PSYCHIC
by Xaser Acheron
My reintroduction to Doom is tangentially related to Psychic. A friend gifted me a Something Awful account back in '09 and one of the forums that I gravitated toward was the Let's Play forums. They had a Doom mods thread going on at the time and I think that they were playing a combination of Psychic with B.P.R.D.'s Equinox. I saw so much cool stuff going on with Doom (my previous dips in user-created content being limited to whatever I found on my Dad's Doom 1 & 2 Collection shovelware CD as well as Kaiser's Doom 64: Absolution TC) that I wanted to dive right in. Of course, if you're a long-time reader you know that I don't spend a lot of time playing gameplay mods, but fourteen years to finally load up Xaser's Psychic seems, in retrospect, a bit excessive. At least I had planned it out back in 2019 to play it after The Abyss! That's got to count for something, right?
Psychic was originally released back in 2009, making it a hot property when I saw the Let's Play with it paired with Equinox. It didn't see a final release until 2021, though, by which point it had garnered a lot of accolades as well as a spot in the Top 25 Missed Cacowards article. I don't know enough about the ZDoom modding scene to be able to authoritatively tell folks how revolutionary it was, but it's easy for me to believe. This is an RPG-lite mod by way of an in-game shop menu that you can use to upgrade your weapons and... your pSyChIc PoWeRs. It's compatible with Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Strife...but not Chex Quest. This is probably for the best; I'm still kind of traumatized by blowing Flemoids into smithereens in Samsara.
The thrust is sort of a mashup of Devil May Cry for its gunplay and the Shock series of games (System Shock, Bioshock) for its power system. I actually haven't played any of the Shock games apart from a bit of the original System Shock so I can't really compare what Psychic does to any of them, but from what I gather, Shock's powers are your alternate fire, just as they are in psychic. Both your primary and secondary fire are available at all times with you cycling through weapons like normal and using the inventory keys to page through your powers, like they're tokens that you keep in your inventory and press [ENTER] or whatever your inventory select key is to use.
The guns and powers are part of Psychic's appeal but the driving factor is an in-game shop that can be accessed at any time. You buy new powers, upgrade up to level three for both powers AND weapons, and can also buy every powerup that your little heart desires. These range from basically on-the-fly soulspheres and blue armors to spheres whose effects I think originate from Skulltag's spheres and runes (like Time Freeze and Turbo or Brutalis / Defender for Strength / Resistance) to "hey, I could really use a rad suit right now!" You may not be able to purchase an invulnerability, but with enough blood money in the bank you can combo together enough effects that, barring going toe to toe with a rocket-slinging Cyberdemon, you might as well be invincible. Side note--if for some reason weapon pickups aren't forthcoming, you can use blood money to buy them.
Everything is purchased in blood money. Some of this can be found in the place of ammo pickups or is rewarded whenever you pick up a weapon that you already have, but most of it is dropped from the monsters you slay. Blood money coins only bounce around on the floor for a short time. This encourages the player to engage in some pretty risky maneuvering, at least early on, in order to maximize your kill / blood money ratio. As a cute note--I don't think that this affects anything--the coins are usually colored and named to reflect either the monster's native element or the element that it may have been affected by at the time of its death. For Doom, this usually matches up to whatever its death animation's blood is colored. For an example of something a bit more exotic, Strife's robots drop rust tokens.
The .TXT reminds you to bind the Buy Items key and its default is "F". This is also what closes the menu, so don't go thinking based on its name that it's meant to be used to buy your pick. You navigate your options with the arrow keys and then make a selection buy pressing whatever your gun shoot key is. It took me longer than I care to admit to figure that last bit out. You may also have to re-bind your item use key in order to switch powers; this bit me on several occasions, even with it being bound to ENTER by default. Similarly, if you don't appear to be able to use your powers, make sure that the secondary fire key is bound.
Xaser limits you to five guns, very reminiscent of the original DMC's arsenal with dual ebony / ivory pistols that are very precise and great for sniping or stunlocking; a shotgun that can fire quite rapidly and has great pushback; a grenade launcher for smashing bulky mooks and crowds; a needlegun of questionable provenance, an odd utility item that is no doubt a callback to DMC's underwater section; and the Nightmare, which fires bouncy projectiles and uses your psychic energy like DMC's devil trigger. The weapons are generally great workhorses and if you really like the gunplay then you can augment them with the Psycho powerup, which boosts their attack similarly to the devil trigger. When you start your game, you have the option between manual or auto-fire with manual the default because, well, manual gun control was one of DMC's hallmarks. Auto-fire is available "for relaxed trigger fingers", but if you're a pro-clicker then you can shoot faster in manual than what the auto-fire is capped at.
