Woolie's PWAD reviews (latest: njma01.wad)

[Woolie Wool]

When I first got into Doom around 2000, Colin Phipps' Doom Underground was my go-to for level reviews, having what were probably the best Doom level reviews available at the time. Around 2018, I did a few reviews in a similar format to the old Doom Underground on my now defunct Tumblr, and recently I decided to start doing it again. Instead of Doom Underground's "gameplay" and "architecture" scores, I instead have "layout", "visuals", and "combat". I'll start with a new review, but I will intersperse some of my old reviews from Tumblr in with the new ones over time. For starters, I have a review of Obsidian's excellent new wad Candlemass.

 

Index:

Candlemass (candlemass.wad)

Containment Area v1.2 (contain.wad)

Vaporware Demo (vaprdemo.wad)

Knee-Deep in ZDoom (kdizd_12.pk3)

Arcadia Demade (arcadia.wad)

Technical Issues (techissues.wad)

A Big Job (abigjob.wad)

Heartland (heartland.pke)

REoL Tough: The Uprising (6fiffy1.wad)

Emerald Ambush (emeamb.wad)

UAC Ultra (uacultra.wad)

NEW! Enjay's Marine Assault (njma01.wad)

 

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Candlemass (candlemass.wad)

 

 

Author: Obsidian

Release date: 4/26/2020

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Modern Boom compatible (played in PrBoom 2.5.0)

Completion time: 10 to 20 minutes

Layout: 4 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 4 | UV: 4 | Overall: 4/5

 

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/candlemass

 

"Candlemass" is a medium-sized Boom-compatible map (with a stub to keep the player from progressing into the IWAD levels) based on a unique set of textures done in flat shades of pure black and white. The result is something like one of the GeoComp levels for Quake III Arena mixed with the harsh austerity of the original MacOS and its single-bit-color, quite literally black and white graphics—imposing, geometric buildings whose blank surfaces roughly suggest a gothic or Arabic castle theme, but the minimalist aesthetic leaves most of what this place actually is to the imagination. Only the sky and Doom’s light diminishing provide any shades of gray to soften the harsh binary of #FFFFFF and #000000 (woe to the player who picks up the secret light-amp goggles!). The visuals are the absolute standout of this map and give it a surreal, alien atmosphere similar to Cyb’s “Void” for ZDoom, but somehow pushed even further, all this done in Boom without ZDoom trickery.

 

And when on the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go, shoot them.

 

Not to say there isn’t some trickery, though, mostly in the form of faux 3D effects involving midtextures, and some variants of certain enemies and items that have reflections under the main sprite, used along with a false floor to create the impression of a mirrored glass floor, which is one of the most striking effects I’ve ever seen in a Doom wad. There’s also a shadowy boss monster that fires floods of mancubus projectiles, but also picks up the bodies of slain demons and throws them at you in the manner of Killer Croc from Batman Doom. With the space provided he’s mostly a non-threat, but it’s cool to witness. Lighting tricks are also used to create areas of highlight and shadow, and a deadly ambush where you get to test your CQB skills against imp and revenant silhouettes.

 

Like most modern “Boom-compatible” wads, “Candlemass” has compatibility issues with more conservative Boom-alikes. Boom and MBF will not run “Candlemass” at all due to a slightly malformed textures lump, and Woof will present a few errors with the display of midtextures. I played my second run with PrBoom 2.5.0 on my AMD Athlon machine and had no problems. The author recommends -complevel 9 for best results.

 

The final battle is a routine crowd-shaping and circle-strafing exercise but it looks amazing, especially in motion.

 

“Candlemass” is a tough map considering its relatively basic fight setups. Much of the difficulty comes from the very limited supply of health; every mistake costs dearly and you can go for minutes at a time with perilously low health, adding a sense of risk to encounters that would otherwise be relatively tame. Space is also in fairly short supply, with the cramped, boxy layout being highly reminiscent of Erik Alm’s Brotherhood of Ruin. Correspondingly, combat favors SSG engagements against mid-tier enemies like hell knights and mancubi with supporting trash and a scattering of hitscan snipers, so slaughterphobes need not worry. I found the combat a bit sloggy, but it was quite serviceable once the SSG was in hand, with two separate paths one can take to reach one of two SSGs, each with a fairly good trap involved. Your layout memorization will also be put to the test on your return to the beginning to use your hard-earned key (there is only one), and are intercepted by a cyberdemon that most players will want to avoid instead of wasting their ammo on. There is little room to maneuver and he is likely to kill you if your dash to the key switch is anything less than fluid.

 

The texture theme occasionally gets in the way of gameplay, especially in the central hub area with columns and midtexture arches that blend into each other, and the floor, due to the uniformity of the stark white and black. Some mild noise or a concrete/stone pattern on the textures would go a long way towards making the layout more legible. “Candlemass” is yet more proof that the “classic” ports still have plenty of untapped potential, and is just a damn good way to spend fifteen minutes. Recommended.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

Another review, this one originally written for Tumblr a couple of years ago, for SailorScout's classic E2M2 tribute.

 

Containment Area v1.2 (contain.wad)

Author: J. “SailorScout” Bengtson

Date: 2/4/00

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Boom compatible (played in Boom 2.02)

Completion time: 1 to 2 hours

Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 4 | UV: 3 | Overall: 5/5

 

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/contain

 

Three years ago, Doomworld’s administrator Linguica ran a an event where Doomworld members voted for the best map from the Doom IWADs by means of an elimination tournament called April Agitation (named after NCAA basketball’s March Madness tournament). My favorite, “Computer Station”, made it all the way to the final rounds, but was ultimately defeated by the original “Containment Area” from Doom 1. The ur-crate map has had many homages, tributes, and successors since 1993, and this level is perhaps the best of all of them. “Containment Area v1.1” is a gigantic Boom-compatible adventure map based around a similar warehouse theme to Tom Hall’s masterwork, even calling back to individual rooms, but scaled up to absolutely Homeric proportions. There are exactly 666 monsters at the start on UV and the level has absolutely no slaughter or even slaughter-like fights whatsoever; it’s just that huge.

 

Mommy, I don’t feel so good…

 

Fortunately this plywood jungle is studded with crate formations and other landmarks to serve as points of reference while you explore its vast expanses, which is a good thing as the map sends you back and forth across the map on many journeys, detours, and digressions as you first clear out the main storeroom (if one could call a place so huge a “room”) and then plunge into various wings to collect keys. All six keys are used, but only the three keycards and the blue skull key are needed to exit the map; the other two skull keys give access to health, ammo, and weapons that you will need to UV-max this level because supplies are hard to come by in this map. Most of the ammo is shells and bullets, with rockets and cells being doled out very grudgingly, and you can go for several minutes between medikits. This is made worse by multiple cyberdemons scattered throughout the level, which will put serious pressure on your ammo reserves should you choose to fight them. I only took one one, which ambushed me in the plasma gun room. With not nearly enough cells to just hose him down and not a lot of room to get around him, it was a tough fight where I had to think ahead and try to predict the cyberdemon’s movements to avoid being cornered. There were two other cyberdemons I just ran from; one dropped in with a horde of revenants after I grabbed the blue key and I had to use several teleporters previously used as progression aids to take a round-about way through the level to get to the blue key door without being intercepted, and then did a headlong charge through the door, and up the ramp, literally plowing my way through imps and pinkies, before the cyber and his posse could catch up. The third…well, you’ll see. It will probably kill you at least once.

