Chosen 1.33

As a TC, it's very impressive with its original content.  However, the gameplay is mostly tedious and painful.  First, most of your weapons feel incredibly weak, and the better 2 ones are extremely limited in ammo.  They're very slow to fire, take ages to kill anything, and hitting an enemy often has the same response as hitting a wall - a "tink" sound with no blood or reaction from the enemy.

For the enemies, you've got melee fighters who move so slowly that they're an unthreatening waste of time; arrow shooters whose projectiles are almost invisible; janky Lost Soul reskins who can hit you 10 times in one second and take massive chunks of your health; and guys with shields who become invincible for several seconds upon being hit - like the Centaurs in Hexen, except even worse because there's no weapon that can kill them remotely quick.

To its credit, the level design is simple and intuitive, and doesn't go crazy with massive size, mazes, or obtuse puzzles, for the most part.  One problem, like someone else said, is that there's not enough health and way too much armor.  Then there's the end boss - spoilers - where you need to shoot huge pillars to break them and aren't given any hint for it.  These pillars look like normal level geometry, and don't even have any cracks.  After that, the boss has to be defeated by hoping he moves through a narrow area, and steps onto a certain platform which damages him, and then hoping he moves back out, making the platform reset so you can repeat the process.  I get that you want to show off Zdoom's technology, but as far as final bosses go, it was tedious and anticlimactic as hell.  I was facing an Egyptian god, but it felt like I was trying to teach object permanence to a baby.

Overall it's another example of an ambitious mod that tries all sorts of new things, but neglects the core gameplay.  Fascinating to look at, not very fun to actually play.  I give it 3 stars just for its original content.

Pros:

-Theme and atmosphere are top notch.

-New weapons are fun to use and very creative.

-Extremely high quality texture and sprite editing. Can't commend them enough for this. You can barely tell you're playing DOOM.

-Level design is great overall, no maze-like levels or puzzles that take eons to solve.

Cons (mostly trivial):

-Story is really simple, kinda dumb, and frankly unnecessary, but it doesn't get in the way too much.

-For me, very hard to read numbers on the HUD. I couldn't tell the difference between 4s and 9s, for example.

-Very scarce health pickups and too many armor pickups, I often found myself at 1 health and 200 armor.

-Second phase of the end boss fight was pretty difficult to figure out, cool idea but could've been shown to the player better.

-Hard to tell when you're actually hitting an enemy with the bow/axes. Seems like they'll only do their pain animation and lose some blood half the time, and the other half, you get the *ting* noise that normally plays on a miss, but you actually did hit them.

Overall, great wad that is very much worth your time. It's obvious that a lot of hard work and love went into making this.

this might just be a huge spoiler of a review, but here it goes. Chosen is an Egyptian-themed wad that is pretty much a TC, new character, new weapons, new enemies, new items, new levels. all new stuff. first and foremost, you are NOT playing Doomguy, you are playing Kissa, and compared to Doomguy she is a lot weaker. the weapons given to Kissa are fairly bleak and provide a challenge curve, starting with the melee weapon which has slightly better range than normal as well as the Anubis throwing axe, which I hate to say it, is very inconsistent with its overall damage. what do I mean by that, try killing just one of the enemies at the start, it can take probably just two axes, but sometimes it could take from six to eight. the melee attack, with its increased range, just may be the better option against some foes. the Sekmet bow, the second weapon you'll get, fairs a bit better in damage output but is still inconsistent. the Staff of Seth's Wrath (Slot 4) is pretty much my boss killer choice weapon, due to its homing abilities and consistent damage output, it pays to save the ammo here. the Scarab Scepter (slot 5) functions similar to Heretic's Firemace but is probably weaker as far as I can tell.

enemy-wise, the Isis warriors (which function like lost souls) can really hurt and are probably one of the toughest overall enemies. the Anubis melee enemies and the Bastet archers are pretty much fodder in comparison. a variant of the Anubis warrior with a shield and spear exists, and is somewhat annoying to fight due to the shield getting thrown up plus its reflective abilities, not to mention a fast spear throw. there's also anthills and scarabs, best to use melee attacks. the bosses should usually be dealt with using the staff, except for the last one.

finally, the levels, which there is a surprisingly small amount. there's a focus on starvation, as there's usually not a lot of handy supplies, sometimes you need to break pots to get stuff. you get a level-select thing which I guess is standard, but the first level in the game is the longest and most notable, climbing and zigzagging through a pyramid at a slow pace finding the scarab keys until you get to the exit. the second level opens up with a dual boss fight before a bleak outing where you find two scarab keys and get on a boat. the boat ride is lame, where you sail across the lava while Isis warriors try to attack, then another boss that shows up. the landing area has very few monsters afterward, focusing a bit more on puzzles like the one to get the big healing item as well as the lava one, both of which can just be annoying.

when you finally fight Uraeusis, or whatever the snake's name is, it starts out standard, the snake functions like an arachnotron in that he spits out fireballs rapidly nonstop until you leave his line of sight. monsters teleport in to make it harder as well. but it's a shoot until health meter is depleted ordeal which goes to the second stage, here Uraeusis is actually invulnerable, and the only goal now is to find four pillars on the outskirts of the battle area and shoot all four until they crumble (this is where I save my Scarab scepter ammo since this seems to be the only really decent use of the weapon). then there's the final stage where you fight Uraeusis alone, or rather just try to lure him onto the central block over the lava four times, which can be difficult when he starts firing nonstop and not going where you want him to go. that's how you finally beat this boss if you must know.

if you know what you're getting into this TC will be done in less than 30 minutes. it seems so novel at the time, but due to how the latter levels seem lame in comparison to the first level and the general slow pacing, there's just not much going on for it.