Monuments of Mars

LOCAL DINGUS PLAYS EVERY SINGLE DOOMER BOARDS PROJECT

PART 1: MONUMENTS OF MARS

(if you don't know what the Doomer Boards Projects are, here's the Doom Wiki article on them)

I'll start this off by saying that I have some reservations going into this little series of mine. For one, the Doomer Boards were (allegedly) originally made for people that got banned from Doomworld (which many of the DBPs' frequent contributors were and still are), and having someone else post the projects on the Doomworld forums almost acts as a form of ban evasion. Also at one point DB made its Projects subforum inaccessible to guests so you had to make a DB account to be able to view anything to do with DBPs which was kinda stinky since DBP posts on Doomworld were permitted as long as no one tried to "recruit" people to the Doomer Boards but now you don't really have a choice? That's kinda fishy.

This already tenuous arrangement between the two sites got even dicier when a direct advertisement of the Doomer Boards in DBP37 resulted in the posting of DBPs on the Doomworld forums to be banned outright for a little bit. Speaking of which, there's also hella beef between the two sites, with a lot of animosity and off-site harassment (oh boy), and there's even WAD-specific drama (DBP48 looks like it's... definitely gonna be a thing that exists).

With that being said, I won't be going into any of this aforementioned drama unless I feel that it's extremely relevant to a given DBP's development and/or release. This is so that I don't lose my mind scrounging through various threads trying to figure out exactly why a specific installment doesn't have an idgames link when it's probably just some annoying drama that I don't wanna have to dig back up. At the end of the day, it's drama on Doom forums, and I frankly don't feel that that's worth large amounts of my time when the reasons for people getting banned can be a bit dodgy at times. It's not something I want to concern myself with, and it's not something I feel like bothering readers with unless I think it's absolutely NECESSARY. Just know that, more often than not, the frequent contributors to the projects got up to some SHIT in the meantime.

With all that out of the way, let's talk about the actual WAD.

The first installment of the DBPs, March 2018's Monuments of Mars, is a solid start to the series. There aren't any maps in here that I found to be noticeably worse in quality than the others, which is kinda necessary when there's only seven maps in total. Fight design's good, difficulty curve's fairly reasonable, visuals are very well-done (if a bit generic, though that's mainly because of the resource pack), music choices fit pretty well - it's a consistently good-but-mostly-not-quite-great time throughout.

I will say, though, even when playing on Hurt Me Plenty single-segment with saves, I found myself getting low on ammo a lot more than I was expecting. Granted, I'm not exactly amazing at Doom, but ammo still felt a lot tighter than it probably should've and I shudder to think of the troubles that pistol starters would have to deal with. The Pinky horde feat. Arch-viles in MAP07 felt especially ridiculous - I'm not entirely sure how that's manageable with just the resources in the map (i.e. without the BFG from MAP05) without intensive planning. That could just be me, though.

All-in-all, if you have, like, an afternoon to spare, Monuments of Mars is a nice way to spend your time, though I get the feeling that most of the later DBPs are going to blow this one out of the water.

OVERALL RATING: 7/10

FAVORITE MAP: MAP03 - "Ares Compound" (by Phobus)

LEAST FAVORITE MAP: MAP06 - "Steel Militia" (by Scotty) (still a good map tho)

HARDEST MAP (for me at least): MAP04 - "Drill Station" (by 40oz) (I have no idea why that Cyberdemon gave me as much trouble as it did)

MAP YOU SHOULD PLAY FIRST IF YOU WANT A SAMPLER: MAP02 - "Mt. Orion" (by 40oz)

With only 7 maps, this WAD delivers excellent quality and at least 1 hour of top notch quality in terms of gameplay, design and presentation. Intense, fast and fun. The challenge it presents is complicated enough to spice it up without being extremely tedious/difficult. It's not easy, but it's not extreme either, and in that balance you find quite a lot of fun. Considering that the WAD is themed on Mars, this is probably one of the best I've seen in terms of adhering to its theme. Great and fantastic. I would like to thank the Cacoawards for introducing me to this beautiful collection of maps that are on my roster of exciting and fantastic WADs.

Levels 1 to 4 were great: beautiful, somewhat open maps with lots of exploration, challenge, and smart monster placement which renders a lot of replayability. 9/10

As for levels 5 to 7, their gameplay can be described with 'bite-sized arena fights' as the main loop, and 'mazey nonlinearity' for the layout design, and for me, that's boring. 6/10

This wad is easy to forget

Absolutly amazing.This is real doom.

A very well put together mapset. Excellent layouts, spectacular graphics and testing gameplay (which includes five archviles in a lava pit at one point...). Level three is perhaps the standout, but really there are no duds. 

If I had to nitpick, I'd say the authors could have made a concession to exponents of continuous play by consistently placing a couple of 25% healthpacks and a green armour near the start of each level (try doing some of these if you finish the previous one with 20% health and no armour!). Also the ending of the game is a little weird and something of a letdown in my view.

9 out of 10.

I can't help but love what's been coming from 40oz and company lately - this was a very fun and quick set of levels with plenty of red themes to go around. Really loved some of the concepts on play; there's a couple 'reach for the top' stages, a hemmed-in section of pumping rockets into crowds of cacos and former humans and some other brutal affairs carefully introduced without overstaying its welcome. I did feel some parts were potentially more frustrating given a lighter footing - if you're as careless as I can be at times you might just take some hits from behind you in some windowed acres of flying projectiles or trying to solve the mystery of the lost hitscanner. This is otherwise a worthwhile mapset, no doubt - and at 7 maps in length it shouldn't take players long to explore for themselves and see what they liked most about it.

Great wad. Minor bug, you can break some things on map 2 if you go the other way at the start.

has a lot of fun moments and is steady in progression, good red theme and encounters all around. recommend.

A pretty good level set with some memorable levels, does a lot of justice to its tan techbase and lava mountains theme.

Short level by level:

-Map01: Best opening tan techbase!

-Map02: Awesome lava mountain adventure

-Map03: Good chaotic level with nice visuals

-Map04: Weird gimmick map that uses ledges. Not a fan because it bogs the map down

-Map05: Good detailing, but frustratingly rough sometimes and not a whole lot of interesting structures.

-Map06: Good modern level

-Map07: Hard and a bit unfair sometimes, but  good visuals and other well thought out stuff saves it from being mediocre.