 

The general combat is slow-paced and mostly incidental, just like the original, but with the opposition augmented by most of the Doom II bestiary (arachnotrons and Pain Elementals are notably absent, a pity since they could have added some more pressure to certain areas), with some very well-placed archviles that can cause absolute mayhem if allowed to get out of control. Mostly it’s a war of attrition—wearing down the ranks of the enemy while trying not to make too many mistakes. While the mazy, warren-like level design means you usually face only a few monsters at a time, there are so many ways for monsters to traverse areas that it’s easy to get flanked and maintaining situational awareness is critical. Cacodemons especially like to float over your cover and maul you while your attention is directed elsewhere. Despite having Doom II enemies and the super shotgun, it still largely plays like a (quite difficult) Doom 1 map, with a lot of chokepoint camping and relatively static positioning, so people who like to brawl a lot may be disappointed.

 

This guy wins 2000’s Cyberdemon of the Year award.

 

The detailing is extensive and quite tastefully done; it feels a lot like a somewhat more primitive version of Espi’s design style. There is more “wallpapering” of textures than is generally accepted now, but it’s about as good-looking as PWADs could get in 2000, with none of the garish, clumsy, copy-paste detailing of some other limit removing maps of the era. Unfortunately I don’t yet have a truly period-correct computer to test it on (I played it on my 1.7 GHz AMD Athlon XP+ rig, which is quite excessive for 2000), but this level was probably a real burden on the people still running old Socket 7 systems (don’t even think about a 486), though it does feature a REJECT lump, which not every wad had and made it run much faster on slow machines.

 

Fair warning: this level is very long. My time came out to a bit over 53 minutes, but that doesn’t count deaths and reloads, of which I had quite a few, so an hour and a half would probably be a good estimate. I like levels long, but levels that are this capital-E Epic are not to everyone’s taste, especially since this one doesn’t have the huge, awe-inspiring set pieces of many classic gargantuan maps like “Darkdome”, “Fire Walk With Me”, “Citadel at the Edge of Eternity”, or anything from the Deus Vult series–these are very well-done and professional crate mazes, but the bulk of this map is still spent surrounded by crates, so it doesn’t have much bombast to it. I found it to be on the generous end of “just right”, so I enjoyed it immensely even if I was glad to see the exit when I was done. A must-download for adventure map fans, Doom 1 lovers, and people who just want to make a couple hours of their lives disappear.

 

Edited June 30, 2020 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

Thanks to @Altazimuth for providing the custom Eternity build for this review!

 

Vaporware Demo (vaprware.wad)

 

Author: Sarah “esselfortium” Mancuso

Release date: 11/14/2011

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Eternity (played in Eternity 4.01.00)

Completion time: 10 to 20 minutes

Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 5 | UV: 3 | Overall: 5/5

 

Download: http://esselfortium.net/wasd/vaprdemo.zip

 

“Oh my god,” I said to myself as I beheld the opening scene of Vaporware Demo upon starting my playthrough, in almost exactly the same tone as the ur-Becky from Sir Mix-A-Lot's “Baby Got Back”. “Look at that floor.” The floor was polished almost to the perfect clarity of ZDoom mirrors, but with a touch of haze to make the illusion more convincing. The reflection of the crates and objects on the floor was colored by the green of the floor and the entire effect looked so perfect that it looked as if Doom had always meant to have shiny floors. It's not a mirror at all, but a portal to has an upside-down version of the starting train cars tinted by some odd transparency on the floor texture between the two sides. Because that's something the Eternity Engine can do.

 

I remember playing this not long after it came out, but I was terrible at Doom back then and a ZDoom peasant who hated the vanilla-style physics and mouselook control (well, the mouselook is still not great last I checked, but I don't use mouselook anymore...). Which is a shame, because Vaporware is a fantastic tech demo for a fantastic engine that never got the love it deserved, and damn good just as a PWAD. Even the most advanced GZDoom constructions have nothing on this—the layout feels more like a Quake map than a Doom map, and I kept getting turned around because the space I was navigating through did not follow Doom's rules at all—this is as close as Doom has ever gotten, probably ever will get to being “true 3D”, and in esselfortium's hands the impression is utterly seamless. Around every corner is some sort of architectural wonder: the aforementioned train with the shiny floor, an elevated catwalk above the main building's lobby, a crane controlled from an observation room on the third floor that lowers a suspended crate with a backpack on it to be reachable from the catwalk. This is Doom?!

 

This area looks astonishing in motion, as much as my Bush-administration retro rig was able to achieve “motion”.

 

It sure is, and esselfortium delivers with the fundamentals as much as she does with the portal wizardry. The mapping style is a clear harbinger of esselfortium's Back to Saturn X maps, especially “Back to Saturn X Radio Report”, employing a vastly more powerful engine but not as unique and self-assured as those maps were. There's more clear derivation—some Chris Lutz here, some AgentSpork there, and a lot of both Tormentor667's baroque lust for detail and Espi's taste in applying detail, but it's all done very well. Combat revolves around the shotgun and chaingun and flows much like that in the aforementioned BTSX opener, but a bit more perilous considering the presence of mancubi and the new monsters.

 

There are three new monsters borrowed from Knee-Deep in ZDoom and reimplemented in Eternity's EDF language; they are effectively indistinguishable from their ZDoom counterparts. The Shadow is the weakest but also the most interesting to fight, a faster, meaner sort of imp similar to the variant from STRAIN but with its own sprite set—these were a fun addition to the bestiary and fills a harasser niche where an imp is not enough but a chaingunner would be inappropriate. There's also the Rapid-Fire Trooper, of which there was only one, and I gunned him down before I even recognized him, and the thoroughly annoying Catharsi. The catharsi uses that ugly Klesk skin from Skulltag, strafes side to side like the class bosses from Hexen, shoots a quick burst of projectiles, and leaves behind a bomb that throws projectiles in all directions when he dies. The mechanics don't really fit together to fill a viable niche and the sprites are a severe stylistic mismatch with the other monsters and clearly derivative of the imp. There are also some bullet casing effects and a port of Nashgore, and seeing these flashy effects a port that feels “vanilla” to play was a real trip. Now I want an Eternity Engine Smooth Doom...

 

Slopes? We got slopes.

 

There is a huge suite of custom textures, some from Nick Baker's famous sets, others custom-made, and they simultaneously nod backwards towards Simplicity and Suspended in Dusk while also having some of the slick neon Quake-goes-cyberpunk styling of Back to Saturn X. They cohere very well (if not as well as BTSX, but then again, what does?) both with each other, the sprites, and the relative few IWAD textures that make an appearance. Despite the absurd level of detailed applied to every available surface, the texture alignment is absolutely outstanding, every single bit of geometry having its textures stretched and massaged to fit perfectly.

 

I played this on my AMD Athlon XP rig, and Vaporware kicked its ass all over the place, with 20-30 fps (at 320x200 no less) in most places, and less in the opening train car with the funky floor, and on the catwalk. The GL2D driver helped a lot over pure software, but still the old Athlon struggled to keep up. Not that this is a likely use case—in fact I had to have a special build made for me with all SSE instructions disabled so Eternity would run at all.

