Demonfear

Demonfear is a vanilla Doom 2 megawad designed by Adam Windsor (Capellan). The wad is comprised of 6 episodes of 5/6 maps each. Each chapter was originally released individually between 1995 and 1999 and then compiled as a collection on 2000. I have beat this wad a couple of times on UV using Crispy Doom with the highly recommended Midi Pack made by P41R47.

One of the most characteristic things about this map set is how fast it plays. Most levels have less than 50 monster, there is very little exploration and levels take very few minutes to complete. This gives an arcade feel to the wad that makes it great to play in small bursts. Beating the entirety of it will takes less than a couple of hours with some experience.

Early levels are very simple and focus on Doom Cute designs such as houses, jails and gas stations. Later on the player will explore some tech bases and finally an small section of hell.  As the wad progress you can see Windsor improvement as a mapper using more sophisticated designs while keeping the maps short and simple.

The maps are never too challenging, but some of them can get you killed if you are not very careful, Capellan likes to put Archviles where you less expect them and the blocky nature of the maps can make them hard to dodge comfortably.  The maps favors the use of hitscaners and occasionally they are teleported in another area of the arena while you are busy dealing with another group of enemies which can catch you unprepared.

Demonfear can be great fun when you are in the mood for something fast and easy or when you just want to play some Doom without compromise to a long period of time. The short levels reminds me of some newer projects such as Deathless, Zone 300/400 or the Windsor own Doom404 which distill the Doom experience to its basic core.  The lightness of it may put some players off if they expecting something meatier.

If you are into a short and easy wad, if you like 90s map design or if you have a couple of hours to spare give this one a try. 

4/5

This is an incredibly fun wad to play through.  I felt the first couple of maps were a bit weak, but thoroughly enjoyed maps 9 onwards. 

This is the epitome of what you could call an extremely fun mapset.
Not much details here, but interesting enough to play it again and again.

This is soo much fun, that i needed to make something for it.

So yeah, i made my own midi pack with 35 new music files to enjoy.
I added the story sketches that Adam Windsor wrote in a txt file as custom

graphic replacing the maps names on the intermission screen.

And also a new TITLEPIC, INTERPIC, HELP and BOSSBACK.

I open a thread for everybody to download it!

Go grab it!

There really isn't a whole lot to say about this one. In fact, it's probably the least ambitious 32-map megawad you're ever going to find, to such a point that you can clear the whole thing in one day, possibly even one session. But what little Demonfear does, it does well and thoroughly. There isn't a single bad map in here, the action is constant and always well-calibrated. Architecture wise, absolutely nothing stands out of course, but it all looks surprisingly respectable for such an old release. As for the cherry on top, the inevitable Doom 2 map 30 remix that concludes the adventure(thank the Gods those days are over) is way, way better than a map of that sort has any right to be.

A fun set of 32 very short maps, offering some quick, relaxing Dooming action. The levels are quite varied and offer interesting challenges, although the final ones kinda feel similar to each other. The difficulty is generally laid-back, especially if you're playing continuously which will allow you to breeze through the levels.

Probably the shortest 32 level megawad in existence. Very few maps have more than 30-odd monsters and are fairly easy, even on UV, though there are some well deployed Revenants and Archviles which can cause the odd awkward moment.

The best way to play it these days for a challenge would probably be with pistol starts or mods like Complex Doom or Hard Doom.

The only way I could get map 22 to run properly was in PrBoom-Plus, using the Doom2 v1.9 compatibility setting (Complevel 2), by the way.

Not bad, but too small confined maps, not much area to explore or have bigger fights, would have been nicer if levels were a bit biger

Small, arena-like levels.  Feels a bit like a confinement project.

the classic short but hard megawad. well, it's certainly hard when playing back then, but now, not so much. there's nothing really new in Demonfear besides the levels, and they are all bite-sized with reasonable monsters to take on in each one. a few interesting scenarios, with the back-to-back secret levels being similar, the arena maps, and MAP22 which actually sadly is broken in a way. odd that both MAP20 and MAP26 of Requiem were slated to be here, but were used for that wad instead. however it's still a good one to play in about 40 or so minutes, it's short and its fun.