Stone Stratagems v1

Average map set, not bad, but also not great.  Nice the idea of stone texture inspired maps, gives the maps a theme.  Very rough start with few ammo and weapons to fight several revenants, arachnotrons,hellknights even barons ^^;

Minimalistic architecture with lots of squared room, a bit of misaligned textures.  But overall, was fun to play, I give it a 3.5/5

When I first played this, I thought it was some mapset from the 1990s, but I'm surprised this was released as late as 2009. Why was DCK used to construct this when other better utilities existed at the time (even Dystopia 3 was better and that used DCK)? Honestly this is one of the most boring packs I've played - most of the one-monster-per-room combat and "traps" can be avoided by just walking around/away from monsters. In addition, every single room seems to have a theme that clashes with the adjacent rooms. This left me exhausted after playing from just playing half of the pack because of how boring and uneventful this was. The only good part about this pack is the good night's sleep that it induced.

it's cool. pretty average, but you know what, the average set could in fact fair a lot better than something overly ambitious. Stone Strategems barely does anything new, just offering 21 levels with some decent Doom action in each one. main theme is stone/rock, which is pretty good I guess. author does try to make some of the levels memorable with a few ideas. MAP01 is pretty slow for an opener, and some might be thrown away at MAP02 and MAP03 unfortunately (they're pretty bad in comparison to the others). the set picks up the pace quite a bit after those two duds, with MAP11 having an interesting slaughter arena at the yellow key. maps afterward aren't too memorable but not necessarily that bad, MAP12 being my favorite of the bunch. if you simply want another Doom 2 experience, give it a go.