-
21 MORE FOR '21
We couldn't help but spotlight even more of our personal favorites out of the dozens of good releases this year -- plus even a handful of wads the community was especially high on. As in the main features, demo releases are not included yet and there is no particular order. Nothing is remotely official about this rundown; contributing to it is just one of the perks of covering the rest! Enjoy.
Nameless - Jimmy
Doom 2, GZDoom, 1 map
A wide, sweeping Lovecraftian fortress sprawling amongst dark and moody cliffs, the goal of this map is simple: collect the colored demon masks and gems to reach each new section of the gargantuan gray marble complex. Along the way, eyeless pinkies, zombie-like imps, and assault rifle-wielding sargeants crawl amongst the stone, doing all they can to stop you. A mischievous gargoyle offers up a super shotgun -- pick it up if you dare! To finish, scale a behemoth of a monstrous mountain with every horrific demon beast sent charging straight towards you, the mountain shaking angrily with thunderous cries.
-
Judgment - Rayziik
Doom 2, MBF21-compatible, 33 maps
Eight years in the making, Judgment is both an early adopter of the new MBF21 mapping standard and an omnibus-style release, collecting the majority of its author's mapping output for Doom into a complete campaign, chronicling the ill-fated journey of a lost marine from hellscape to hellscape, with only death behind and nothing but more death ahead. Featuring an impressive variety of themes drawn from a number of texture resources, the tone of the mapset is grim, gritty and gothic, an angle it exuberantly leans into with its host of diabolic new enemies, each filling a distinct role in combat to supplement the classic cast. These demonic reinforcements are most (un)timely indeed, as from the first minute of the game to the last Rayziik's focus is foremost on fights of all shapes and sizes; for pure, singleminded action, Judgment is just the ticket. Make no mistake, there WILL be blood before the final sentence is served.
-
Boaty McBoatwad - Scotty et al
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 16 maps
The community project Boaty McBoatwad had a simple premise: make a map with a boat. The immediate draw is seeing all the variations people came up with: from cargo ships in a frozen bay, to rusted steamers in very suspicious liquid, to techno-futuristic ships swimming in raw energy to, my favorite, a gargantuan mass of flesh and bone that blinks at you when you set upon it in an abyssal blood sea...a living boat. While the concept itself is lovable, what takes this far beyond a pure curiosity is that much of it, especially later, is simply quite good, boat or boan't (but there are definitely boats). Some authors had a knack for pulse-pounding scuffles and elegant architecture. Plus a huge boat in your face works great as a signposted goal and a stage for a climactic boattle, giving many maps a sense of adventure that belies their shorter runtime.
- @rd.
-
The Long Trek Back Home - hervoheebo
Doom 2, vanilla-compatible, 32 maps
After the triumphant explosion of the boss brain, the Icon of Sin arena is a wreck littered with corpses and detritus. Clambering through tunnels in the walls, you find chambers that are unsettlingly familiar -- transmuted versions of map30's stock-up room that could have been there all along. Every stop of your trek back to Entrway is reimagined similarly: extensive structural damage reveals wildly new forms of progression and secret-hunting, and unlocks many areas in the liminal spaces, such as how in Barrels O' Fun, a large barrel factory can now be accessed. What makes Long Trek Back Home so intriguing is not just the communion of source and author -- of old experiences filtering back like a stream of cloudy memories -- but all the murky, cryptic environments full of mysteries to unravel. As you reach the end, reality itself reveals its wounds.
- @rd.
-
Uprising - Cheesewheel
Doom 2, limit-removing, 32 maps
Grab your trusty pistol, don your battered armour and steel yourself for the long battle to come. It is time for an Uprising! Spanning 32 action-packed maps, Cheesewheel’s second one-man-megawad tells the tale of a lone warrior’s grand campaign of vengeance. From desolate valleys to shattered cities to frozen bases to the surface of mars and beyond, you will wage brutal war upon demonkind, facing off against a host of new and dangerous opponents. Loose, open layouts and an emphasis on player mobility facilitate a dynamic, free-flowing style of combat that seamlessly ebbs and flows between casual incidental action and intense set-piece battles. Each level flows elegantly into the next, giving the map-to-map progression a satisfying sense of continuity. While potentially exhausting, the unbroken nature of the experience serves to truly sell the set’s narrative, which is what makes Uprising my favourite Hell on Earth.
