Astrostein

like many in the WolfenDoom series, Astrostein horribly suffers from amazingly bad layouts that promote backtracking, and Astrostein 1 may be perhaps one of the more blatant ones, showcasing layouts where you start in the center and have to go to loads of other places just to get through, and the bases are very large in size which don't look right when you factor in the enemies' sizes. as before, the novelty of fighting "Nazis in space!" is great, but wears off due to the terrible conventions of the level layouts and perhaps the very dull and gray design. to make matters worse, there's a number of hard-to-find switches, some of them one-time only, and to compound that we've got quite a few walls that raise up which will block access, so it's actually possible to get stuck in some maps, even the first map can suffer from this. and there's quite a bit of copy-paste, especially in the crew quarters maps. at least what Laz does here is try to give them separate deck names, so one's the crew quarters, another's the sickbay, and so on.

i'm gonna go ahead and give credit where credit is due, this is perhaps the most Doom-like of the WolfenDoom sets, and that goes for its two sequels as well. you'll be getting the full stack of weapons, all made to be more sci-fi, and despite not really being changed all that much, the weapons are workable and the weapon progression is okay enough to not be a pain in the ass. the enemies are alright too, again its hitscan-heavy but it also gives us a few projectile-throwing robots and such, and you of course get the weapons needed to get by so gameplay when it isn't making you backtrack is at least giving you appropriate combat when needed. and even when backtracking, you've got some extra monsters at times. unlike Arctic Wolf, this one actually is much fairer in WolfenDoom standards.

from what I remember in The Portal, it's the prequel to Astrostein, all in one map, dealing with going through Egyptian stuff, which is somewhat cool. so you basically get the ancient tomb-style gameplay, going through some waterways, crusher hallways, big shrines...of course the problem of backtracking is still persistent. very much so, imagine how annoyed I was having to go back and forth between that waterway and the crusher hallway just to get required keys. regardless, it's only one map, so it's not entirely as bad as the super-symmetry and gray that the majority of Astrostein is made out of.