Halten Sie!

while some of the WolfenDoom wads place players in large, oversized areas with enemies strewn throughout castles, Halten Sie! does something different. it gives us something that looks extraordinarily faithful to something that would be made from a simple Wolf3D level-to-map converter, and the result is something that looks like it could've been its own set for a Wolf3D mod. mind you, that's a fantastic thing by WolfenDoom standards, as gameplay certainly emulates a Wolf3D levelset fairly well.

and that says the same for the dehacked work here. while other sets in the WolfenDoom catalog portray officers as chaingunner replacements and mutants as imp replacements, this makes them more faithful to Wolf3D, with the officers more closely being like shotgun guys (the SS still drop the machine guns) and the mutants the same as their Wolf3D counterparts, hitscan and all. the boss monsters are a lot tougher than you'd expect, with the hitscan bosses (Hans/Trans Grosse + Ubermutant) firing instantaneously while the Death Knight is moreso a mancubus reskin with actual rockets yet again. some of these guys can be rather surprising and nasty unfortunately, as they show up in rather inconvenient locations.

level layouts are generally good for this 11-level set. there's still some unfortunate doses of symmetry which I don't really like, but since the levels are smaller, it's not as bad. some secrets are bad, but the nature of Wolf3D maps had given me experience in this kind of thing. the first episode (MAP01-03) may also be rather slow, since you only can fight with the pistol up until then. MAP02 is rife with dogs for some reason, and MAP03 has a shitload of guards at the exit, all this before you reach the rest of the levels and find the rest of the enemies and weapons. the final map (MAP11) apparently doesn't contain a major boss, and is even lampshaded in the story text afterwards too, but since it's lampshaded, I'll give that one a pass. regardless of these things, Halten Sie! easily ranks as one of the better WolfenDoom wads.