Violence

Good tunes, cool visuals, fun gameplay.

An all killer no filler wad with a novel color palette and fitting synth soundtrack. The first 3 levels fly by (in a good way) and the 4th is a beast of a closer with just over 500 demons to murder. The level design is open and begs to be properly routed/optimized, and looping back to previous areas is well implemented and feels natural. It's not a difficult map set by any means—you'll probably beat each map on your first playthrough—so don't be afraid to let loose with your weapon of choosing.

5/5, this wad accomplished what it wanted to.

Doom causes Violence after all

Excellent wad. The visuals of course are very unique & colorful. And they're not just purple - there's so many vibrant colors. Purple, red, yellow, and green pulse and glow in contrast to the dark black metal architecture. But beyond the visuals, the level design is great. It's very interconnected and full of neat surprises, and progression is intuitive and rewarding. It reskins the classic Doom weapons, and all the sprites look great and are aesthetically cohesive. It also includes an MP3 synthwave soundtrack, which is very fitting to the neon colors and fast-paced gameplay, although I disliked that one of the tracks had vocals.

Violence consists of four midsize level maps. It has a distinctive, beautiful and well crafted style which encompasses everything from visuals, sounds, music and gameplay to the name of the piece itself.

For the visual part it uses the color violet and dark textures as it's main theme and gradually adds more bright neon colors to the mix. The first level has red as an additional color, second level introduces yellow. The theming is very consistent. Zombies greet you with their violet haircuts, barons shoot you with violet slime and all the plants (trees, vines, bushes, grasses, moss) are injected with violet instead of chlorophyll. Items and power-ups are either violet or use the other bright colors (red and yellow). Slime follows the same pattern, it's either violet, red or yellow depending on the level or setting. Textures are mainly dark grey or brown with occasional lighter variants and they are all decorated with the three bright colors, usually as scrolling light stripes.

The weapon graphics have also been changed. I don't know if they are borrowed from somewhere else or made by the author. Either way I'm pretty neutral about them. Usually I heavily dislike visually diverting from the original weapons but here the new graphics suited well with the rest of the theme. The weapon sounds have also been altered. I'm generally against changing the sounds too but I found myself even liking some of the changes. Like the cool bass boost added to the double-barreled shotgun. It almost feels more powerful with that bass energy. And you can even use the weapon to add your own beat to that nicely fitting retrowave soundtrack. Yes, there's also a well selected soundtrack which feels integral part of the whole theme. Damn, sometimes I started to get a feeling I was in some weird synthwave night club dancing with the demons. This vision poured into my mind especially in the yellow keycard room in MAP04 which at first is well lit and all innocent. Then you hit the switch. And you know what happens in DooM when you hit a switch in a key room. Yes, lots of wild monsters appear! But this is no ordinary ambush. Lights go off and you find yourself in a disco ballroom decorated with neon yellow wireframes from Tron. Then you start shooting with your chaingun and the monsters react to your fire with a spastic seizure as they always do but here the effect looks as if they were dancing under strobe lights in some dark synthwave club. And then you probably die because there are just too many of them and they don't back off even though you scream and try with all your might (#metoo).

Difficulty level is pretty fair. I've played this a few times in cooperative and now replayed in UV to write this review and I died only once (in the club room mentioned above). The author describes this WAD as "'sit back and play Doom' set" and I can't really disagree. This is one of the core reasons I like DooM. Give me flocks of monsters to kill in beautifully crafted levels at the right intervals and you'll keep me happy. Sometimes I might enjoy more exploration or even puzzles but it's always that fast paced yet laid back killing spree that pleases me the most. The gameplay flow broke only once. That was in MAP03 with the red bars. For the life of me I couldn't remember how to lower them. Turns out it works by stepping on the teleporter in the north-west island which takes you on top of a red pillar and when you step down from the pillar it lowers itself and the red bars. Not very intuitive beforehand. I would have placed at least an item on the teleporter to make the player go there in the first place. Now it was mostly luck that I went there. In coop there's a higher chance of someone activating it because more players running around the map. And when you compare the logic to how the yellow bars are lowered (with a button) it looks even more non-intuitive. Well, that's pretty much my only criticism to this otherwise brilliant piece of WAD artistry.

Just, wow. Blew me away. Short and sweet. I want more!!

Guten!