Welcome back to the Doom Love/Hate series! We’ve reached the end of the mainline Doom games, but every time I do one of these Love/Hate series, I always enjoy taking a little detour to check out a notable related game. Doom‘s one of the most influential franchises in gaming, so I had a ton of options to choose from. There are tons of boomer shooters, both new (Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun) and old (Star Wars: Dark Forces), so I was spoiled for choice.
However, I ultimately decided that it was time to go back and replay a notorious title: Super Noah’s Ark 3D, which had earned itself the thirteenth place on my list of the worst games I’d ever played*. I had played Super Noah’s Ark 3D a few times for a laugh years ago, but had never managed to make it very far and kept getting lost in its levels.
Admittedly, I was a bit leery about putting it onto the list at all, because I wasn’t sure if it was actually bad or if I just sucked at it. However, now that I’ve played a bunch of classic Doom and understand the design philosophy of shooters of the era, maybe I would get a new appreciation for the game? Perhaps I would just hate it even more now that I have the proper context for what a game of this era was supposed to be like? Read on to find out…
There are a couple different ways you can play Super Noah’s Ark 3D. The game was originally released on SNES and then ported to MS-DOS a year later. The game then got a surprise re-release on Steam in 2015 (this is the version I played for this article). Suffice to say, the Steam version is by far the best way to play the game today (I’ll get into the reasons why later).
*I made a mistake in that article: Super Noah’s Ark 3D is NOT based on the Doom engine, but rather the Wolfenstein 3D engine. Despite entering development after Doom‘s release, the publisher, Wisdom Tree, were apparently cheap bastards. Since the Wolfenstein 3D engine was outdated by this time, they went with it simply because they could license engine for less money. Granted, this still makes Super Noah’s Ark 3D feel identifiably Doom-like, it’s just running on far more limited technology.
Love
- Music and Sound Effects – So I started up Super Noah’s Ark 3D and the first thing I’m greeted with is this banger of a theme song. Don’t assume that this low-budget, bootleg, Christian game is made by talentless hacks, because the music is legitimately catchy! I don’t think you can say that it’s as iconic as Doom‘s soundtrack, but if you took these tracks and put them into a more popular game, that they would have been very well-regarded.
- Note: I played the Steam version of the game, which has a remixed soundtrack. The original SNES soundtrack is largely the same, but very bitcrushed, which makes it a hell of a lot less enjoyable.
- I also want to shout-out the game’s sound effects, which add a lot of charm and silliness to the overall proceedings. Each enemy makes a very distinctive sound when they are aggro’d, which helps you to know what kind of danger you’re in. The sound they make when they spit at you is also humorously cartoonish and would make me snicker even in the latter levels. The monotone “WOW!” voice you get whenever you discover a secret area also never ceases to make me laugh, because I have to assume that that’s what Noah’s voice sounds like.
- Goofy Tone – Look, it’s easy to make fun of a game called “Super Noah’s Ark 3D“, but I am pretty confident that it was never meant to be taken seriously. The game has so much silliness to it: from the big murals of Noah’s smiling, bald face, to the flags which just say “NOAH”, to the funny sound effects and upbeat music. They aren’t taking it seriously and you shouldn’t either.
- The game even has some meta humour, whether intentional or not. This is a family-friendly remix of the uber-violent Wolfenstein 3D, so it’s funny to see how they’ve translated its mechanics to pacify evangelical parents. Guns are now slingshots, enemies go to sleep instead of being killed, the Nazi imagery has been replaced by self-aggrandizing banners hung up by Noah, etc. The murals of Noah that he’s hung up everywhere also look like Hide the Pain Harold, which is fucking hilarious.
- Oh and speaking of meta humour, since this game is a Wolfenstein 3D remix, guess what texture the murals of Noah’s face are replacing…
- It’s Still Got That Classic FPS Feel to It – Even with all the early-90s edginess cast aside, the core gameplay of Super Noah’s Ark 3D still manages to be pretty fun at times. Exploring a level, clearing out every room, dealing with threats, looking for secrets, and trying to find the exit: it’s all still fairly compelling, even without the extreme violence and gore.
