One day back in August I looked up the word ‘fascist’ in Steam because I was curious to see the results. I was immediately intrigued to learn that this was about fighting the Spanish Nationalists: a heavily underrepresented category of antagonists. As a matter of fact, this is the first (run-and-gun) FPS set in the Spanish Civil War, and I find it fitting that the first entry in this genre would go for a deliberately old school feel.
Only Lead Can Stop Them is a neoclassical FPS largely inspired by Wolfenstein 3D, while borrowing liberally from other ’90s first-person shooters. Far from being a simple reskin of Wolfenstein 3D, Only Lead Can Stop Them features nine weapons and umpteen different enemies across three geometrically diverse episodes. The most unfamiliar addition is the Conviction feature, which is basically a power-up that you can temporarily activate after collecting or generating enough energy for it. It makes you more damaging as well as harder to kill, and you’ll be reusing it quite a bit as you run low on health.
You start off with a bayonet and work your way up to a pistol, a submachine gun, a double-barrelled shotgun, a rifle (good for long distances), a flamethrower, the Vickers machine gun, a rocket launcher grenade launcher, and dynamite that you can throw at enemies or fragile walls. Most of these weapons feel well balanced, but the dynamite feels situational and the pistol eventually becomes obsolete, unless you feel like saving ammo, and ammo only really feels scarce in the final map.
There are no hitscan enemies (that is, shooters who can instantly hit you), but most of the foes pack firearms whose shots are extremely difficult to avoid at short distances. This gives you a small chance to survive in combat without having to hide behind anything. Supernatural enemies range from undead monsters to humans: there is a hooded mystic who fires a slow projectile at you, and a deadlier variant who fires a faster one. The tanks are the unusual enemies because they are made from geometry yet behave like other foes. Mêlée enemies include a dog, a tougher dog, a lizardman (because why not), as well as giant bats, and they can all be very unnerving in close corridors.
I have died numerous times to many of these foes, especially the Scorchers: they are immune to fire and their flamethrowers can kill a healthy player in a second. Naturally, the designers introduce all of the foes gradually to keep the experience fresh and engaging. The first boss that you encounter is a joke who is no match for your Vickers machine gun, but the twoth and final boss is much harder — almost frustrating, even.
All of the levels are set in Spain, but the environments range widely: there is a prison, a village, an urban landscape, an airfield, a palace, a harbour, trench warfare, a sewer (can’t have a first-person shooter without a sewer), a volcano, a mine, and more. Surprisingly, there were far fewer traps than I was expecting, barring several monster closets. I played on the highest difficulty and all of the maps felt reasonably passable. That being said, some of the levels feel oversized, making them tedious to finish, so sometimes I got tired of hunting for secrets.
Likewise, I noticed many rooms (especially in episode two) that were comedically spacious yet bizarrely underdetailed. They reminded me of those unofficial level packs for Quake that had some ridiculously big rooms with nothing of interest in them aside from a couple of monsters. Sometimes the maps look architecturally reasonable; other times they absolutely do not.
Speaking of flaws, as of this writing Only Lead Can Stop Them has more than a few glitches. The first one that I noticed happened after I reloaded a save, when I could hear barking but never see a dog. At first I thought that an enemy must have spawned outside of the level’s bounds, but I eventually figured out that the barking was coming from a corpse.
However, enemies do occasionally spawn outside of the geometry, like the monster closet in E3M3 which involves enemies trying and (mostly) failing to shoot you from behind a wall, thereby making 100% completion almost impossible unless you get lucky with your dynamite. Enemies occasionally clip in and out of walls (ironically in a first-person shooter without a noclip cheat) and there were rare instances where I unintentionally fell out of the level. I say ‘unintentionally’ because there are actually several maps where it is possible to knowingly walk outside of the level bounds if you do a little too much exploring.
The only glitch that truly frustrated me, though, was when I reloaded a save and got became permanently stuck in a pot that I had broken earlier. I could not get unstuck even after breaking the pot again and playing with the splash damage. I simply skipped the level with a cheat (but I could have restarted instead).
Above all, Only Lead Can Stop Them’s biggest mistake is the ending. I am not going to give too much away, but as of version 1.19, you never get to go head-to-head with an Iberian dictator — as epic as that would have been. After you defeat the totally unrelated final boss, you get an incongruous ending that feels much more like something taken from a generic D&D campaign than anything even loosely inspired by the Second Thirty Years’ War. I’ll be disappointed if the designers never address this by releasing a new episode, or at least redesigning the final level.
Concerning the aesthetics: the sound is mostly fine. In fact, the sounds are awfully high quality for a neoclassical video game, but unless you are a purist this should be no problem at all. Nevertheless, it is baffling that none of the enemies speaks one word of Spanish — on the contrary, you’ll only ever hear Spanish at the end of episode one. The music sounds more like something that you would hear in a SNES title than a ’90s FPS, but that’s okay: the tracks are good, especially E2M2’s (I felt like Spain’s very future was tottering on my shoulders as I was listening to that). That being said, there are also a few songs that would have benefited from extended mixes, because they can become mildly grating after looping so many times.
As for the graphics, they get the job done. Some characters bear a passing resemblance to the ones in Blood or Redneck Rampage, while a few look kind of like ones from Wolfenstein 3D or Doom II. The only character model that needs more work is the final boss. The textures and the items also look fine, and so do the weapons… when they are lying on the ground, that is.
Which leads me to my next point: the parts that they screwed up were the crudely animated final cutscene, the somewhat crudely drawn characters in said cutscene, and finally, the weapons as seen in the protagonists’ hands. The weapons on the HUD almost look like somebody took photos of their hands holding actual weapons but simply turned the contrast all the way up to pixelate them. I think that the designers wanted to mimic those pixelated scans from Doom and Heretic, but if that was their intention then they were unsuccessful; these HUD weapons look nothing like ones that I have seen in any other shooter.
Overall, I like Only Lead Can Stop Them. Being a back-to-the-basics FPS, there is not much in it that is revolutionary (apart from the woefully underexplored setting), but it has satisfying combat and I was seldom bored exploring the environments. The campaign is reasonably lengthy, taking me approximately eight hours to finish, and for $10 this is a worthwhile product, with or without the level editor and the ‘shooting gallery’ in the form of a maze. On the other hand, this is also a product that could use some more work, and it remains to be seen if the designers have either given up on it or are merely having a break. I hope that by writing this review I’ll draw more attention to this title and that will encourage them to keep going.
