Eye of the Storm

Another step in my current quest to review the Cabal series. I have to admit that the start of the map was not very promising: you start in the middle of a chaingunner ambush (luckily, with their backs turned at you) and no weapons, unless you check that star-shaped platform...but will it be an unescapable pit or something else?

As soon as you leave that center structure, you'll be bombarded from pesky revs on pillars. Don't bother killing them even if you have ammo to spare (which you might think you have, at some point, but that's just an illusion), as they will "respawn" from secret teleporters, and they might turn useful later on...

Speaking of ammo, at least until you get to the yellow key, you won't have much of it, so I thought that good old Kvernmo was back to his old "frugal" tricks again, but thankfully it's not as bad as some of the earliest entries in the Cabal series. What is at a premium however, is health, and armor more so. Simply put, try not getting hit. See those stimpacks at the beginning? Those represent about 30% of all available health on the map, and there's no scarcity of cruel hitscanners that erode your health away from afar, like rats gnawing your soul away morsel by morsel.

In any case, you can plod through the map in relative ease until you manage to collect all three keys, and then you will have to activate the cacodemon trap, where about a 100 of these buggers will flood the map, turning what has -so far- been a survival challenge into a slaughterfest. Hope you didn't waste any ammo on those pillar-sitting revs, which might turn out somewhat helpful now. It is barely possible to take every single caco down if you manage to find all the secrets, but you don't have to.  TBQH I don't know if it's possible to get past the archviles/skullkey switches area without finding extra ammo in both secrets and blasting them to oblivion before you get hurt too much. Maybe a speedrunner with more patience than me can shed more light on this.

Even after you're done with the bulk of the baddies, there are more nasty surprises waiting for you in the exit room, so I hope you didn't waste everything on the cacos, or you'll be scrounging for ammo from those final zombies.

All in all, an entertaining and engaging map.

Journey to the lost Cacodemon Empire that perished 665 years ago...and it's new years eve...Awesome welcome party. -> The Image of Evil