-
Perpetual Powers - Lorenz0 et al
Doom 2, GZDoom, 21 maps
A megawad in three stylish chapters -- colorful icebound complexes, shrines and fortresses in lush crimson forests, and the desiccated wastelands of a dead world -- Perpetual Powers avoids falling into a rut while serving up a steady dose of rowdy encounters tied together with lighter skirmishing. Lorenz0's combat design is skillful and versatile -- he can pull off an energizing 100-monster stroll as well as a late-game slaughter gauntlet -- and along with a few talented guest authors, he consciously varies scale, pacing, concept, and composition more than the norm. Accordingly, Perpetual Powers falls into a satisfying groove but with no shortage of fresh twists. The stately OTEX look and sprinkling of GZDoom features places it as sort of a modern spin on the descendants of Scythe 2 it takes lessons from.
- @rd.
-
Skulltiverse - ViolentBeetle et al
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 32 maps
Skulltiverse is a portal-hopping adventure from corrupted techbases to the fleshy depths of hell to the inevitable disintegration of the world -- and after a low-key beginning, it starts uncovering a surprising number of gems. Conceptual highlights include a riff on Valiant's Mancubian Candidate, an exquisitely tense survival horror trip with shades of Hell Ground, and one of the most ambitious spins on Wormhole's parallel realm concept in a while. With its playful spirit and the resonances that come from having many recurring contributors, I was sometimes reminded of Japanese Community Project. Like its predecessor Hellevator, it speaks to the power of fine-grained community project oversight; ViolentBeetle started with resources, themes, a frame narrative, and more. It might also speak to the power of a soft space restriction in redirecting "magnum opus" energy into experiences that are brief, but dense with clever ideas.- @rd.
-
Dungeon Synths - Big Ol' Billy et al
Doom 2, GZDoom, 9 maps
A fanciful and original debut release from the freshly-minted Doomer Bards Krew, Dungeon Synths is a delightful musical adventure, spanning nine whimsical maps, each brimming with style and an infectious enthusiasm for the two convergent mediums. Thematically, the set is a neat summation of its title, a fusion of classic Heretic-style gothic architecture and a sort of rusted magi-punk industrialism, reminiscent of an alchemist’s lair co-opted by demonic robber barons and inflated to inhuman proportions. Likewise, the set’s fantastic score deftly syncretizes its disparate influences, resulting in a powerful synergistic blend which gives the set a palpable, immersive atmosphere. This, combined with the various authors’ penchant for inventive music-themed set-pieces and gimmicks, makes Dungeon Synths a real joy to play, an all-to-brief flash of distilled creativity and passion potent enough to momentarily enliven even the gloomiest of souls. Truly, a rousing debut performance. Cheers to the Bards!
-
Zone 400 - pcorf
Doom 2, vanilla-compatible, 32 maps
Among players who stick to wads with a higher profile, pcorf is known as an author of stately, measured adventures -- but 2013's Zone 300 became a sleeper hit riding pretty much the opposite track, all madness and mayhem packed into a full megawad of tiny maps. The sequel is cut from the same cloth, now a bit bigger and with spiffier visuals, but just as eager to jump into its distinctive style of unrelenting, hyperactive, but altogether very accessible combat. With pcorf showing a more experimental side, Zone 400's appeal was broad: a playground for speedrunners, a sandbox for gameplay mods, and of course, a fun experience for fans of bread and butter Doom gameplay in tight packages.
- @rd.
-
Sucker Punch 2 - Rook
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 9 maps
Great things come in small packages, and Sucker Punch 2 is no exception to this rule. Packing tons of action into a super-concentrated mapping style, Rook demonstrates an exceptional mastery of both environment and combat in this short and sweet set. Sucker Punch 2 takes the traditional environmental shift from tech to hell and gives it an OTEX twist, each scene rich in atmosphere and scope, but no two maps looking too similar to each other, thanks to Rook’s imaginative layouts keeping the maps fresh and clean. Efficiency is the name of this WAD’s game, each combat setup making solid use of the sometimes tight quarters, and creating havoc in the big spaces in just the right moments. So, cmon, don’t be afraid -- Sucker Punch those demons straight back to hell -- you’ll be sure to have a blast! -
Tetraptykon - Demonologist
Doom 2, limit-removing, 4 maps
Tetraptykon is a short but substantial set of four euphorically bloodsoaked zone-of-influence slaughtermaps cut from an older cloth, drawing heavily on the legacy of the primordial Hell Revealed and perhaps even moreso on its black sheep / fashionably verboten fan sequel. While newer users most familiar with the slaughter genre from its mechanically rococo and ostensibly 'artsier' modern strains might conceive of this old style as simplistic, in Demonologist's capable hands it's shown to be as robust, multifaceted and fun as any other. Each of the four maps has a distinctly different theme and setting -- a rustbelt city under siege, a stone citadel between worlds, a trail of tears through Hell's fiery floodlands, a death-rimed vision of Ragnarok's aftermath -- and places a different spin on the classic / OG slaughter style, from series of individually staged battles to cerebral exercises in tactics, field management and resource planning to straight-up freeform, improvisational horde control. If you fancy yourself a true one-person army, your resume is not complete until you've learned how we did it in the Back When, and there is no finer crash course out there than this.
