Temple of the Lizard Men 4

Alando1 keeps us engaged in going after those weird lizardmen creatures in this fourth installment of Temple of the Lizardmen. Like the third, it's another big megawad, made for linear adventure combat and overall, it really is more or less the same as the third combat-wise, with a few subtle changes. many enemies and weapons return from that game, and it's kinda obvious which weapons outshine others and which enemies are still the nastiest ones. as a holdover from my experience from the third game, the semi-automatic shotgun proves to be better than the double-barreled shotgun in most instances, while enemy-wise you really wanna get rid of those Shadow Warrior-ripper guys and the floating mage enemies that glide.

Among the new stuff you can find a minigun, which is better than the assault rifle as it doesn't reload, as well as a Dragon Scepter, which functions a bit like a slow-speed plasma weapon. The Eye of the Sceptre is functionally equivalent to the BFG9000. Not a whole lot in the way of actually new monsters, with the exception of bosses. Several powerups are now used as inventory items, and the flashlight can now be toggled with the F key without having to switch. Also collectable are weapon upgrades which enhance certain weapons.

For the levels themselves, these are the best in the Lizardmen series yet. While the previous installments moistened the player with lots of linearity in the majority of maps, there's degrees of nonlinearity in the levels this time around. Plenty of keys to find, plenty of secrets, and the levels are substantially larger. All in good fun, although I personally don't care for the boss arenas all that much. There is one important thing to take note, and that is that there's actually more than one path to take at times. At at least three instances in the megawad you will have to go through branching areas which depends on which exit you took (I'm not referring to secret exits by the way, since they drop you off where you were when you are done). This means to get the full experience, you gotta go through one particular route, then the next one, and there's even different bosses at times too. The branching paths further the replayability of this particular installment making it the coolest one yet.

The fights (and the weapon system) are not bad but nothing special. Decent boss fights. The environment is instead really well made (nice music too) with well-fitting new monsters.