- As I’ve alluded to, the game stays true to Wolfenstein 3D in that every level also has lots of hidden secrets to find. They’re generally sign-posted by noticeably-different wall textures which you need to interact with. This is great, because I don’t need to check every fucking inch of wall to find all the secrets. They’re pretty easy to find if you’re looking for them, but subtle enough to feel exciting to uncover. While there’s rarely anything earth-shattering hidden behind them, the fact that they’re here at all feels great. The game even features a couple of secret levels, which is a cool bit of extra effort that I appreciate!
Mixed
- Super Weapons – Despite being a game where you’re shooting animals with a slingshot, Super Noah’s Ark 3D manages to pack in not one but two “super weapons”: a rapid-fire coconut shooter and a watermelon launcher (which is effectively this game’s BFG). These things are legitimately great in some circumstances. They one-shot most regular enemies, have wide hit-boxes, and can take out multiple enemies at once. However, they have a major, crippling flaw which makes them situational: they fire a projectile rather than using hitscan like the slingshots. The reason this is bad is because any wall or obstacle in the environment will immediately block the projectile, preventing you from hitting enemies behind it. This would be fine if the enemy’s attacks would also be blocked by these object, but their ranged attacks all use hitscan, which are not blocked like a projectile. This means that you are often stuck in situations where your “super weapons” can’t hit the enemies, but they can hit you. As a result, you’re generally better off just sticking with the rapid-fire slingshots, since they can fire faster and will hit more reliably. Like I said, they are really useful in some cases (if you are in a wide-open space or long hallway), but it sucks that they’re often more of a liability than a boon.
- Bible Trivia – This is a Christian video game, so of course it has fucking Bible trivia forced in. I grew up in an evangelical household, Christian media companies are obsessed with making kids do Bible trivia, because it’s the only thing they can think of to make it sufficiently “educational”. Super Noah’s Ark 3D will occasionally have scrolls you can pick up to answer a trivia question. Get the question right, and you are rewarded with a significant health and ammo boost. That said, this is no cakewalk, because these are legitimately difficult questions for a kid’s game (and this is coming from someone who has read the entire Bible). The game uses multiple-choice and true/false questions, but they’re often deceptive, technicalities, or just straight-up difficult unless you are intimately familiar with the book of Genesis. I guess you could argue that this is unfair and that the game rewards you for knowledge that you cannot get in the game itself, but I did kind of appreciate that they genuinely test your knowledge and I always enjoyed the health and ammo boost.
Hate
- INSANELY Unfair Difficulty Tuning – Despite being a kid-friendly game, Super Noah’s Ark 3D is an utter bastard in terms of its difficulty. I played the game on the “Normal” difficulty setting, but my ass got kicked constantly for several reasons:
- First off, enemy damage output is nuts. You can be sitting pretty at full health, when suddenly you get ambushed by a basic enemy. Even if you only take one it, that hit can be devastating. In the clip I posted above, you can see that I am at 86% health, get ambushed by a sheep, and am down to 21% HP in an instant. That’s not even the worst hit I’ve taken; in one particular instance, a noticed that single ranged attack took off 62% of my HP!!! Enemies cause so much damage that you can find yourself dying in a second before you even have a chance to react. Granted, there does appear to be some damage drop-off over distance, so ideally you should be picking off enemies from as far away as possible, but the game’s level design will often force you into close range engagements. As I said before, most enemies are also using ranged hitscan attacks, so you either eliminate the enemy immediately, duck in and out of cover, or die.
- Building on the last point, dying in two or three hits is punishing, but it can feel reasonably challenging and fun if the game keeps you topped up on health. However, Super Noah’s Ark 3D is very stingy about health restoration pickups. Only a handful of them are available per level, with the bulk of them often squirreled away in secret areas. As a result, you are often spending large chunks of a level already damaged and only one hit away from death. It ends up leading to trial-and-error situations where you keep getting killed, so you have to memorize where the enemies are and take them all out as efficiently as possible without taking damage. The game is so punishing that it reminds me of Ninja Gaiden III‘s soul-crushing difficulty tuning.
- Oh, by the way, death works like it does in Doom: if you die, you have to restart the entire level and you lose all your weapons and items. Not only that, but you can run out of lives in Super Noah’s Ark 3D. You can find additional lives in secret areas, but they’re few and far between. Thankfully, the Steam version has a quick save system, which is yet another reason why this is the definitive version.
