Another day, another indie FPS gornfest about sending The Legions of Hell back to where they belong...
illWill is a 2023 First-Person Shooter developed by a single person, Russian computer programmer Slava Bushuev, one which draws inspiration from old-school, gorn-loaded FPS games popular in the 90s.
Described by Bushuev as a "cocktail made from bits of Doom, Blood, Quake, Serious Sam, with Unreal Engine 4 as the blender", illWill casts the player as a demon slayer, awakening in an empty, abandoned building with absolutey no memories of how he got there. Inexplicably, numerous hellish-looking monsters have infested the building, and after collecting a shotgun he'll shoot his way out.
Unrelated to the RPG, Ill Will.
Blood, guts, bullets, gore and tropes.
- Alien Blood: Painheads have white blood. And because of how flimsy they are, a shotgun blast results in a massive geyser of white.
- all lowercase letters: The title deliberately starts with a lowercase "i". Although the "W" in the very middle is in caps.
- Ambiguous Situation: How did you get into this monster-infested realm, devoid of humans? Are you dragged in hell, like the Doomguy? Is the game set After the End, and you're the last human alive? Or did you voluntarily choose to enter the netherworld, because reasons? Or, if the opening level can be assumed to be you awakening in a mental hospital, is the whole game seen through the eyes of a deranged mental patient?
- Amnesiac Hero: Just... who are you, exactly? And why are all these monsters coming after you? Unfortunately the game doesn't have an answer - you finish the last stage by walking through a door marked "The End" and it just ends there.
- Conjoined Twins: Mifiks King, the Final Boss, is made from three King Mook versions of the Mifiks enemy, sharing a single torso on multiple mechanical legs.
- Container Maze: After escaping the first stage's mansion, your next area is an abandoned shipping yard filled with dozens of containers you'll need to navigate through, infested with monsters.
- Cool Crown: All the bosses wears a gigantic golden crown, besides being larger than their non-boss mook counterparts.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: Expectedly, if anything onscreen is moving, it's an enemy.
- Fungus Humongous: One stage in a forest sees you crossing a copse of tree-sized mushrooms. With faces on their trunks. They can't attack on their own (the area's main threat comes from Painheads, floating jellyfishes, and various monsters coming out behind the shrooms) but some of the shrooms can periodically vomit a wave of acidic liquid that hurts you if hit.
- Giant Mook: Behemoths, toad-like demons are the largest common enemies who tanks several hits before going down.
- The Goomba: Two easy-to-kill, basic monsters infests much of the game's first half:
- Slaughterers, despite their names, are overweight, slow-moving humanoid creatures who lumbers awkwardly around the place while trying to spit acidic globs at you, alongside a meat cleaver for hacking from up close. It takes around two shots to kill them and they appear in large numbers early on for target practice.
- Painheads are tiny, imp-like creatures whose heads are (true to their name) embedded with dozens of pins. Despite being introduced after Slaughterers in the first level, they're actually even weaker enemies who dies in one hit.
- Gorn: The game is as gory as the 90s FPS classics that inspires it, with mooks blasting their High-Pressure Blood all over the place with each kill.
- Grenade Launcher: You can obtain one which fires long-range, exploding canisters. It even works on enemies high in the air, like those purple octopus-things.
- King Mook: ALL the bosses (five of them) are sized-up, giant versions of the game's recurring enemies. Which the game simply labels as "King X" - in order: King Slaughterer II, King Painhead, King Behemoth, King Spider, and Mifiks King.
- Lightning Gun: You collect one called the Soul Ripper early on, which fires a concentrated orange lightning bolt on enemies. Mooks killed by said weapon tends to leave behind a charred carcass.
- Mascot Mook: The Painheads tends to fulfill this role in promotional materials. Even the game's trailer shows one of them pulling the Unreal logo behind... moments before it gets exploded by someone firing a shotgun offscreen.
- Mecha-Mooks:
- There's an unnamed robotic enemy type with a rounded body, spindly limbs, and snapping crocodile-like jaws, that when killed spills black sludge everywhere.
- The Spider enemies may be a subversion. It's an Unnecessarily Creepy Robot resembling a walking eyeball on spider-legs, but it bleeds red when killed.
- No Name Given: None given to your player character, oddly enough. Most of the enemies do have names, save for those floating mono-eyed purple jellyfish creatures, the wolfman-esque feral beasts who can pounce on you, those rounded robots who bleeds sludge (NOT the Spider enemies), and a few.
- No Plot? No Problem!: The Steam description outright states "the game doesn't have a plot in the usual sense", and the gameplay shows exactly that. But then again, who needs a plot when you spend the game killing monsters while going from point A to point B, using increasingly larger weapons all the way?
- Noodle People: The humanoid Mifiks enemies are tall, skinny purple creatures with ridiculously thin limbs.
- Oculothorax: One of the few unnamed enemies, a floating purple octopus-creature with a gigantic eye in the middle of it's face. That it shoots Eye Beams from.
- Ominous Fog: One of the stages appears to be set in an alternate version of London's Hyde Park, where there's plenty of fog obscuring the background while massive amounts of monsters shows up front. You fight the first boss, King Slaughterer, in this area.
- Skeletons in the Coat Closet: The Slaughterer enemies, including their boss King Slaughterer, wears necklaces made of human skulls. Suddenly, the abscence of humans in the game's verse makes a lot of sense...
- Taken for Granite: One of your weapons shoots spikes containing slow-moving petrifying poison. Enemies with multiple spikes embedded on them will suddenly turn grey and solidify while mid-attack.
- Unnecessarily Creepy Robot: The Spider enemies, despite their name, are actually robotic eyeballs on mechanical spider-legs who looks just as creepy-looking as the flesh-and-blood monsters. Then again, they do bleed red when killed...
- Your Head A-Splode: Tends to happen to enemies - especially Slaughterers and Behemoths - when you blast them from point-blank using shotguns or grenades. They actually die without keeling over, with their neck-stumps behaving like a malfunctioning drinking fountain loaded with tomato juice.
- Zerg Rush: The standard MO of every single enemy type have them trying to overwhelm you in large numbers. In the earlier stages it's mostly the Painheads, Spiders and Slaughterers who does this, but late into the game you'll be swarmed by legions of even stronger enemies.