 

Going down...

 

The only downside is that the opening map “Cargo Transfer” gets you completely engrossed and fired up to play the rest of the wad and...it's over. A few short minutes, and you're booted rudely back to the title screen with a major case of Doom blue balls. I hope the never-ending BTSX saga has not consigned Vaporware to oblivion because this was quite a shock to play and an even bigger shock that seemingly nobody has ever attempted anything like it again. Play this map. I don't care if you don't like Eternity. This map deserves to be played, and if you are an Eternity hater, it might change your mind. It sure changed mine.

 

Edited June 30, 2020 by Woolie Wool

[esselfortium]

Thanks for the review!

 

I haven’t touched this project in a long time, and my mapping has changed a lot since then, but who knows. Maybe someday there will be more of Vaporware. In the meantime, at least its name is truth in advertising.

[Nine Inch Heels]

I had no idea this thread existed. I love reading more extensive reviews. Good stuff Woolie.

[Redneckerz]

God i love these extensive reviews. Way to go, Woolie! Bookmarked.

14 hours ago, Woolie Wool said:

Thanks to @Altazimuth for providing the custom Eternity build for this review!

 

I played this on my AMD Athlon XP rig, and Vaporware kicked its ass all over the place, with 20-30 fps (at 320x200 no less) in most places, and less in the opening train car with the funky floor, and on the catwalk. The GL2D driver helped a lot over pure software, but still the old Athlon struggled to keep up. Not that this is a likely use case—in fact I had to have a special build made for me with all SSE instructions disabled so Eternity would run at all.

This peeks my interest honestly, as a modern Eternity build without SSE instructions could be great for legacy (no pun intended) systems.

[NiGHTMARE]

Nice reviews! I spotted a mistake in the first sentence of the Containment Area review, though: Malcolm Sailor and SailorScout are different people (well, at least as far as I know :))

 

Also, if there's a a tally of people wanting more Vaporware somewhere, please add me to it!

Edited June 30, 2020 by NiGHTMARE

[Woolie Wool]

In my first multi-map wad review, I drag myself through the megalithic Knee-Deep in ZDoom.

 

Knee-Deep in Zdoom (kdizd_12.pk3)

Author: Daniel “Tormentor667” Gimmer et al.

Release date: June 2, 2007

IWAD: Ultimate Doom

Format: ZDoom-compatible (played in ZDoom LE 2.8.1f)

Completion time: 3 to 10 hours

Layout: 3 | Visuals: 4 | Combat: 2 | UV: 3 | Overall: 3/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/Ports/megawads/kdizd_12

 

Few level sets in the history of Doom have invited as much controversy as Knee-Deep in ZDoom. Almost three years in the making, canceled near the end of development and then uncanceled after being ported from Doom II to Ultimate Doom, loved and hated in seemingly equal amounts, Knee-Deep in ZDoom will likely be remembered as long as Doom is. ZDoom mapping at the time had been exploring highly scripted, "cinematic" experiences for quite some time when KDiZD started development, with project lead Tormentor667 at the vanguard of that movement. In addition, rapidly increasing computing power had led to an arms race of more detailed and visually complex maps at least since the likes of GothicDM 2 and Mordeth in the late '90s. ZDoom had just recently introduced DECORATE, originally designed just for props but expanded into a fully-featured actor definition system that instantly made its only potential rival, EDGE's DDF language, look inadequate and obsolete by comparison. Enemies, objects, and gameplay mechanics could not just be adapted from existing Doom functionality, but created de novo to accomplish almost anything the author desired. The zeitgeist of the era pointed towards more, more, more.

 

Knee-Deep in ZDoom is indeed "more"; one could even say "more" is its guiding philosophy. It started with the original nine maps of Knee-Deep in the Dead, the simplest, most basic Doom there is, and added more. Knee-Deep had six monster types, so its remake would have seemingly dozens. Its maps were simple and spare sometimes to the point of being almost ugly, so Knee-Deep in ZDoom would be baroque to a level that would blow away the likes of Gothic99, Caverns of Darkness, and Phobos: Anomaly Reborn. Maps were getting big in the early '00s, so these maps would be humongous.

 

Many of the new monster classes seem redundant.

 

The project drew in nearly the entire ZDoom community, at least until it closed and restricted itself to just a few team members to impose some semblance of discipline and get it out the door. In terms of sheer human effort and person-hours invested, KDiZD probably set a record that would not be surpassed for many years. But was it all worth it? This mod's detractors are absolutely right when they point out that Knee-Deep in ZDoom is a total mess. Most of the maps, having passed through so many hands (and not just community members, but the Id Software employees who made the originals way back in '93) are a riot of different architectural styles and design elements. Many of the new enemies lack a defined combat niche, or overlap with a monster that already exists, while the more useful and versatile Doom II monsters were all cut after Id Software forced them to move to Ultimate Doom if they wanted to use the maps from that game (and of course, without the original maps, the project had no point). There are two very powerful new weapons in the form of a break-action grenade launcher and a deadly hitscan rifle, but they're not as fun nor as useful as the plasma gun and BFG.

 

Even the intermission gets an animated 3D map with many new features.

 

And of course, KDiZD is perhaps most notorious for being long. Megawad long. FIlibuster long. The original layouts by Romero, Hall, and Petersen were fairly compact affairs, but each one has been expanded to several times its original size, and even those parts of these maps that correspond to the originals have had walls, barriers, and obstacles added to pad them out. Even the shortest maps take well over twenty minutes to complete at a casual pace--if Knee-Deep in the Dead were like one of the thrash/groove metal albums that most of its music was plagiarized from, Knee-Deep in ZDoom is more akin to a early Opeth album--it doesn't just have huge maps, but every map is huge beyond all reason. My playthrough took me over six hours plus deaths--for a single 8+2 level episode! You could finish a Back to Saturn X wad in about as much time, and play more than twice as many levels, and even those wads are frequently criticized for being too long.

 

But sometimes, just sometimes, all the disparate and often contradictory parts of this hot mess of an episode come together to create an experience that is truly magical, like unlocking the secrets of "Toxin Refinery", or the desperate, brutal struggle of "Computer Station". Those things were enough to get me to see the whole thing through in my first playthrough of the mod in almost ten years, even if just barely. This is a level set of peaks and valleys, wonder and frustration, beauty and bullshit, and the good here can't easily be extricated from the bad, because both come directly from the core of the KDiZD ethos--that more is better, and too much is just right.

 

Z1M1: Hangar by John Romero, Tormentor667, Risen, NiGHTMARE, NMN, cccp_leha, DroobieDoobie007, Ninja_of_Doom, and esselfortium (2/5)

I hope you like the pistol, because you're going to be relying on it for the vast majority of this long, ponderous intro level. You'll plink away a good sixty or so hellspawn before you even get the shotgun, whose shells you'll have to use sparingly and judiciously because the ammo situation is punitive. There are some scripted sequences to show that this is, indeed, a ZDoom map, but aside from one with a "seismic bomb", they are presented entirely without in-game metaphors. A switch to make a radiation-filled exit area safe to enter is not a ventilation control room or valves to open the nukage drains--it's just a switch that literally turns off the radiation, with a security camera helpfully installed in the middle of a blank wall so you can see a green-tinted hallway clear up and be informed of the consequences of your decision in the laziest way possible. The biggest threats are hitscanners, especially the rapid fire troopers, who can quickly overwhelm and whittle you down if you stand in the open. This only aggravates the glacial pace of the proceedings. It's a slog.