-
Ray Mohawk 2 - Doomkid et al
Doom 2, vanilla-compatible, 20 maps
In similar fashion to last year’s award-winning Powertrip, Doomkid once again revisits an old concept, expands upon it, and throws open the floodgates to all and sundry who wish to craft their own vision of glorious beachside mayhem. The result is a refreshingly varied experience, with a surprising degree of mechanical depth and thematic range. From pirate coves to apocalyptic cities to ancient ruins to sleepy seaside complexes, Ray Mohawk 2 offers a range of settings and themes, bound together by a universal thread of arcadey exuberance. Likewise, the set features a myriad of combat-styles, ranging from casual incidental action to gloriously insane set-piece encounters and everything betwixt, with each author exploring the possibilities offered by the set’s comically overpowered arsenal in their own way. Truly, Ray Mohawk 2 is a genuine delight, a spirited joyride that never ceases to surprise. Ride that wave of destruction, dear reader, and wreak havoc!
-
Micro Slaughter Community Project - Bauul et al
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 17 maps
"Micro slaughter" has been around for a while in works like Rush and in the later parts of numerous megawads, but even then, MSCP had a fresh take on it. Rather than a universal downscale, it preserved the grandeur and alien hostility of immense slaughter wads like Sunder -- the stunning cuboid lightshow of map02 is the first dose of many -- but kept the play experience short, individual maps playing out as intense bite-sized ordeals that don't tax your endurance. Some maps task you to carve space through big mobs with the BFG or patiently shepherd unruly siege cows, while others are tightly scaled combat puzzles with barely three-digit monsters. This variation makes it a good all-in-one entry to this often intimidating genre. The bdubz...I mean occasional difficulty spikes suit the "training" angle just fine; after all, slaughter in the wild is rarely a smooth ride.
- @rd.
-
Wormwood ]|[ - Ribbiks & Grain of Salt
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 3 maps
Ribbiks and Grain of Salt's annual Halloween treat has consistently offered some of the year's most challenging, daring DeHackEd experiments: Wormwood ]|[ plunges deeper into magical realism with perpetually exploding dark matter, spread-fire arachnotrons, and flaming black orbs that guard perilous obstacle courses and can be cajoled to smash through the hordes for you. The closer, one of Ribbiks's big nonlinear post-Magnolia sprawls, is a demented world of spikes and knife-like angles that can seem like it's steadily growing out of some primordial evil, like if you passed through ages later, it would be a vastly larger and even more inhospitable dimension -- with even more drunk arachnotrons.
- @rd.
-
Dereliction Derby - PinkKittyRose
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 1 map
PKR's Dereliction Derby is a sprawling military garrison and research complex nestled in a mountain range deemed of archaeological interest by the UAC (gee, I wonder why etc.). Comfy and traditional in its techbase / dig mashup theme, the base and surrounding environs are rendered in loving detail that lend them a particular personality amidst the many other techbases we see each year. This one has quite a lot of ongoing maintenance -- difficult to finish these tasks when key janitorial staff keep inexplicably going missing every time they're sent to the basement and all that -- that gives it a rough charm. While the map covers quite a bit of ground, it's very well-paced, combining staged battles indoors with a more freestyle skirmish style outdoors, and a wide variety of tricky secrets that are very believable in-world. The capper is a cheeky finale that really comes out of nowhere in more ways than one, cementing a lasting impression for one of the most confident of the year's many impressive mapping debuts.
-
Testing Pool - yakfak
Doom 2, Eternity Engine, 1 map
Testing Pool is quite the adventure, though perhaps not in the usual sense. Designed more like a dungeon than anything else, it's a closed and carefully regimented subterranean space of sinuous tunnels, crisscrossing skywalks, looming colonnades, countless dropoffs, and strangely stacked terraces, all steeped in heavy shadow and flooded with poisonous blood. There's an odd stateliness to it in spite of all the grime and gloom, but the real draw lies in figuring out just how the hell you're supposed to get out again. While not a terribly large level in terms of sprawl, the design is incredibly dense and three-dimensional in nature, and learning its intricacies through exploration and experimentation before finally managing to unravel the Gordian knot of its internal logic is truly rewarding, and soothing to mind and soul. See if you can find the extra-hidden, "true" exit -- the fight there is worth it, both off-kilter and suitably climactic.
