Foursite

8.2/10! Awesome and fun wad, I love the vanilla doom feel. Heres my video review-

So. You're a budding level designer who wants to make an impact. What's the Big Idea? Perhaps if you enter stage left with an all-star cast of seasoned performers you can make an impression before moving into the limelight; a tried, respected practice. Or, instead, you could run bounding up the aisle with a megawad in each hand and demand attention straight away? Established designers have to wrestle with image and expectation all the time, but as a new member of the community, well... The Doom is Your Oyster. Your big ideas may yet survive the waves of doubt and disillusion bestowed upon you by Doomworld to turn into big maps!

Foursite wasn't exactly made off the grid, so I can't rule out the possibility that Bauul may have been trying to square his ideas with an understanding of accepted practice (he returned to the community at the tail end of 2015, having first joined in 2000), but it's a level that certainly plays and looks like it came from someone who was willing to let his ideas roam free... and that's really wonderful, I think. For all its flaws, it presents as a big window into the mind of a new talent, and half the fun comes simply from picking out the sorts of ideas that mightn't have gone unsullied by local sensibilities, had things turned out differently.

That said, it would be remiss of me not to start parroting the demands of conventional wisdom, at this point, so... prepare your Bauuls buns for burgers.

The best two things about Foursite are A) the way it sets up objectives and strings them together, and B) its set piece encounters. Not all of these encounters work out quite as well as they should, often being oddly balanced or hampered by some poor relation between player movement and decorations or monsters (I do wonder if the lost soul elevator in the second quadrant wasn't deliberately designed so that the items would block their flight, when needed), but the ones that do work are enjoyable, indeed. On the flip-side, however, the deliberate segregation of areas and the pacing combined have totally robbed this level of most of what's unique to a one-hour experience: the sense of journey and accomplishment. Interesting and grandiose as the encounters are, there's scarcely any connectivity between areas already seen outside of the grand central foyer around which all of the map is built — or, at least none that aren't contained within their corner — so it's easy to lose perspective as you pick your way through the base. This isn't always a part of design that a level of this size needs to succeed in, except the attempts at world-building make it clear that it's something the player ought to appreciate, here, so it's a glaring weakness. Perhaps the whole would have worked better as four distinct levels, after all.

Visually, things are busy and trim; schizophrenic, at the worst of times. Some of the areas are impressive, architecturally, but there is a sense that the innumerable textures, high contrast lighting and resulting incoherence is also doing its bit to take away from the journey. Combat is curiously malnourished: revenants only make an appearance after nearly fifty minutes in, and the vast majority of time is spent plinking away at imps, demons and hell knights with some combination of the (super) shotgun and chaingun (there is scarcely any rocket launcher ammo in non-secret areas). Otherwise, there are some inventive traps, and Bauul likes to toy with your expectation every now and then; a job made easier by his practice of repeating tasks and movements.

The only flawed map I'm always happy to play is the one that's made by a newcomer, and to that end I can say that foursite was absolutely worth the hour invested. It's a gargantuan roamer that delivers on some carefully crafted ideas, even if the bigger picture never really materializes, the fighting doesn't get out of second gear, and the ugliness abounds.

Bullet-points of Interest:

• An ambitious attempt at creating a journey that is somewhat undone by its layout and appearance.
• Grand and engaging set piece encounters; some more successful and memorable than others.
• Some very nice world-building moments.
• Restrained combat that eventually tires and disappoints.
• Too many mazes!
• Lack of new music is unfortunate.