 

Z1M2: Nuclear Plant by John Romero, NiGHTMARE, Risen, Tormentor667, cccp_leha, Lexus Alyus, and Mephisto (4/5)

What an improvement! "Nuclear Plant" has much faster-flowing, less hitscan-choked combat than "Hangar", and preserves the layout of the original intact (with a few fairly logical additions) instead of dismembering it and scattering its pieces across a sprawling maze. The detailing looks better here--most of it, anyway; the crude linework of the damaged hex floor in the blue key area looks awful and clashes with the other maps' fetish for "flat sectoring" hex tiles--and the largely BROWN1/BROWN96/BROWNGRN texture scheme is more cohesive. While difficulty is mostly down from Z1M1, the fights that do test the player more are much more dynamic. My favorite was the yellow key trap in which you have to move and shoot with both speed and intentionality to avoid being caught in and torn apart by a rush of pinkies and their new lunging counterparts, Mauler Demons. There's even some colored lighting, and it works with the palette and doesn't look like shit the way 99% of colored lighting does in software rendering. If all the maps in KDiZD were this good, it would get at least another point on the overall rating. Unfortunately, most of them aren't.

 

Z1M3: Toxin Refinery by John Romero, Vader, NMN, NiGHTMARE, TheDarkArchon, Risen, and Ellmo (5/5)

Ah, the most famous/infamous of all the maps of KDiZD. The primary claim to fame of this mod's take on "Toxin Refinery" is that it is absolutely gigantic, and it does not disappoint in that regard. "Toxin Refinery" is really two maps in one, the upper level that is built around Romero's core layout, and an entirely original mine level beneath, accessed through what would normally be the secret exit. This level is merely massive if you take the normal route, but reaching the new secret exit is a truly epic undertaking involving all six keys and most of the level's secrets. It is easy to get lost, especially in the dark, mazy mines, where you will likely find yourself turned around frequently.

 

The combat is staid but inoffensive, mostly corridor shooting. KDiZD steps up its meat game here, introducing Mech-Demons, who have twice the health of normal pinkies and take forever to kill, and Hell Warriors, essentially a Hell Knight with a shield like Hexen's centaur, though thankfully it doesn't reflect your rockets back in your face. The inclusion of an SSG would have done wonders to speed up the flow of combat, especially against the hell warriors, who are a chore to kill with the single shotgun. A huge amount of effort has been put into this level--texturing and alignment are superior to the previous two maps, sloped sectors are used heavily in the mines to give them a natural feel, and the use of detail is more thoughtful and cohesive. It's certainly a gigantic map, but its sense of mystery, discovery, and wonder make the half-hour-plus you spend wandering around worth it. If you play no other map in KDiZD, play this one.

 

Z1M9: Military Base by John Romero, BioHazard, Tormentor667, Vader, NMN, Risen, cybermenace, Ninja_of_Doom, and Vile1011 (3/5)

The original "Military Base" was the weakest of John Romero's E1 maps, and Z1M9 does not do a whole lot to improve on it, keeping its most fundamental flaw--the grid layout of flat, boxy rooms connected by narrow corridors that lead to plenty of dull doorway-camping action. The majority of the map is essentially the same as the original E1M9 with a few embellishments, but a large courtyard has been added to the end of the map in which you face a succession of fairly tame horde battles as you activate switches to open the way to the exit. I remember there being archviles in a very early build of this map that were taken out in the process of moving KDiZD over to the Ultimate Doom IWAD; they would have added some zing to the fairly pedestrian combat on offer. You can get the SSG (with some fairly awkward new graphics and sounds to avoid using Doom II IWAD resources) pretty early in this map, in a secret that is hard to miss, but it is of little use until the final courtyard.

 

Z1M4: Command Control by Tojo, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini Tom Hall, John Romero, NMN, NiGHTMARE, Risen, Vader, BioHazard, Kirby, and Vile1011 (1/5)

I hate this map. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, and if I could be like AM and turn it into a gelatinous blob monster and torture it for all eternity, I would. People like to complain about Z1M3, but THIS is the map everybody should be bitching about. The original "Command Control" was the flabby midsection of Knee-Deep in the Dead, an amorphous sprawl of Generic Techbase Product that speaks to why Tom Hall's plans for Doom were almost wholly rejected, but this take on "Command Control" is so, so much worse. Still, everything in it works on a technical level, so I can't hand out a zero, even though that's how much fun I had playing it.

 

Like the original, the texturing on "Command Control" is all over the place, borrowing from almost every texture family KDiZD has, but considering how many more it has than Knee-Deep in the Dead, the result is all the more garish. It's almost as huge and long-winded as "Toxin Refinery", but without the sense of place and the thrill of discovering the next breadcrumb that leads to the secret exit. The lighting is obnoxiously dark, especially in the underground cavern section where you're likely to blunder straight into the embrace of a satyr or pinky that you didn't see until it was inches from your face, and the outdoor balconies where it's apparently daytime but darker than most night maps. This combined with the loads of doorway chokepoints and tight corridors rewards cowardly playing while brutally punishing any attempt at boldness--most Wolfenstein 3D maps have more dynamic encounters than this one.

 

This map heavily loads up on the spongier and more annoying KDiZD enemies--hell warriors, dark imps (three different kinds that look largely the same that fire identical-looking projectiles, but behave differently, because fuck you for trying to anticipate the next monster attack), mech-demons, and satyrs, but again the SSG is hidden in a secret area (I played Z1M9 and came in with one, but I can't imagine how tedious this map is if you have to play the whole map with the single shotgun). The rocket zombies from Obituary make several appearances here, usually hiding in a dark corner waiting to instantly kill you out of nowhere. This level is exhausting and draining, but what it taxes is more your patience and memory than your mechanical skill. Performance on my Athlon rig is poor in normal gameplay and absolutely terrible on the automap, which became a slideshow as more areas were unveiled.

 

The spinning fans sure look pretty though.

 

Z1M5: Phobos Lab by John Romero, Tormentor667, NiGHTMARE, Risen, Vader, Kirby, and Lexus Alyus (3/5)

KDiZD's rendition of "Phobos Lab" is not a brilliant map by any means, but refreshing after the tooth-pulling tedium of "Command Control". The base map is better, light levels are reasonable again, and the allotment of enemies favors the classic Doom cast over the new entries. Secrets abound for those willing to risk taking a dip in the nukage, including the first appearance of the grenade launcher. The architecture and texturing are still all over the place, with motifs and ideas from one area not continuing to others. The chaotic, overindulgent use of detail also spoils some fights, especially the end fight against a bunch of pinkies and maulers where square platforms jut out from the floor like warts to mess up your footwork.

