Plutonia 2

"Putrid stench in your last breath,
Seeing death is nothingness,
Inhale the winds of punishment.

Aim!
Fire!
Attack! " (Perversor - Inhale (Anticosmocrator, 2015)).

And thus, Plutonia 2 ended, played through Eternity 4.00.00 Voluspa on UV difficulty. A rather interesting community sequel to the most challenging IWAD, but does it live up to its name? Well let's find out, shall we?

Plutonia 2, as the name implies, is a community sequel to The Plutonia Experiment, one half of the Final Doom expansion for the original Doom II. It aims to be a continuation to the IWAD and thus it sticks pretty close to its philosophy while adding new things to the table and expanding upon the foundation of the predecessor. It comes with new music, status bar, ENDOOM screen, fonts, and intermission screens. The Schutzstaffel and Commander Keen are the only non-standard Doom II enemies to make an appearance in the levels.

The design of the maps stays true to that of the original while bringing its own spin and usually taking liberties, but the essence of Plutonia is present in every map, that being challenging combat and smart enemy usage. The player is carried on various locations on Earth and Hell during the journey, both indoors and outdoors, and faces an Icon of Sin at the end.

Similar to the original, the difficulty curve is traditional, starting relatively easy and slowly becoming more difficult s you make progress. Relatively, because just like the original even the first map can give the player a false sense of safety, but all it takes is a dumb mistake and everything goes down. Mistakes are costly in Plutonia, and Plutonia 2 is no different. There are also no difficulty spikes, therefore the balancing is done well for all maps, from the beginning to the end, and the enemies or maps themselves aren't the only thing to pay attention to either. Resource management plays a big role. Easy to get fooled into believing the maps are offering a bunch of ammo or health, only to discover in potentially the same map that it isn't so. Monster infighting also helps in the more punishing sections. 

Although the general ideas of Plutonia are followed, certain iconic maps present an interesting take on their concept, with perhaps the most notable level being MAP11: Arch-Violence, which expands on the original's Hunted. This time around the player finds himself in a maze with 3 locked door (3 keys), and the Arch-Viles are no longer encountered one by one, facing even small groups at once.

Another difference would be the lack of very tricky portions that the original had. A notable example here would the notorious Soul Bridge, an idea which isn't seen in PL2 at all, instead resorting to other creative traps and encounters to kill the player or push them over the edge. But this is perhaps were the problems arise. Despite the encounters being fair and challenging most of the time, there are a number of questionable choices. Sometimes the player is ambushed in very dark, if not pitch dark rooms, and occasionally a completely unexpected monster closet opens up, killing an unsuspecting target in a matter of moments. There are also a number of secrets that are trapped, instantly spawning enemies around you. Both are cheap ways to kill an unsuspecting target as neither of them require the player to anything other than have previous knowledge, as by the time they assess the situation they're dead. Other than this, despite some maps paying homage to other traits of their IWAD counterpart, they might go too far. MAP29 is one such scenario. Although it's a very solid map with good layout, interesting areas, great use of textures, and fun combat, it's too long for its own good, taking almost or over an hour to finish in a blind playthrough. MAP29 was also the longest map in Plutonia, but took nowhere near as much, thus this level being an example of a level taking an idea to the extreme.

The final map has, unfortunately, a very anti-climatic end game battle. This is because it's one of the worst takes on the IoS out there. The player is tasked with shooting the eyes, or forehead, of an IoS from awkward angles. Awkward, because it can only be found out through trial-and-error, shooting it randomly until it starts making noises. The only clue given by the platforms that need to be raised is that it's either the left side of its face, or right, nothing else. Certainly fun to shoot rockets randomly.

The music is another interesting aspect in PL2. The most intriguing part being that it's literally all over the place. It features entirely new tracks from different sources, as well as Doom and Doom II. It makes no sense. Luckily though, the tracks do fit the maps they're used it, so this becomes less of a problem, despite still being there anyway. The new tracks seem to be more action oriented, unsurprising considering that PL2 places greatest emphasis on gameplay, and then the visuals and atmosphere, although it has plenty of that.

Fortunately, these are also the only problems in PL2. For a community project with contributions from various authors the quality is fairly consistent, but it's also easy to tell when you're playing a map done by someone else as they all exhibit pretty different gameplay styles, design, and enemy usage, while also keeping in mind the core aspects of the original. This is always important but sometimes difficult to nail in projects, where quality consistency can become a real problem, and it's not without precedent to run into a few, or a lot of, fantastic maps, only to end up in a real crappy map, or maps, in the same wad at some point. The opposite is also true, the maps becoming too similar to each other to the point the player has no idea whose map they're playing because there's nothing to create contrast between them.