-
Bourgeois Megawad - Decay, Doomkid, & Razgriz
Doom 2, vanilla-compatible, 30 maps
There is no field where layout reigns more supreme than PvP -- where one misstep can consign a map to the big heap spurned by notoriously picky deathmatchers heading to another duel on Judas23. Each author here is deeply familiar with that, so what happens when they outfit their fussily laid out combat zones for single-player action? You get one of the most popular megawads on Doomworld this year: praised for gameplay that is simultaneously fierce and thoughtful -- rooted in organic, multidirectional brawls in compact, looping layouts. It also became a minor speedrunning sensation, amassing well over 400 demos just this year. The megawad doesn't forget its origins either. Every map provides a parallel DM arena of the same layout, and since plenty of them are "demade" vanilla versions of advanced Cacoward-winning Zandronum projects, quality baseline is practically guaranteed.
-
NoSp3 - NoReason
Doom 2, MBF21-compatible, 32 maps
Over the last two years, NoReason has proved himself a skilled purveyor of simple horde-based macroslaughter. Earlier this year, NoSp2 became a hit among speedrunners by mixing in smaller maps and building on those fundamentals with rude experiments -- what if archviles could revive everything, from bosses to other archviles? And Cosmogenesis took the ridiculous gigantoslaughter formula of Holy Hell and updated the look, intensity, and sophistication to modern slaughterwhore tastes, with an hours-long monstrosity of a map that even Ancalagon admits is very difficult. All of that has led up to NoSp3, which takes the experiments even further -- a rapid-fire rocket launcher, a doubled health-armor cap, ice-skating cyberdemons. Extravagant spectacle and four-digit body counts become the norm. The hardcore slaughter fans were making a lot of noise about this one.
- @rd.
-
Literalism - MFG38 et al
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 26 maps
This year was something of a watershed for community projects with unusual and clever premises. In Literalism, project runner MFG38 took a random name generator and spat out names like "The Goat's Hideout " and "Cosmic Cacodemons" and "The Mancubus Computer." As a contributor, that was your theme and guiding star, nothing else. Literalism's best maps can have whimsical themes like little else made this year, where the name itself -- considering the wild logical leaps needed to extract an idea from one -- might as well be the distilled essence of some unusual lore. Build specs vary greatly, but a side effect of the concept is that even the rougher maps often have something amusing and inventive about them.
- @rd.
-
Archi-TEK (a.k.a. UVOLNIT) - romsu89
Doom 2, GZDoom, 3 maps
Released quietly by its author to very little fanfare, Archi-TEK is another re-imagining of the quintessential Doom storyline of Hell's conquest of Earth, compressed into a set of three huge maps, the first set in a haunted industrial refinery where reality is beginning to tatter and fray at the seams, the second in a blasted cityscape of truly massive corporate skyscrapers that appear to be in the early stages of rebirth as something else entirely, and the third in a grisly interpretation of Hell as a towering biotech nightmare. The coy omission of screenshots or any other real information in the release thread belies one of the most visually dramatic releases of the year, with romsu89 showcasing an uncanny flair for truly imaginative scene composition and detail on both the macro and micro scales, as well as a penchant for intricate layouts which believably flesh out the inmost reaches of the many spectacular vistas on display.
-
The Event Horizon - Killer5
Doom 2, Boom-compatible, 4 maps
The horror. The horror. The Event Horizon is not so much something that you play as a fate that befalls you. While m31 is a quick, compactly-designed affair that would fit right in with the author's slightly more jaunty techbase episode from later in the cycle, and m32 is a fairly conventional open-ended slaughter with a few skeletons in its closet (or rather its basement), the title map is basically the Lemarchand Configuration once again manifested in our reality, this time as a Doom PWAD. To what end? Hell if I know, but it assuredly bodes well for none of us. Of all of the year's many forays into the arcane and esoteric, none are as deep or as dark as this, a rabbit-hole of mind-bending secrets bottoming out into an abyss of extreme gameplay strung as tightly as piano wire around the throat of sanity. It's both horrifying and gloriously exhilarating......but mainly horrifying. You've been warned.