 

Z1M6: Central Processing by John Romero, Vader, NMN, Risen, cccp_leha, FarlowJ, Ninja_of_Doom, and Kirby (3/5)

Vader's touch is all over the revamped "Central Processing", which is by far the most visually striking of all the KDiZD maps, and the only one aside from Z1M8 to rise above the messiness of this set's architecture to be truly beautiful. Since the original had little in the way of outdoor scenes, the mappers were able to wrap the entire original layout in a long indoor/outdoor runaround that makes this "Central Processing" feel like a coherent complex of buildings rather than an agglomeration of rooms and areas. I especially loved the sunset sky (unique to this map) and the shafts of golden light (pillars of fog, actually) cast through the skylights in the main section of the map. Z1M6 was a horrific lag-fest even on contemporary systems, and my much weaker Athlon suffered even worse from many of the outdoor scenes and the slope-filled cavern at the north end of the map, even crashing a couple of times. The layout starts out linear but opens up once you reach the control room where you deposit keycards to gain access to previously inaccessible areas of the map, but you're about two-thirds finished by the time you get there so what nonlinearity you get doesn't count for that much.

 

Gameplay is not as terrible as Z1M4 but not great either. Maneuvering room is usually scarce, with the big vistas being largely just for show as you scramble along tight corridors and ledges. Greebles and filligrees frequently protrude out from walls, just waiting to arrest a dodging player for just long enough to be tagged by a monster fireball. It's a triumph of form over function, though the form is better-looking and more consistent than the previous maps in the set, sticking to a coherent visual language instead of drawing haphazardly from a dozen of NiGHTMARE's texture packs. The automap is almost useless, a smear of lines that blend into one another to fill up what should be empty floor space--if any KDiZD map was crying out for the sort of automap cleanup with hidden lines pioneered by Back to Saturn X, it's this one. At least looping paths are provided to get you where you need to go without having to stare at the map and plan your route.

 

Z1M7: Computer Station by John Romero, Risen, Tormentor667, Graf Zahl, Vader, NiGHTMARE, and NMN (5/5)

"Computer Station" was my favorite map of Knee-Deep in the Dead, and KDiZD's version, while not quite as good as "Toxin Refinery", is a standout map. The original was the largest and most ambitious of the Knee-Deep maps, and Z1M7 expands it into a gigantic adventure map, extending the titular station deep underground. The architecture here looks more consistent and thought-out than any other map save "Central Processing" and exudes a thick, menacing atmosphere with hell consuming more and more of the base as you go deeper, flesh bursting out of walls, pathways through the caverns surrounding the installation collapsing into the lava, the sounds of broken machinery mingling with the rumble of moving rock and the cries of the damned(?) as the very ground shakes and shifts to make way for hell as it seeps into and corrupts Phobos' interior. Like with Z1M3, there is a definite sense of discovery, though not as pronounced, but instead of secret treasures, it's absolute evil and horror.

 

The combat matches the atmosphere, perilous and punishing right from the start. The automap says 366 demons at the beginning, but by the time the last one falls dead you'll have slain well over four hundred. Traps frequently deploy beasties, up to including the strongest of the new DECORATE monsters, both in front of and behind the player, severely testing both your fundamental Doom skills and your grasp on the new weapons and monsters, their strengths and their weaknesses. It's harsh going on UV, but much more creative and dynamic than the previous few maps, so victories felt harder won and deaths, of which there were plenty, felt like a natural consequence of my mistakes rather than the caprice of an asshole level designer, as they so often did in Z1M4 especially. While most maps in this set feel like Frankenstein jobs, Z1M7, like Z1M3, is put together with purpose, everything in it contributing to the overall vision of both the subsumption of human reality by hell and a grueling final examination for the player. When you reach the exit to "Phobos Anomaly", you'll feel achievement, exhilaration, and relief in equal measure...

 

...but what if you're not going to "Phobos Anomaly"?

 

Z1M10: Penultimate Evil by Tom Hall, John Romero, Sandy Petersen, American McGee, Shawn Green, Tormentor667, Vader, NiGHTMARE, and Risen (1/5)

Get 90% in all end-level stats for all of the other levels and you get access to “Penultimate Evil”. Rather than being based on any one Id Software level, this is a sort of "mixtape" of parts of levels from all three of the other Ultimate Doom episodes, stitched together with connective tissue developed by the authors themselves. As the super-secret level, "Penultimate Evil" attempts to be the hardest challenge in the entire wad but what it really is is irritating. It leans hard into everything wrong with KDiZD, loading up on jumping puzzles on tiny ledges surrounded by lava, bullet-sponge gimmick enemies, and areas that are way more claustrophobic than they look simply because there's so much shit sticking out of all of the goddamn walls.

 

"Penultimate Evil" is clearly inspired visually by The Shores of Hell rather than Knee-Deep in the Dead, with an angry red sky overlooking tech architecture almost completely subverted by hell. However, while many areas look good individually, the patchwork nature of the layout, even by KDiZD standards, means that they don't gel into any sort of coherent atmosphere or sense of place beyond "oh, I recognize that part!" when you notice which Ultimate Doom level a certain room is derived from. High-tier enemies abound, and I found myself frequently wishing for a BFG, especially since a couple of encounters (especially the one unleashed after grabbing the yellow key) tilt a bit towards slaughter, but without any of the entertaining chaos engendered by an actual slaughter scenario because there is no infighting. The whole thing is a leaden, joyless experience and I hated every minute of it. I didn't even bother to hunt down the secrets.

 

Z1M8: Phobos Anomaly by Tom Hall, Sandy Petersen, Tormentor667, Vader, NiGHTMARE, Risen, NMN, Darkhaven3, Ninja_of_Doom, and Lexus Alyus (3/5)

After a journey that feels longer than most 32-map megawads, we finally come to the heart of Phobos' infestation, the revamped "Phobos Anomaly". In terms of sheer looks and audiovisual presentation, it's probably the best in the entire set, really selling this place as an "outpost of hell" as the Doom II intermission would put it, with reality itself constantly shifting and twisting (along with the map architecture and texturing) according to some inscrutable alien logic. KDiZD frequently tries for a horror feel, and Z1M8 is definitely the closest it comes to achieving that end, channeling both the original map and one of my favorite E1M8 replacements, Kristian Aro's "Paradox" from 2002: A Doom Odyssey.

 

That said, the combat is a chore, and the Nightmares, these shadowy imps that appear out of nowhere to claw at you, are incredibly annoying because they become invincible as well as invisible when not attacking, so you can't let them attack once and then try to guess their movements to take them out--if one gets away, you have to let him attack you again and again until you get a good SSG shot on him. After an easy fake-out boss fight involving barons and a brief sojourn into hell itself, you get a two-stage final boss battle, the first involving six barons and an assortment of trash that is easy enough to deal with, then a mix of hell nobles with the infamous Bruiser Demons, whose projectiles are easy enough to avoid but also have a devastating ground-based explosion attack that is hard to avoid and often an instant kill if it connects. But then you hop off the pentagram as per the original E1M8 and--what? Another boss battle? Part of the ground drops away into a pool of lava and out springs the Magmantis, some creature that looks like it was taken from Powerslave or Witchaven or some similar game, and is an obvious 3D model rip that looks completely out of place in the Doom bestiary. Don't worry, though; despite having loads and loads of health, he's a cinch, being slow-moving, humongous, and attacking with relatively slow projectiles. He's made even easier because, if you missed it in previous levels, you are given the rifle, which will take his 15,000 hit points down in short order. Just plink at him until he dies and be careful not to get stuck on one of the imps who spawn in to ineffectually harass you, and you're golden.

