Horse Shoe

Horse Shoe is said to be a symbol of good luck and protection, according to a research. It's also footwear for horses, or should I say "HOOFwear" (*insert drumroll fail) ... but what does any of this have to do with the map? Well, that may depend on the user, or whether you watched some video the text file mentions, but if you are like me and occasionally prefer to read at least one complete and, hopefully, charismatic wattpad story review before submitting to the unknown, you'll see that the shoe is indeed symbolic and appears to fit in where your heart desires, which isn't going to be too obvious in plain sight...

All rambling aside, this isn't an understated map. It starts humble, with the first of various E1Myounameit references you'll find throughout, pumping shells and bullets into small fry, and soon delves into dangerous toxicity and explosives together, and traps galore that'll wake your ass up, though without necessarily locking the back door most of the times should you please to engage them in your own terms. One of them happens relatively early on, in the form of a sudden firefight as you climb some stairs, with bullet spam and agitation - I probably ate three homing fireballs of low damage on my way out, how lucky!

Things don't go too crazy from there on, but remain consistently fun and true to testing reflexes - the brief interlude over nukage that follows is a cool memorable fight that quickly pits you against several perched shooters, gasbags patrolling around, all assisting a much taller guy in the middle, whose stay didn't last as long as I believed it would (shells for days in my case). The pitch-dark room serves as a (temporary) switch to the overall uniform brightness in the map. It's also a good excuse to shave spectres with chainsaw, because why not.

Outdoors is vast, letting those ledge snipers become more of a temporary nuisance until you meet the empress upfront, which by then you're probably in a godlike state, provided you didn't leave with claw marks all over your body out of that final twisted Entryway room - the best barons of the map. Speaking of outside, I actually like that little transition to a more open area after fighting through enclosed spaces, it defines the second part of the map for me. If I didn't speak about visuals before, it's because this is where, in spite of looking empty, the scale and AV midi blend the most together (again, for me). Not that indoor visuals were lame or anything, green/tan/gray scheme is usually a neat combination, though maybe it's missing a malfunctioning light or two here and there.

Anyways, that'll do this review. Positive experience aside, I'm still not entirely sure what's the 'horseshoe' of the map for me, and I don't care to be honest, but maybe you'll find yours. Just perhaps enter expecting a little more punch than your average classic iwad tribute, remember to pick the right skill setting for your own joy. 

Horseshoe is a mid-sized map that reminded me visually of the Starbase cluster of Doom 2's first episode, with a bit of Knee-Deep in the Dead mixed in. It could have used stronger lighting, but it's still comfy. Gameplay starts out as free-form area clearing with the weaker guns, but once you get the first key, it leans into traps and specific scenarios that require nimbleness. I found those scenarios fun. As a neutral observation, the difficulty on UV is a couple of notches higher than the description -- "[a] classic, oldschool Doom 2 map" -- might lead you to expect. 7/10. 

Actual Review (you've been warned...):

This starts off deceptively: pop imps with the shotgun, cha-cha with the chaingun, pet a caco here, boop a hell knight there, you know the drill. Then after you get the first key, the danger levels spike out of nowhere, with cheeky traps stacked one after another. And we're just getting started.   

Enough cheeky. Now for buttcheeky. Lording over much of the rest of the map from here on out: a cyberdemon you first meet in a nukage chamber. Your task is unclear, your radsuit is wasting away. You don't have the ammo to kill it, so you don't engage. It hounds you anyway. It must not like your sense of fashion. Haven't you heard? Hooves and horns are in style. Where to go? Out of the corner of your visor, you spot a tiny door, stashed off to the side, in a very awkward spot. 

Careful to avoid the artillery trained on your ass, you dash to open the door and stumble into a network of dusty, pitch-black hallways. There, you flail for your life against denizens of the dark who are all too happy to give you the funny business, and pry open the next leg of your journey. Walls crumble and fall. Clarity is all you want. A flashlight is all you need. 

But wait, it's never that easy. "Hey bud, da fuck!?" you hear. The cybie is ever so eager to pounce on the opportunity to join up again. "I thought we were friends uwu!" 

Okay, "friends" -- just for now.

In the next area, convincing it to kill a batch of loitering monsters is not so tough. It must be warming up to your outfit choices. Things are going swell. Things are gonna be fine. 

But friendships never last with such a glaring imbalance in clovenness. It's just not in the balance of it all. With no warning, you're given an ugly ballistic haircut as a rocket whizzes past your ear. Fuck, that took six months to grow! Now it's for real. If you can hold back your rage for a bit longer, you might lure cybie into the next-to-last area and put it to work against its encampment of pesky ledge snipers. You might use it to clear out the lingering barons, useless byproducts of a botched copy-pasta job in some UAC simulator, before settling your score once and for all against your woefully underqualified barber. You might find the key that unlocks the exit. Don't fail. To fail and to succumb is to admit that being dressed in the finest combat armor that money can buy is tactically inferior to lugging around an oversized rocket launcher in the nude. That time spent pawning extra computer area maps and chainsaws will be all for naught.