It feels like every other day there's a cool new Doom WAD that spits in the face of God and turns id's classic shooters into FEAR (open in new tab) or Super Mario 64 (open in new tab), but what about love for Marathon (open in new tab)? Bungie's Mac-only Doom clone and clear spiritual predecessor to Halo,' On October 1, modder hypersleep released Apotheosis X, an ambitious total conversion of Marathon Infinity worthy of retro FPS lovers' attention ( opens in new tab) was released.

Its aesthetic appeal is immediately apparent: all-new weapon and enemy sprites, high-resolution textures and a custom soundtrack. The first few missions take place on a human cruiser with the amusingly named UESC Gingerbread Man, which is reminiscent of the starting level of Halo 2. The 23 levels of Apotheosis X seem to eventually take the player to the surface of another world and its requisite eerily glowing ruins.

Mechanically, Apotheosis X is impressive, and even the basic weapons behave differently from the vanilla Marathon. For example, the pistol is now a projectile plasma gun instead of the original hit-scan magnum. The missions I played had a boomer-shooter feel that unraveled the knots in the level design that I craved, but by the second map I began to feel that Hypersleep was really cooking the gas.

There are far more enemies than ammo here, but there is also a switch that activates a cow-like friendly drone in the level. It's like calling your brother to take down a bully. I wonder if Apotheosis X is based on this mechanic, or if it is more like a Nintendo platformer that packs new and interesting features into each level.

Apotheosis X has been a long time coming; hypersleep states in the readme file that they released an unfinished version in the teens in 2007 and were finally able to finish it in 2020." As usual, "ambition outweighed good sense, and over the next two years, nearly everything in the game was rebuilt from scratch. [Apotheosis X is a commercial-quality retro shooter campaign that is free to play right now. Installation is simple: download the open-source version of Marathon Infinity's Aleph One (opens in new tab) and simply copy the play executable to the Apotheosis X installation file available at Mod DB (opens in new tab).