As much as the Amiga used to be a powerhouse for 2D gaming back when it was new in a middle of The '80s, the early The '90s saw other platforms catching up and eventually superceeding it, especially spurned by the releases of Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom onto the IBM Personal Computer. A handful of Amiga developers did take on a challenge of delivering Doom-like action onto the aging hardware, and Death Mask is among one of the first attempts released for the Commodore system.
While other Amiga first person shooters like Gloom, Fears, Breathless and Alien Breed 3D have targeted AGA-based Amigasnote , Death Mask has targeted to work on the trusty 7Mhz, 32-colour, 1Mb Amiga 500, even if many concessions had to be made in order for the game to run semi-smoothly, and we do mean major: Only the walls are textured with an ocasional floor and ceiling decorations not unlike Wolfenstein 3-D, and the player can only look in cardinal directions, with scrolling between views being utilized for an illusion of smooth 90 degrees rotation. The player viewpoint also only utilizes half of the horizontal screen estates, which at least does provide the game an ability for split-screen multiplayer either in co-op or death match. The overall result resembles moreso a simplified variant of Hired Guns than Doom, but they've certainly tried. Frankly, it is amazing that this game even has strafing.note
....oh right, the plot. Relegated wholy to the manual, the backstory borders on the luducrous: In the the far future of 80th century on planet HIBA, humanity has advanced far enough to be able to create any sort of life they wished through genetics, all while the less desired results tended to be dumped underground, some of which were able to adapt and evolve. Centuries later, a mishap with handling the Mercurium fuel wiped out the humanity in an explosion, paving the way for the most genetically sophisticated underground creatures known as The Rat People to overtake the surface and build a new civilisation on top of humanity's remains, utilizing whatever equipment they were able to salvage. And now, some other Alien races are interested in colonizing the now-Rat planet, thus the Rat Empire has assembled an elite military force known as The Death Mask to protect the homeland and drive off the invaders. The players are part of such squad.
This "360 Degrees of Rotating Action" provides the following tropes:
- Arbitrary Gun Power: One would expect the shotgun to be powerful upclose and the blaster to being a powerful precise-type weapon, but apparently the strength of the weapons is pretty much tied to their firing rate, with the Mini-Automatic sub machine gun somehow outperforming the earlier weapons in terms of damage output, to say nothing of the Medegun.
- Anti-Frustration Features: In co-op play, only a single of two players need to get to the level exit for both of them to advance to the next level.
- Attract Mode: The game would provide static screenshots of two-player action, interspered with weapon showcases as well as lovely images like the art featuring our protagonist(s), one that is the page image.
- Bag of Spilling: Regardless of whatever weapon you'd complete a level with, you'd always start the next one with the shotgun, whenever there wouldn't be another weapon nearby tends to vary per level. Health and ammunition are reset after each level as well.
- Border-Occupying Decorations: The game has a split screen view regardless of the number of players, so in single player mode the view that would be otherwise used by Player 2 would be covered up with a logo on a stone background.
- Cut and Paste Environments: The game does have a handful of wall textures, but each level only uses around one-two textures for walls, in addition to few special textures showing the view outside and stuff. Egregiously, the level exits look like simple dead ends until you'd enter there and read the "completed" message. The game does mark certain areas with messages that try their best to describe what the area you're in is supposed to represent. It's fortunate the game gives you an Automap feature.
- Die, Chair, Die!: There are some destructible props like barrels or reactor cores. Some levels actually task you with destroying certain props in the level before the level exit would be unlocked.
- Emergency Weapon: Shall you run out of ammunition, you'd switch into the knife. Damage-wise it manages to be even weaker than the shoddy shotgun. "When the worst comes to the worst" indeed.
- Faux First Person 3D: This is more or less how the game maintains an illusion of being a First-Person Shooter, especially with the player being limited to looking at cardinal directions.
- Gatling Good: The Medegun serves as the strongest weapon of this game.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted, aside of your knife that you'd fall back to when running out of ammunition you carry a single firearm, and weapon pickups replace whatever you were holding.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The levels do sometimes feature chest-high walls that provide you a view to the other side but that's it, and not only you have no means to jump, you can't shoot through the chest-high walls either.
- Ludicrous Gibs: The organic enemies get reduced to this whenever they die.
- Mecha-Mooks: Present as a mobile enemy type that can drain your health much faster than others if you'd let them.
- Mooks, but no Bosses: Rather, the very final level has you exterminate one last nest of the aliens, in a level that compared to the mazes of everything before it is very open, with plenty of palm trees but very few walls. Just be smart about picking off the aliens one by one rather than let you get swarmed by the mutants from all sides.
- More Dakka: Apparently, a weapons' power is directly tied to this.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Cruelly inverted. Your starting weapon, it is more of a Ranged Emergency Weapon with it's relatively slow rate of fire and damage so low, it would take few shots to kill even the weakest enemies. To say this game does not respect the Double Barreled shotgun would be a massive understatement.
- Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: More Dakka is apparently king, as faster firing weapons are considered more powerful than slower ones. In order: Knife, Shotgun, Blaster, Mini-Automatic, Medegun.
- Stationary Enemy: There are "sniper"-type enemies that stay in place but would shoot at you from any range as long as you're in their line of fire. In contrast, the mobile enemies can only damage you if they'd get close to you.
- Universal Ammunition: Every single firearm uses the same ammo pool, regardless if it's a shotgun or a chaingun. The burst fire of the automatic weapons is treated as a single shot.
