Jade Earth

Just giving it 5/5 due to architecture design. Author of this map made a great feeling that this underground base is really BIG. Took 2 hours to beat it on UV. The difficulty progression is not that great like people said in comments (e.g. a bunch of archviles at the end, which makes battles annoying, not challenging), but still plays good most times.

Must play.

It feels like this green underground techbase just never ends. It took me almost four hours in-game time, it's quite an adventure. I can think of three sections that gave me really hard time but most of the encounters are fairly straightforward incidental stuff. Some of it feels very cheap, I'm not a fan of having chaingunners and hell knights hiding in a nook right behind a door. Single-segmenting this must be absolutely soul crushing. For the most part, it's not terribly difficult but there's a lot of shotgunning hell knights, and clearing out snipers. Lots of monsters are hiding in dark corners with ambush flag, so the encounters drag on. It feels like it's meant to be played slow and methodically with bits of heart pounding moments here and there. Granted, the par time listed is one hour twenty minutes, so I was playing very slow. It definitely gets a lot more fun from the point where archviles are introduced.

The level of detail is pretty high, and very consistent throughout. You'll be passing by lots of doors that won't open for some time. Kinda shame there was no indication of what door you open by pushing and what opens remotely. The winding paths always lead you back to a new progression point, and even with some non-linearity, I wasn't getting lost much.

In summary, Jade Earth is very long, very slow, and very green.

Buy your kids tickets to cinema and send your wife to wellness. Jade Earth is long. Depending on your style of play you can expect to spend underground anywhere between 2 to 4 hours. Did I mention underground? If you are afraid of dark, this is not something for you. Level has its own pace; despite 1100 enemies present, don't expect Serious Sam-like waves of enemies. In fact, there are just 3 or 4 bigger fights. This doesn't takes away fun from it, it's just different kind of fun :) Oh, and if any of you manage to get at least 8/10 secrets without googling, idclipping or other cheats, you have my utmost respect; they are very well hidden. All-in-all very good level, ideal for long winter night

Single map, pretty hard, good gameplay, nice design with stock textures. Very long - took me 2 hours not counting reloads.

Before playing this map please make sure of the following:

- You like tech bases

- You like shotgunning Hellknights

- You love Arch-viles

- You have time on your hand

Alright, if you can check all of the above, then please play this map. It's a huge underground tech base with lots of nooks and crannies to explore. The automap may look daunting at times, but the author did a very great job of guiding you and you rarely get lost. It also helps, that it's a fairy linear map as well. The base also lives up to its name, being mostly green and at times very, very dark. You might want to adjust your brightness levels, I don't judge.

A good, very HUGE map, plus or minus 1000 monsters depending on difficulty: the kind that can take upwards of two hours on the game clock to run through. Naturally it's not for the FDA/no-save crowd. Frankly I had to do it in multiple sittings over the course of a day, as map fatigue kept setting in. That said, and despite the fact that it largely uses the same green marble/stone and tech textures throughout, the detailing and designs manage to keep areas from feeling too samey, though personally I would have used a greater variety of textures in different areas to keep them more distinct, or at least widen the color palette a little. While most of the map takes place indoors, there are a few cool outdoor void areas (which I could've used more of, to be honest—even peeks out of windows would be nice!), some cave areas, and even a small ruins setpiece. There are many side areas and a great deal of interconnectivity (though few if any true route choices), but the pathing is very good: I never felt lost even when coming back from a break. The fact that buttons almost always acted on something close by was naturally a huge help.

Gameplay was appropriately challenging and about as varied as it could be in such a huge map, though there are a few tricks one can tell the author was especially fond of. For example, there are plenty of archviles. Luckily I'm fond of stomping archviles. On the flatly negative side I felt some areas were much too dark. Unfortunately these were often populated with stealth demons—not very clever. Also I don't know the idea behind fighting multiple Cyberdemons in a near-pitch-dark room with tons of geometry to get stuck on, but it wasn't a good one.

While there are some things I would do differently, this is all told a pretty fine map—provided you're among the intended audience of people who like trawling through huge-ass maps to begin with.