In the early 90's id Software had started a new craze - the FPS craze. Their phenomenal games, Wolfenstain 3D and Doom, might not have created the genre, strictly speaking, but gave it form and flame, setting the trend for years to come, and breaking quite a few sales records. Suddenly every system had to have its own FPS, be it a port, or a completely original title. The Commodore Amiga series of computers were no different, and while by the time Doom rolled out Commodore was literally on its last legs, the classic Amiga 500 (as well as its derivatives, 500+ and 600), and the new Amiga 1200 were still relatively powerful and popular in Europe as multimedia machines thanks to their offloading most of the legwork to a set of integrated graphic chips. The 1200, being the more powerful of the two, recieved a number of original FPS titles, the ones most fondly remembered probably being Gloom and Alien Breed 3D (itself a small technological marvel). Amiga 500 and other 68k based Amigas, however, had always struggled with even crude untextured 3D games like Total Eclipse or Epic, and a working first person shooter was something that was considered unattainable on this hardware. This didn't stop the developers from trying, of course, and while most attempts turned out to be unplayable failures, at least one title stood out: Cytadela / Citadel, made by a group of Polish demoscene coders.

The game shipped on five 880k floppy disks, with the first three containing just the game launcher and a lengthy, thankfully skippable, intro comprised of low resolution FMV cutscenes and text passages that, while impressive, essentially amount to the plot of Doom 1 - lone survivor of a military mission, a space base that ceased responding, and so on. The first two levels even use "zombies", fireball breathing monsters, and demonic imagery, although later areas are more varied than that. So varied, in fact, that each one feels a bit disconnected from any other, and the only interaction between the background plot and the actual gameplay is that each of the game's six main areas has a bomb piece hidden on its third level. These - very missable! - bomb pieces are used to create, well, a bomb, which unlocks the final level. This outline is a slight departure from the typical FPS of that era, as much as a "typical FPS" could exist in these early days - most games were simply a linear sequence of levels, sometimes divided in "episodes", whereas in Citadel the player can select any area he hasn't completed yet, retaining his equipment between levels.

This is just one of the developers' many design decisions that could from today's perspective could be called atypical. Unfortunately, only a handful of them could be reasonably called good ideas, and most of them are a bit unwieldy, or just plain don't work. For example, the game has its share of colored keycards and switches puzzling, however, here the keycards aren't the usual one-a-level deal, instead having a literal ammo counter, each use taking one card. Furthermore, some of the switches are actually traps that can permanently stop the player from progressing, and the player can run out of cards if he unlocks the doors in the wrong order. This could qualify as merely annoying, but the levels can get rather large, as in 30+ minutes large, so memorizing the correct sequence of switches and doors can get... difficult. But beyond the sluggish walking speed and a pickup that scrambles controls for a few minutes, there is one idea that will likely infuriate anyone who played any fps ever: wall damage. Touching any wall, or even any door that isn't completely open, will result in a small rebound, screen distortion, and taking away a hit point, with a pointless "ouch" message scrolling past the status bar. It's exactly as aggravating as it sounds, and it's even worse on weaker systems where the framerate isn't so hot. There are also other quirks to the game mechanics. For example, weapons are breakable. Each one will definitely last several levels, depending on how often it is fired, but eventually it will simply break and the player will have to find a new one. Thankfully, every stage is littered with weapon pickups and the hero always replaces his weapon for the new one, so the risk of being completely defenceless (there is no melee option) is pretty low. Furthermore, there is no "Armor" counter, but health ("NRG" so you know it's l337) has a cap of whopping 999 points. This might seem a lot, but given the hero's limited mobility, an occasional enemy-heavy encounter might eat up a well over 500 if the player is not careful, and sometimes even then.

Thankfully actually fighting the enemies is the most enjoyable part of the game. Each area has its own set of 2-4 unique enemies, each type armed with a weapon corresponding to what the player can use, and dropping ammo for that weapon. Some are trivial, some are tough, some are annoying, but every one is at least a bit different. AI and pathfinding are pretty much nonexistent though enemies can still hurt each other - for example, it's very common for the fireball enemy in the first area to set his allies on fire with blind shooting. On the armament side, there's the basic handgun-shotgun-machinegun combo which works okay enough for mowing down weaker enemies, especially the ever-useful shotty, which can shoot essentially as fast as the player can tap fire. There's a "flamethrower", essentially a fireball gun that, well sets enemies on fire, meaning them flail around for quite a while, blocking your movement and bullets, and dealing contact damage, which limits its usefulness a bit. Another weapon, far less common, is the "blaster", which fires blueish blobs that are actually quite powerful, even if they seem otherwise. Finally, there's the mandatory rocket launcher, which is ironically slightly less powerful than expected, and the explosion effect is rather weird. Overall though, apart from the handgun, weapons are pretty fun to use and blast the enemies with.

The graphics are a very mixed bag. Many visual effects, such as the textured floor/ceiling, and plenty of decorations, can be turned off, and the viewport can be rescaled from a literal poststamp size to taking up the entire screen, and the user can change these settings on the fly to ensure an acceptable framerate, though basic 68k users desiring smooth visuals will have to settle on about one fifth of the avilable screen, no floors, and low detail setting. One can't help but feel though that the designers used that as their starting point because the textures and sprites get really pixellated once the viewport is enlarged. Furthermore, the quality of texture work is really uneven. Each area has its own completely unique set but, partly due to its low resolution, a lot of it is rather messy, with poor color choice. The Lab area got the worst of it, though its not the only offender. Furthermore, the sprites have only a few frames of animation, and most are blatantly traced. It isn't a bad thing in of itself - for example car batteries serving as blaster ammo, or propane tanks for flamethrower work okay, but then one type of enemy simply is Boba Fett, and another enemy is the Star Wars stormtrooper, not even edited or recolored. Sprites that are more thoroughly edited or created from scratch tend to look ugly or weird, such as the orange scowling thing from the labs, or the red blob thing from the sewers. The same can be said about the sound effects - it's all very much a homemade thing and it shows, with mismatched moans and screams making up most of it, though the weapon and door effects are surprisingly decent. There is no music in the game, apart from the menu and gameover tunes, but the menu song is actually pretty cool.

In the end, Cytadela was an average game for its time, but had the advantage of running on a relatively underpowered, if popular, system. With its sluggish, deliberate pace, focus on labirythine levels, and some odd design choices, it certainly pales in comparison to better Amiga FPSes, and Doom blows it right out of the water. Publisher meddling - the tagline on the Polish edition literally says "This game is not for you!" in some futile attempt at being edgy - probably prevented the game from gaining any further notoriety and left the developers with an aftertaste bad enough, it was the first and last game they ever made. Oddly enough, despite its thorough averageness, it had fans dedicated enough to complete a freeware Windows/Linux/OS X port, available here http://cytadela.sourceforge.net/index.php.