 

Can I recommend Knee-Deep in ZDoom? It is certainly a landmark, for better or for worse, in Doom modding history, a perfect illustration of both the capabilities of the ZDoom engine and the pitfalls of relying on them in lieu of the things that actually made Doom a great game to begin with. I kind of think of it as a "magnificent failure", whose importance is less as a mod in its own right than as a part of the dialectics of level design, a thesis to which purist wads like Needs More Detail and Doom the Way id Did served as an antithesis, leading to wads like Back to Saturn X and Eviternity that combined the best of both worlds. If you play it, I recommend playing on a skill below UV, as the compromised gameplay and level design make it slower, grindier, and more frustrating the harder it gets, rather than more exciting and rewarding. It's a mod that wants to show you something more than it wants to directly engage you, and parts of the show are indeed really cool. Many people want to either exalt or damn this mod, but me? For the most part, I can't do either. For all its bigliness and bombast, Knee-Deep in ZDoom is simply mediocre.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool
eye spel gud

[Woolie Wool]

Arcadia Demade (arcadia.wad)

 

Author: Jean-Paul LeBreton

Release date: August 19, 2010

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Limit-removing (played in MBF 2.04)

Completion time: 20 to 60 minutes

Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 4 | UV: 3 | Overall: 5/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/arcadia

 

While a few notable mappers from the early days of Doom modding, like Dario Casali and Matthias Worch, used their mod projects to jumpstart careers in the commercial games industry, it is exceedingly rare for a crossover to come from the other direction. "Arcadia Demade" is the product of Jean-Paul LeBreton, the lead level designer from the first and second BioShock games, and, as the title suggests, remakes (or rather "demakes") the "Arcadia" and "Farmer's Market" levels from BioShock in the Doom engine. "Arcadia Demade" runs on limit-removing engines, so even doom2-plus will run it just fine.

 

"Arcadia Demade"'s only custom assets amount to a tinted palette and a sky texture, yet its aesthetic is like no other Doom map ever made. Rather than attempt a facsimile of the original BioShock maps with a raft of custom textures or GZDoom sorcery, LeBreton artfully reinterprets and abstracts the level using strictly Doom's visual and gameplay tools. A layout that was somewhat tedious in BioShock flows much better in Doom, with its radically improved mobility. 3D features in the original levels are recreated here with lift platforms, which provide the added benefit of a quick shortcut between higher and lower areas. It’s not quite clear with the low-res, muddy sky if the map is supposed to be underwater or lit by twilight/moonlight, but it definitely feels cold, desolate, and lonely. Texture usage and alignment are impeccable, conveying a sense of physicality and scale without baroque detailing or Ribbiksian chiaroscuro.

 

I hope you know how to use it.

 

Like its antecedent, and really, all the System Shock 2 and BioShock maps, the objectives (keys, in this case, incorporated into setpieces vaguely reminiscent of the original map) are strictly linear, but some can be reached using a choice of different routes. Late in the map, a secret teleporter room opens behind the start area, allowing instant teleporter access to all the major areas. The other way "Arcadia Demade" imparts some Shock-like flavor to the proceedings is through its poverty of ammo. From the very beginning, on UV, ammo is so scarce that the inclusion of a backpack feels like a joke, and competence at kiting, Tyson, and infight instigating are crucial for survival as you dash past monsters and scrounge for ammo. In addition, many of the more valuable pickups are "poisoned" with teleport traps, to the point where some would be better off avoided altogether, at least on UV.

 

The combat in this map would be quite desperate if there weren’t a surfeit of health and armor to offset the ammo famine.

 

However, monsters are thinly spread around the map, so it isn't nearly as punishing as it could be. Still, it manages quite aptly to instill a sense of creeping, slow-burning, ever-present dread as you nervously eye your ammo counter. Near the end of the map I simply ran from a couple of encounters in the central hub, including a cyberdemon that I did not have anywhere near enough ammunition to kill. Despite being a level for a game that is usually about the complete opposite, "Arcadia Demade" genuinely captures some of the tension of survival horror games. Monster teleport lines are used in several encounters to disorient and confuse the player, and with the ammo desert, one never really feels fully in control at any time. One skulks, creeps, and hides, rather than carving through enemies like a murderous figure skater.

 

"Arcadia Demade" draws from the knowledge of the Doom community without fully being part of the "PWAD tradition", and for that reason is almost unique among Doom maps (though there is also No Rest for the Living), an "outsider art" wad that nonetheless lives up to professional standards of quality. It looks fantastic, plays well enough, and its MIDI is tasteful and understated enough to not become grating over the course of the map's considerable length. Everybody should have played this one.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

Technical Issues (techissues.wad)

Author: Endless

Release date: March 2, 2022

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Limit-removing (played in Doom2-plus v1.9

Completion time: 20 to 40 minutes

Visuals: 3 | Layout: 2 | Combat: 2 | UV: 2 | Overall: 2

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/techissues

 

"Technical Issues" is a fairly long limit-removing single map for limit-removing exes. Though it was not tested with an actual DOS port, unlike some recent -complevel 2 or "vanilla" wads, it does indeed run under the original DOS engine. However, aside from its admirable commitment to compatibility, it has little going for it; aside from not having been tested to the original Doom engine limits, it feels like it would have easily fit in--and sunk into the depths of /idgames largely unnoticed--in 1995 or 1996, and not in a good "lost gem" way.

 

"Technical Issues" bills itself as a "complete map that felt like a progressive adventure", but an adventure map is made or broken by its sense of place and immersion, and the aimless sprawl of cramped, boxy rooms and corridors that makes up "Technical Issues" completely fails to deliver either. The vast majority of the map is decorated in bland gray and silver textures that recall nothing so much as the early Doom alphas. Id Software, mercifully, recognized the direction they were going in summer 1993 was headed nowhere good and retooled Doom into the game we know and love today; "Technical Issues" feels like a collection of the slough they left behind in the transition, dressed up with some Doom II objects and hackneyed sector lighting effects that were trendy in 1998 but trite today. The MIDI is one of Jimmy's lesser works; a rather bland Dream Theater homage that never builds much atmosphere or tension.

 

Most fights are a simple matter of camping corners or doorways.

 

The amorphous, labyrinthine layout and cramped, rectilinear architecture make for stilted gameplay; by far the biggest threat to yourself is your own rockets as they slam into some of the superfluous detail bits sticking out of walls. There are several archviles scattered throughout the map, most of whom are placed to resurrect plenty of monsters, but the layout means that all of the vile encounters are played out in a strictly one-directional manner with the archviles and supporting posse all crashing upon you in a single wave to be rocketed into oblivion. Ammo is initially scarce, but later in the map, rockets and cells are handed out like AOL trial CDs and it's virtually impossible to mismanage your resources after the red key area.