The guns are great for utility but Psychic's flash is in its special powers. There are eight total disciplines: steel, plasma, ice, earth, fire, lightning, gravity, and dark. Each uses your psychic reservoir, which replenishes over time. If you run out then you'll do nothing to the monsters and only damage yourself. I naturally gravitated toward fire because it's a great crowd control ability, causing flames to sprout up and do a ton of damage, particularly to larger opponents, as well as stunlocking them. Steel throws out bouncy projectiles, so it's a decent starter power, but on its own it's not much fun. Plasma is your own personal rocket launcher with all of the dangers that come with it. Ice has some novelty factor in being able to freeze monsters, but I wasn't really wowed by it.
Earth is fun, allowing you to roleplay a little bit of Korax as you summon a line of stabbing stalagmites. I used lightning early on for its ability to quickly nuke bunched-up zombies, and it's still good for that, but it just doesn't have any oomph against bigger monsters. Gravity has a lot of secret potential. It knocks monsters back but when regularly, fully powered it can deflect projectiles. If monsters bounce into each other, then they get PISSED, which beyond normal infighting can also trigger aggression between members of the same species. Dark is a single-target nuke that sends monsters to the shadow realm. It costs a lot of psi but when fully-powered it's formidable against larger monsters that you just need dead ASAP. Again, I majored in fire, but I started using plasma when I saw what a great long-range nuke it was. Dark is very handy to have, especially against big bads like the Cyberdemon and Spiderdemon, but only under specific circumstances.
Just like the weapons have the Psycho powerup, your powers can be augmented, similar to Heretic's Tome of Power. The in-game shop offers an Overcharge powerup that accomplishes this and you can find them in the wild, but you can also pick up psychic crystals that sort of accomplish the same thing (except these also appear to level up whatever power you currently have selected, so pick them up wisely!). This supercharges your psychic meter and changes the way your powers operate until the overage is depleted. For something like the plasma and dark, it just makes them stronger, to the point where dark can single-target compete with the BFG. For others, the changes are pretty drastic. As an example, fire normally lobs a projectile that may or may not burn down the enemy and then spawns a bunch of little flames that fry monsters but can also damage YOU. Overcharged fire turns you into a walking fire emitter. You're immune to your own fire in this state, but if you were planning on using it for crowd control then you may want to swap to something else.
One of the other drastic overcharge effects is the ice power. Normally it looks like a solid blast of ice missiles similar to Hexen's Frost Shards. When powered up, it lobs an icy sticky bomb a la Shadow Warrior that eventually detonates, raining freezing crystals all over the floor. I had high hopes for a lot of these powers for nuking monsters in slaughter scenarios but for some reason the powered-up earth was the only thing that seemed to hit right, at least as I tested it against the horde of Barons in "Tricks and Traps". The true room-cleaner is the Nightmare. When you're overcharged, it shoots five projectiles a shot (you'd normally have to hold to charge it to get the same effect), and unless my eyes deceive me it's also boosted by Psycho. Combine this with Brutalis and bigger enemies--particularly in relatively enclosed spaces--and you've got a lot of potential power. Err, at least for as long as the Overcharge holds out.
As mentioned earlier, Psychic plays nice with most of the idtech1 games. I had a BLAST of a time playing this through some of the Heretic Shareware episode and highly recommend it. The basic guns are just so satisfying to use against the low-tier monsters. Ditto for OG Doom. Hexen and Strife, well, not so much. I was really looking forward to what Psychic might do with the former but it's still as slow as ever. The monsters just feel so beefy and blood money just sort of dribbles in. I don't know if the pace picks up after The Seven Portals, but I don't really care enough to find out. Strife I was curious about given that it was already sort of an RPG-lite. Xaser made a few concessions--like the steel power is considered a "silent" attack and you can still get the 10 HP health upgrades--but I felt like I was putting more of my Blood Money flow into health and armor. I may have just been playing like an asshole, though, to borrow a phrase from Ribbiks.
Psychic enables a relatively safe playstyle through super-accurate pistol stunlocking and sniping but it naturally engenders something more risky due to the blood money drops. It also encourages a host of "Good at Doom" scenarios, this time borrowing a phrase from Xaser, with new opportunities for damaging yourself with the grenade launcher as well as the fire and plasma powers. I didn't count the amount of times that fire projectiles ended up bouncing back at me, but I definitely cooked myself a few times, and singed far more in an attempt to rush in and snag some BM. An ounce (or two) of caution goes a long way toward player longevity, but you sort of WANT to be closer in order to grab that sweet monster moolah, and it's tempting to toss out big, effective nukes all of the time.
I've always been partial to RPG and RPG-lite mechanics and Psychic has just enough for me to sink my teeth into without getting overwhelmed. I don't play mods often outside of reviews for reasons that I hope are understandable, but I'm seriously thinking of finishing out the rest of my Heretic playthrough. If you enjoy playing Doom with gameplay mods and you still haven't given Psychic a shot, then you really ought to.
WE ALL GO A LITTLE MAD SOMETIMES.
HAVEN'T YOU?
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