Do you miss the Chaingunners, for instance? So do they, they're back with a vengeance. So, PL2 might not be perfect, and in some cases perhaps (slightly) worse than the original, but it definitely is worthy of the title and does justice to Final Doom's Plutonia Experiment while adding its own spin. My favorite levels are going to be the ones seen in the first half, plus MAP29. Yes, it drags on terribly, but the design and gameplay is solid so calling it awful based solely on that would be foolish and dishonest. So, grab your weapons and start reliving the Plutonian experience.

Nicely done succesor of Plutonia

This is the first, and one of the best I've ever seen.

this is a best megawads i ever seen, it's petty good.

I have a long lasting love/hate relationship with the original Plutonia. I find it to easily be the hardest of the classic vanilla official Doom releases to the point of frustration with some design choices, like chaingunners galore in their barricaded towers. The entire megawad is very brown or green in texturing too and gets a bit drab. That said I continue to go back to it off and on throughout the years. I finally hit up Plutonia 2 this year and it lives up to its name, it's tough as nails, more brown walls and green ooze everywhere, chaingunners, unsafe starts, etc. Some maps like MAP11: Arch-Violence I hated because it was so tiresome. There were others I found really frustrating in the later teens and early 20's too. Don't expect many safe starts in any of these maps, the majority of them have you in enemy crosshairs immediately, along with tons of cramped sections in several maps, to a crazy degree that it seems impossible to beat most of these maps on a first run without knowing the traps and gimmicks. On the plus side, like Plutonia 1, I still had a fun time overall and this definitely felt like an official sequel. The style changed dramatically in the last chunk of maps and for the best, environments started looking much more interesting with a lot of reds, some maps were simpler but very effective, and I really enjoyed the final stretch along with this incarnation of the Icon of Sin battle at the end. The new music is awesome. I played on continuous play via UV and GZDoom, no mods. Clocked in a little over 8 hours. If you're up for some pain and difficulty, check this one out.

sequel wads, you see so many of them, being sequels to fine franchises, those that are really close to sequels of other famous megawads but still being quite different (the Hell Revealed and Kama Sutra for an example), and then you got the team that decides to make an official sequel to an IWAD. now, the idea of doing this seems to have skyrocketed after Plutonia 2, which I guess is the first major one, afterwards you got the TWID sets, Doom 64 mapsets being made, TNT Revilution along with Devilution, isn't it clear that each and every one of us here on Doomworld is just a rabid fan of such a great game?

Plutonia 2 plays pretty appropriately for a sequel wad. it actually doesn't offer anything new besides a storyline, status bar, menu bar, and levels, but back in the day there were expansion packs (Hell 2 Pay, Perditions Gate, Build Engine add-ons) which have the same sort of thing, and Plutonia 2 honestly feels like that. but the gameplay is not standard Plutonia. standard Plutonia has low monster counts but difficult monster encounters in usually small levels. this has larger levels, larger monster counts, but still retains the aspect of difficult monster encounters. and just because there's more space to work with does not mean things are actually easier. you have to find your sense of place, where things are, and pick off the problems as they show face. there's gonna be some instances of hordes to deal with, usually smaller than your average Hell Revealed horde but still problematic in several levels. and like Plutonia, the biggest problem monsters are gonna be chaingunners, revenants, arch-viles, and mancubi, along with cyberdemons, pain elementals, and any particularly well-situated enemy to find.

you can pick just about any level to be a worthwhile challenge, as many levels are designed around exposing you to the galls of teleporting enemies throughout the wad. even from the second level, which has some nasty teleporting ambushes already. notable levels usually end up being chaos-fests in some ways, MAP09 being an example, followed by chunks of MAP16 and MAP17 (a perfect nonlinear adventure level with loads of meat). MAP18 is one of those wads that on subsequent playthroughs, is one of the most deceptively tough levels to offer. MAP20 is a grind-fest where you really want to pay attention to hitscanners, and then there's MAP23, the level I remember most (but loathe the most I should say), because of it's huge damaging blood pit and slaughter-lite encounters. MAP29 shines as another non-linear adventure level, good odysseys compounded by some other ones like MAP26. you gotta pay attention to the authors here, Eternal is all about proper monster placement that is almost starvation worthy while TVDV has some innovative ideas for vanilla (and his boss level is downright cool). Gusta and Pipicz carry some of the harder levels worth grinding through. you're gonna enjoy Plutonia 2 as long as you can enjoy the difficult combat that it entails.