 

The map ends with a couple of outdoor areas that at least break up all the right angles, but they are just as cramped and maze-like as the rest of the level, and the twin-cyberdemon encounter at the end is trivialized both by the layout and the map handing you a free BFG only a few moments before. And on top of that, the Doom Builder auto-align feature seems to be more or less the extent of the texture alignment. Don't waste your time.

Edited April 20, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Jacek Bourne]

Excellent Reviews. I look forward to more.

[Woolie Wool]

Working on a really big review for a major recent project and it's taking longer than I'd like, so in the meantime here's a review I put on Tumblr exactly four years ago today:

 

A Big Job (abigjob.wad)
Author: Michael Krause
Release date: September 23, 1997

IWAD: Doom II
Format: Vanilla (played in doom2.exe v1.9)
Completion time: 8 to 60 minutes
Layout: 5 | Visuals: 4 | Combat: 4 | UV: 2 | Overall: 5/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/abigjob

 

Happy May Day comrades! A map titled like this seemed like a fine choice for the occasion.

 

Of all the vanilla wads I’ve played, this one seems to anticipate the dawn of limit-removing source ports above all others. “A Big Job” is a huge, huge semi-brutalist concrete cityscape with a remarkably complex layout for ‘97, with many different tiers, colonnades, plazas, and interlinked complexes of buildings. It looks like a rough blockout of a modern city-themed slaughtermap by Skillsaw or a similar author, with the monster population from one of his smaller maps. Everything is built to a monumental scale; it looks “realistic” in as much as the architecture makes logical sense and you could imagine such a thing possibly being built, and it has (simplified and exaggerated) features common in real cities, but this is a city planned without any consideration for humans. Even larger monsters like revenants and hell knights seem utterly insignificant next to these stark gray edifices. It has an uncanny feeling to it, a city immortal, indestructible, ever unchanging, indifferent to your struggles with the demons. It just is.

 

The layout is very open and completely nonlinear. The entire map except for the exit room is accessible the moment you start the map; it is only a matter of finding your destination and surviving the journey. The start is by far the trickiest part of the map as you have to figure out for yourself where to find ammo and start progressing, and you’re harried by imps and hell knights on the ground while revenants and cacos take potshots from above with only your pistol to defend you. If you aren’t observant enough to deduce how to get the SSG that is visible from from the start but initially blocked off quickly enough, you may die a couple of times before you work out a viable strategy.

 

After you get the SSG, it’s smooth sailing all the way to the end, an inevitable consequence of too much space and too few monsters. You’re given these grand open spaces to run around in and a mere 251 monsters don’t bring the firepower to significantly restrict your options. Except for the roaming chaingunners that like to pop up at the most inconvenient possible times, very few of the monsters have a significant chance of injuring you. You can just run past most enemies you face without even fighting them, and provoke infighting with impunity. Normally, I’m not a fan of lock-ins, but I think quite a few encounters in this map could have benefited from preventing the player from kiting the monsters towards other monsters to make them infight or escaping them altogether. Two of the keys are guarded by cyberdemons, but you have an absolute surfeit of both ammo and maneuvering room and you can take them out with little effort. You can even head towards the end of the map to grab the BFG first and two-shot them into a lonely grave.

 

The architectural grandeur of this map could support many times more monsters than it has.

 

The texturing is pretty spartan, mostly plain gray concrete and rough iron, which further contributes to the “geometry blockout” look of the map, but it’s still pretty interesting to look at thanks to some well-thought-out lighting and the extreme (for 1997) structural complexity of this map. I talked about “structural detail” in my layout essay from a couple of years ago as being better than merely ornamental detail; this map has structural detail and only structural detail. The surfaces are all left blank; all the effort is spent carefully laying out the skeletons of these concrete megastructures to awe the player. This is definitely a map to be played in low resolution, to break up all the straight lines and flat planes.

 

This level does not use the map01 slot but is instead located at map27, presumably to use the music from it instead of supplying its own midi. I’ve never liked this habit of '90s level authors, and I especially don’t like it here because the music doesn’t really fit with the mood of the level and the hell sky’s searing red clashes terribly with this fairly dark, gray level. Also clashing are some sound replacements from Quake, which only replace a relatively small number of sounds (mostly monster noises) so monsters sound normal in some circumstances and completely different in others. Fortunately the map seems free of any HOMs or technical faults as far as I can tell.

 

The map is fairly long, but not nearly as long as it could be due to the monsters’ complete inability to stop you or seriously slow you down, so your completion time largely depends on how well you can navigate the layout–I had played this map several times many years ago, so I more or less knew my way around and managed a pretty thorough exploration in 20 minutes. First-timers may take a lot longer. Despite its raw visual presentation and flaccid challenge, I find this a highly enjoyable map that I would recommend to nearly any Doom player. However, I also think it would be an excellent candidate for a modernized overhaul that polishes the looks to a diamond finish and adds all-new, much harder gameplay. Perhaps there should be a 1997 Tuneup megawad?

Edited May 1, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

Here it is, two weeks plus in the making, my review of @skillsaw's incredible Heartland! Absolutely one of the greatest wads of all time and probably the overall best of 2021.

 

Heartland (heartland.pke)

Author: Paul "skillsaw" deBruyne

Release date: March 25, 2021

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Eternity (played with Eternity Engine 4.02.00)

Completion time: 3 to 10 hours

Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 5 | HMP: 4 | Overall: 5/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/heartland

 

I have been enthusiastic about the Eternity Engine's renderer for some years. GZDoom's 3D floors are a neat gimmick, but they're a fairly limited workaround for the Doom engine's limitations, and only work to their fullest potential (which still is a long way off from the true 3D of Quake and its successors) in hardware-accelerated mode. Eternity's linked portals, literally stacking areas of map on top of each other or even inside each other, are not only a more robust solution, but work fully in software rendering as well. Unfortunately, however, Eternity has been relatively unloved by the Doom mapping scene, esselfortium's "Vaporware Demo" (previously reviewed in this very thread) aside. So of course, a skillsaw release that goes hog wild with Eternity features, with Xaser doing weapon design, using Ola Björling's OTEX texture pack made famous by Eviternity, was something I just had to play.

 

And, of course, being the depressed anxious wreck that I am, I didn't play it until very recently. I got through the first three levels, but it wasn't until I came back and replayed the whole thing for this review that I finally completed it. Skillsaw maps are not something you can just casually bumble your way through; every one of his major releases from Vanguard and Lunatic to this one put the player under constant pressure and require you to be "on" all the time to survive. The sort of frenzied, harrowing blastfests that might be a climactic highlight in a mapset like Legacy of Heroes or TNT Revilution are skillsaw's bread and butter, and much of your time in Heartland will be spent between one and three seconds from death. Hesitation usually means failure, and panic pretty much always means failure, as seemingly every step opens a new ambush. In fact, I would not be surprised if skillsaw was, along with Brutal Doom, one of the principal influences on Doom Eternal's similarly high-pressure-all-the-time gameplay experience.

 

Be prepared for some seriously bananas encounters in the last three maps.