- Okay so the enemies do a lot of damage and there isn’t enough healing to go around. That’s not great, but it gets so much worse. The developers, Wisdom Tree, have designed this game to fuck you over as much as possible. They will often hide enemies just out of sight around corners, which basically guarantees that you’ll take at least one hit if you don’t already know they’re there and actively try to counter it. Enemies will also wander around the map and open doors, so even if you know the enemy layouts, they can still ambush you unexpectedly. Oh, and as soon as they aggro, they will immediately start attacking, so you don’t even have a chance to reposition. This can happen as you open a door, so you literally don’t even have a chance to respond before you’re taking damage. Doom had a system where enemies that were not on-screen would be less-aggressive in order to be fair to the player, but that’s just not a thing here; you’ll die to off-screen enemies frequently. It’s just thing after thing which piles up and makes this game so ridiculously unfair to the player. I was getting flashbacks to the Master System version of Ninja Gaiden, which was designed so bastardly that I ended up being able to predict the exact kind of bullshit the developers were going to throw at me.
- All this said: I did end up beating the game out of sheer spite, but I was very close to quitting on multiple occasions. The last few levels in particular were basically forcing me to save scum room-by-room, because I was dying so frequently. You end up having to play the game like Hotline Miami, minimizing damage taken and ammunition expended to clear each room as efficiently as possible. To illustrate this, my actual playtime was around six hours and forty-five minutes, but my “clear” time was just over three hours, meaning that more than half of my total playtime was lost from dying over and over again to the game’s bullshit game design.
- Imprecise Hit Detection and Feedback – On top of the ridiculous difficulty tuning of the game, you also have to deal with some janky game design. As we’ve already covered, most of your attacks in Super Noah’s Ark 3D are hitscan: as soon as you shoot, the game calculates whether the attack either hits or it misses. However, there’s no very little feedback to show whether your attack hit or not. Enemies will sometimes stagger for a couple frames when hit, but it’s very hard to notice in the heat of the moment, so you end up just shooting until every enemy falls asleep. This can be a problem though, because you have to be pretty precise with your aim in order to even hit an enemy to begin with. Even then, it’s hard to be precise because corners and doorways can block your shots. You may be able to see an enemy and fire off a bunch of shots, but the game has decided you are missing and you won’t know until you waste a few shots to no effect. The rapid-fire slingshots mitigate these issues somewhat just due to sheer weight of fire, and you do get used to the game’s systems as it goes on, but even in the late game you’ll be coming across situations where you’re not sure whether the game will actually let you land a shot or not.
- Level Design – Forget the maze-like level design I’ve been complaining about throughout this Love/Hate series: Super Noah’s Ark 3D‘s levels are literally mazes. The in-game map overlay makes them reasonably-simple to navigate, but it is not uncommon to find a key and then have to backtrack to the other side of the level to unlock some far-flung door you passed by once.
- There’s also the aforementioned unfair, bastardly game design, where levels have been set up to kill you without mercy. For example, in one level you walk down a hallway and come to a junction where there are enemies to your left and right. The only way to survive this is to move forward, aggro them, and then immediately walk backwards to draw them out and shoot them before they have a chance to shoot you.
- SNES Version – I was having a decent enough time with the Steam version of Super Noah’s Ark 3D that I had to go check out the SNES version to see if it performed comparably. Was I just being a stingy bastard back when I first played it? The answer is, of course, “no”. If anything, I might have been generous when I only had this listed as the thirteenth-worst game I’d ever played, because the SNES version of Super Noah’s Ark 3D is unplayably bad. The performance is horrendous, the controls suck (being able to play with dual analog sticks in the Steam version makes a huge difference, as you might expect), and the graphics are crushed to the point of illegibility. The SNES version was the original version of the game! The Steam version is game of the year material in comparison, it is wild how much a properly-done port can polish a steaming turd like this.
- That said, you could play the MS-DOS version of the game if you wanted to. It looks worse than the Steam version, sure, but it is still leagues better than the SNES version. It’ll take more of an effort to get it running on a modern PC, but if you want to try it out then feel free.
Super Noah’s Ark 3D is not a good game, but I actually found myself having fun with it. I picked this up for like five dollars in a Steam sale… and, honestly, I feel pretty good about the purchase. The core gameplay is still fun enough, but the game’s difficulty was so stupidly unfair that I found myself powering through more out of spite than actual enjoyment at times. That said, do not play the fucking SNES version for anything other than a (very short and very painful) laugh.
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