Citadel of Sorrow (CITDOOM2.WAD) (For Doom ][)

A pretty intricate and fun to explore map sets in a semi-realistic castle with lots of secret passages, doomcute "realistic" furniture that even include a library made out of sector art stuff. The fact that this is a Retextured Doom map is shown greatly here. Pretty neat map, the only real breaker is that this map have a unused red skull key and other keys for the locked doors (blue and yellow keys)? At least i didn't find them. I had to noclip trough them for complete the map. If it could not be for this bug, it will be a great map. But overall, is pretty good. The baroque music is fabulous. Make me think of women in dress and huge wigs dancing in the marble throne room! Or demons in this case.

Not too shabby. Very intricate level with halls & rooms to explore taking up almost every square inch of the castle. You do have to look through pretty much the whole place to find the necessary keys, but you'll have fun in the process. Most of the gameplay is pretty simple run & gunning of mooks but there are a couple neat traps, like the teleporting/telefragging area and the exit. Despite the large and labyrinthine design of the level, it doesn't get boring or easy to get lost in due to the abundance of landmarks (mainly sector furniture) and high interconnectedness. Texture alignment is quite bad, but oh well. There are some replaced sounds which are a bit odd but not bad, which kind of encapsulates the whole wad.

This is one of the best early single map wads I've played. Set in a castle, it's well laid out, atmospheric and quite tough in places on UV level. It benefits also from new sound effects (eg echoing, booming gun sounds and a haunting new imp death shriek)  plus stirring music, which won't necessarily be to everyone's taste though.

The version I originally played (2.2)  was from the 1995 'Maximum Doom' compilation (with just under 200 monsters), but if you download the one on this page, you'll get an expanded later edition (3.0) which introduces Mancubuses and at least one Archvile, with closer to 250 monsters. I'm not entirely convinced that the latter version is better, but it's still well worth playing.

This wad merits more than the bare 4 stars, so I'm giving it 4.5 out of 5.