UAC Invasion: The Supply Depot

Hang on... doomworld entry looks busted L( . I am reviewing the map by DooMknight

Awesome huge level with great detail, and not the usual cliched stuff. Cheers

Note: due to a DW Files error, the header is currently mismatched. This review is for offbuild.wad. 

This begins as a spirited shotgun battle against corporate smallfry, all the coworkers you hate: shotgunners, imps, and pinkies. A small map with 46 monsters, beyond the opening, it flags. The issue I encountered was finding weapons! You need some if you don't want to plow your way through upper management (several cacos and a baron) with a lone boomstick. Those weapons are tucked away in tight, obscure spots in siderooms. These rooms, like the numerous cubicles in the main workspace, don't hold visual interest; they are very close to identical. Having to inspect each of them until paydirt is rote mechanical labor -- uncompensated. 

P.S. the graphical issues in the previous review are prevented by using the appropriate iwad, Ultimate Doom, as the text file indicates. 

Something I really hate is when you start a level and immediately you are confronted with a monster to kill, before you've had any time to look around or assess your situation.  Of course such time would be wasted on this map, which consists entirely of cubicles, tiny offices, and meeting rooms which, while well-put-together, are completely boring and collectively make up the worst possible environment for a video game.

This is to say nothing of the fact that half of the textures seem to be replaced by a placeholder graphic, as if new wall textures were supposed to be added but were removed or simply never imported by the author, making the entire level ugly and raising the perfectly valid question of why they bothered to publish this level in the first place.

The custom music, while very pulse-pounding in its own right, got very irritating after a while, and I began to resent the author for bothering to add custom music for a level that clearly took some time to design but which ultimately had no purpose whatsoever.  I can't say it's not fitting for the fast-paced shooting action this level demands, but it doesn't belong in a level for a video game, at least in my opinion.

And I put up with all of this for something that ultimately turned out to be a slaughter map.  There's no complexity here; you start the map and immediately are assaulted by a massive wave of enemies, many of which hilariously got stuck in the tiny corners of the level geometry or got lost trying to find me after I ducked around a corner to lose them and look for more ammo.  That's another thing about this map: Even though it's fundamentally very simple in design, it's filled with little nooks and crannies that you have to check to find health and ammo, something that I personally didn't have a huge problem with but which proved very annoying.  Incidentally it was because of these niches that I didn't find the rocket launcher until I'd already cleared the level, which was incredibly irritating.

I will give this map some small credit in that the rush of monsters is made all the more intense by the cramped office environment, which might make it a little more tense than in maps where everything is more spread-out, but that doesn't make up for the gripes I mentioned above.

More minor annoyances include a meeting room with health and armor bonuses which are apparently impossible to pick up unless you have jump enabled, repeating level features such as identical trees outside identical windows and cookie-cutter cubicles making it surprisingly easy to lose your bearings, impassible linedefs used to prevent the player from climbing up certain surfaces because apparently it's really important that we leave through the front fucking door, and a level exit switch which isn't aligned properly with the linedef it's attached to.  And just to put the cherry on it, when I did press that switch I got an awful and completely unnecessary text crawl, complete with error messages indicating that some music files could not be located, and finally a black screen.  Wow did I find a lot to complain about in this one.

I didn't have fun with this level, not one bit.  Cripes, this review is already longer than this level deserves.  Skip this one unless you really need to see Doom Guy shoot up a bunch of zombies in an office building for some reason.  As for me, I want those five minutes of my life back.