Cemetery Warrior 2

In Brief
A budget Painkiller like First Person Shooter.

It was originally given away on the 28th December 2018 where it received a positive 71% from 7 votes with 3 comments which you can see HERE

If you have any issues getting the game to work, please check out the FAQ's thread over in the Game Discussion forums HERE, where you may find a fix for whatever issue you may be facing.

You can see several in-game videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE (русский), HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE.

Introduction:
Cemetery Warrior 2 3D is a first-person shooter. Working in the graveyard, it is difficult to stay mentally balanced. {My grandfather worked as a caretaker for a local primary school and church combined; part of his duties were to dig graves. The church was from the 17th century and many graves were unmarked; he used to tell me ghost stories about after he'd dug up old skulls and other bones from these unmarked graves when preparing a new grave)

On each grave is not just a name, but a story behind it. I never believed in souls or ghosts, so working in a cemetery was just a job, digging on and on. Everything was very easy, but some higher power decided to punish me for such frivolity, my lack of respect for the dead. Along came another sunset, and a wide variety of creatures began to appear over the graves. Souls of the dead with disfigured faces had somehow materialized in this world. How dare they? This is my graveyard, and I'll send you back to hell!
Edited reference accessed HERE. 28th December 2018; reposted 16th February 2022.

The Game:
Cemetery Warrior 2 has limited options, just basic resolution, music and sound sliders with no others. The control's are basic with just WASD for movement, Space for jump (not even needed in this game), ESC to return to the menu, mouse axis for turning and the mouse wheel to select different weapons (once you've picked them up). Depending on how many weapons you've found you can also select weapons via the numbers keys.

The first cemetery has 5 levels called rooms; each successive level has more monsters to kill and from the third level you can pick up a second weapon (dual rifles), which appears to be more accurate when firing at monsters from further away. The only issue with the rifles is that you expend cartridges much faster, so keep an eye on the amount of ammo you have for that weapon. It's the best weapon to use against one of the monsters (which I call the mole) that is introduced in the second cemetery. As each level is cleared, you have to walk through a glowing cross to pass to the next level. Before you do that I would suggest you first skirt around the control point and pick up any ammo that is available. Ammo for the machine gun has a folded belt of ammo and the rifle has a small pile of magazines, later you get a rocket launcher and ammo for that looks like large fat bullets.

Try to avoid parking yourself near a spawn point otherwise you'll be overwhelmed fairly quickly. The ideal place early in the game is as far away from a spawn point as possible and with as much visibility of the cemetery as possible so that you can see monsters coming at you from a distance. In the second cemetery, parking yourself in one spot isn't an option as the cemetery's appear more like arena and monsters spawn from multiple places. Every time I tried to hold my ground I was soon overwhelmed and died regularly.

Once you've cleared the first cemetery (I think it has five levels, but I wasn't counting) you will come across a bright glowing aura that takes you to the next cemetery. As soon as you pass through this you can pick up the two previous weapons you found in the first cemetery and are introduced to a rocket launcher. Once you've picked up all available ammo pass though the control point to start the level. the first level in the second cemetery is really small and relatively easy to overcome. The newly introduced rocket launcher only gets four ammo canisters initially, but more do come later. Once you've picked up all available ammo from a level, no other ammo re-spawns, but I think that if you die any remaining ammo remains and you'll find new ammo spawns in the level. The more you die, the more ammo you can end up carrying. If like me you don't like dying frequently make sure you make every shot count otherwise you may run out of ammo before you've destroyed every monster on that level. If this happens, there's no knives available to use as a last resort, so the only option is to die.

There are no health packs to regenerate health in any level, instead you recoup all lost health when you pass through a control point at the beginning of each level. Also, ammo is not carried forwards from one cemetery to another, but they are from one level to the next in the same cemetery.

If you are using a multi screen set up, this game is almost unplayable because the mouse isn't bound to the game. When I started playing, the game kept appearing to crash, but what was happening, whenever my mouse went over to the next monitor the game would close to the task bar. On opening it up I'd invariably lose some health as it would take a moment for me to regain control. To play the game effectively I had to open up the display settings and from the multiple displays drop down menu option select ''Show only on one''. This messed up my desktop initially, but once I'd finished with the game and returned to the ''extend these displays'' option, the desktop on all monitors were returned to before I made the changes. It's just a little annoyance, but still shouldn't happen in a game such as this.

Throughout the first cemetery there are only two monster types a hulk/tank (as in Left 4 Dead) like thing with a weird face and werewolves. The latter are harder to kill due to their speed and irregular patterns of movement. After you've cleared the first level in the second cemetery, a new monster that is mole like appears and is much harder to kill than the other two again due to how it moves around. You can see it coming towards you by trails on the surface of the cemetery floor. when it appears it jumps into the air and you are hit by rocks that remove some health from you. My tactic up until this point had been to secure a spot and defend it, but this new mole like creature was so hard to hit I had to keep moving. If I stayed in one spot it would target that area. Moving frequently saved me from being it countless times and in this way was able to survive the level. Hitting the mole was in my opinion just lucky shots as it moved much faster than the other two monsters. Around level three of the second cemetery another monster was introduced, that was easier to kill than the mole. This was easily recognizable due to its green colour. It also jumped at you when it was about 5 yards/meters away from you. Shoot it before it gets near, otherwise it becomes more difficult to kill you. It can also jump behind you.

Most of the short reviews over on Steam complained that this was far too short a game, taking from between 40minutes to an hour to complete the game in its entirety. I disagree. I played the game for a couple of hours and still didn't manage to get to the end of the second cemetery. From some images that i found on Google Images there looks to be at least one more enemy (female in appearance). There is no indication online as to how many levels the second cemetery has. I couldn't pass the fourth level as I was killed time after time. I gave up in the end, but will return at some point to see if I can beat it.

Reference Whiterabbit-uk originally posted 28th December 2018, reposted 16th December 2022.

Conclusion:
Cemetery Warrior 2 is another retro inspired run and gun horror game. I've played many of these over the last 25 years. This game pays homage to games like Doom 1 and 2, Quake, and my favourites the Painkiller series and Serious Sam. This does not hold a candle to any of those games but it is a playable game, at least in short bursts. Levels are quite short compared to any of the games I've mentioned previously such as Painkiller, Doom etc. According to the Steam community (reviews no longer available because the game has been removed from Steam) there's no more than an hours worth of game play at the most, but I would dispute this. If you are a young and experienced player, you may beat this in quick time, but the average player, or an older player with slower reaction times would struggle to complete every level so quickly. Even if you did complete it in less than an hour, and even if you'd paid full price for this game I think its still fairly reasonably priced for what you get. It used to be available via Steam for £0.40 , but has since been removed; however Cemetery Warrior 4 and Cemetery Warrior V are still available via Steam. Both are a massive improvement on the three previous iterations of the game. There's no doubt I'd say download and play this game if you are at all into shooting games. Compared to all the above named games its definitely a little Meh!, but it's passable.

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game using Virus Total and it found zero hits from 60 antimalware engines.

The downloaded executable 'may' include some low level adware that only opens your browser once to Falcoware's home page after the game has installed and also places four shortcuts onto your desktop (which can be safely deleted once the game has installed).

The installation does NOT inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcoware's home page following the games installation, it earns Falcoware games some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. Once you've installed the game, there are no more browser redirections. This is because Falcoware removed their installer over a year ago (that installer would show an advert for a game and then open your browser each time you played and then closed the game down.)

You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/a21bf62902ea4f3847cea9560be9c5e16775b96ed2c7e4d767f00e7bef63c04e?nocache=1