 

That said, while it is demanding, Heartland is not as ruthless as true challenge wads. While there is little room for error, the tasks demanded of the player are never all that demanding in themselves compared to the necessity to simply keep one's head on straight amid all the chaos. Health, armor, and powerups are generally fairly abundant, and the larger fights usually have more lightly-populated zones and areas of (temporary and relative) refuge rather than being one big killzone. The tough-yet-accessible character of skillsaw's work, giving the player the rush of "Doom God" maps without the need for perfect footwork and esoteric techniques, has been a constant at least since Lunatic, and comes through in every encounter of every map here. But it is exhausting, especially in the last two maps, which each clock in at well over a thousand monsters.

 

Skillsaw's maps have always been good-looking and employed striking texturing themes, but he definitely has a "thing" that he has normally done on nearly every map, and the slick-looking, speedway-like arenas of his earlier work in Vanguard and Back to Saturn X sometimes ran together (though his map02 for Community Chest 4, "Slugfest", is perhaps the most obvious example of the skillsaw signature style at its least subtle). However, starting with Ancient Aliens, he started incorporating more and more adventure map stylings, and that side of him really comes to the fore with Heartland, where every single map is a grand adventure with its own theme (similarities between "Reservoir Dog" and "Routine Flaring and Flailing" notwithstanding), setpieces, and Eternity-powered interactive sequences--the trains in "Subway Sandwich" and the gondola ride in "Get Shafted" are particularly memorable. The architecture is gorgeous beyond description—I don't think I've ever seen such meticulous and unsparing attention to detail in any other wad, ever. Nearly every frame is beautiful, every surface worked over, background details sprawling far beyond the playable area to make each map feel like a place in a large world rather than a container for arena combat. The doomcute sector furniture isn't even cute anymore; it's so perfectly designed that it loses the awkward charm it normally has and becomes another component of Heartland's architectural majesty. The little sector couches belong just as much as the ruined highway overpasses and towering smokestacks.

 

It’s a long way down...

 

If esselfortium's "Vaporware Demo" merely gestured at the possibilities inherent in Eternity's linked portals, Heartland goes absolutely nuts with them. These levels are not just 3D but massively, indulgently so; not just "room over room" but spaces where the vertical is just as important as the horizontal, with enough tiers, bridges, overhangs, inside-outside buildings, and blind drops to make your average Quake mapper eat their hat. The power and elegance of this for-real-3D architecture feels like more of a breaking of Doom's mold than anything that has come out of the GZDoom community in years. There has never been anything like Heartland’s architectural complexity in any PWAD ever before. That said, the portals are not perfect and sometimes the essential 2.5D nature of Doom shows through, like when a monster straddles two areas connected by a portal and the portal line cuts the monster's sprite off on one side, or when a monster gets stuck on top of a 3D floor for no apparent reason. Fortunately, these are rare. Less rare is the confusion you will experience looking at the automap; with all the "floors" of the map drawn at once (though only the one you are in is drawn in color), the map is completely covered in crisscrossing lines and it can become quite unhelpful when you're trying to backtrack to an out-of-the-way area to retrieve items you left behind. A fully 3D automap á la Descent would be a significant improvement.

 

Aside from the compact "Bruce R. and Sons Construction Company", every map here is an epic, and while there are only seven maps (plus one that doesn't really count), the total commitment is more like twenty normal-sized maps, or a AAA action game before they all got infected with open-world elephantiasis. You'll have to set aside several hours on your first playthrough, though subsequent playthroughs with memory of the map layout are likely to go by a lot faster. I think it is just as long as it ought to be, ending on a high note just as a typical player is starting to feel drained rather than dragging on and on like many modern megawads do. The individual adventure maps form one coherent and thoughtfully placed meta-adventure, with aesthetics, gameplay, and map size all contributing to the sense of escalation towards the big climax.

 

Also worthy of mention is the excellent soundtrack by veteran MIDI wizard Stewart "stewboy" Rynn, one of the most talented composers in the Doom community, and certainly the most distinctive. His jazz fusion stylings, light on heavy rock guitars and heavy on quirky instrument choices and piquant harmonies, have long been a big part of the atmosphere of skillsaw's mapsets. The ones here have an excellent progression between maps/midis too, with the upbeat, arcade-game-like tone of the first few giving way to something darker and more sinister as you enter the back half of the map set and the monster count soars.

 

As usual with his big releases since Valiant, skillsaw makes some additions to the standard Doom II bestiary, but more refined due to the use of Eternity's more powerful EDF definition system rather than crusty old Dehacked. Some old favorites from Valiant return, though the infamous cybruiser has been mercifully nerfed by the use of a half-strength rocket that is shared with a version of the rocket zombie also seen in Obituary and Knee-Deep in ZDoom. The cell weapons are gone, replaced by a flamethrower whose flames stick to enemies with a radius damage over time effect that is pretty unique among Doom mod weapons, and a mine launcher that shoots a large rocket that explodes into many small submunitions. These weapons add to the demand on the player to never panic, because what were the player's panic buttons are now weapons that deny space to the player just as much as the monsters and will punish careless movement with suicide. I was less fond of the smooth weapon animations and special effects like rocket smoke trails and Nashgore blood; they felt a bit gratuitous, and the flying blood trails draw attention to the mismatch between the red blood effect sprites and the green or blue blood of the hell nobles and cacodemon.

 

MAP01: Subway Sandwich (5/5)

Heartland kicks off with "Subway Sandwich", and it wastes no time in kicking your ass. Right from the moment you ascend out of the starting subway station into the city you're costantly on the move, scrambling around hordes of zombies, imps, and pinkies, blasting away left, right, and behind to get desperately needed room to maneuver. You're denied the SSG throughout this map, which forces some careful improvisation (and judicious use of scattered clumps of explosive barrels) when heavier enemies such as hell knights and revenants begin appearing. It all looks dazzlingly beautiful, of course, and makes good use of Eternity's linked portals for 3D overpasses and office blocks, trucks on lifts and spiral staircases. With some more bespoke city textures and a couple of sophomoric joke scenes, it would look almost like an Ion Fury map.

 

A few enemies from the Realm667 Beastiary appear here; the catharsi's annoying movement patterns have been eliminated, making them much easier to deal with. A much bigger threat are the suicide zombies that appear in the second subway station that concludes the level, and locating the source of their screaming and taking them out first is essential to survival in the deadly ambushes in the station. Overall an excellent and intense first map that looks and plays beautifully.

 

(huhuhuh, the par time is 13:37, that's cool, huhuhuhuh)

 

MAP02: Bruce R. and Son Construction Co. (5/5)

"Construction Co." cools off a bit after the high-compression frenzy of "Subway Sandwich". Though it superficially resembles "Shipyard" from Mutiny in its basic setup, the portals add tremendous verticality and the player ascends through several floors, leaping between metal beams and trading fire with enemies two or three floors above. The Rocket Zombie makes his appearance here, and he is a far more balanced and useful enemy than the Realm667 original. The mini-rockets cut down on the frustration he often produced in KDiZD, and he seems a bit slower on the draw too. One hit will usually not kill you, but they are definitely priority targets in any fight. The combat is mostly methodical clearing with a couple of teleport waves along the way, until you get a brutal rooftop fight first with cacos (don’t trust in cover, the portal hax mean they can just fly over it), than an archvile and revenants, and finally by two cybruisers. It's a compact, gleaming showcase for the Eternity Engine's capabilities and a standout even among such excellent levels as these. Don't miss this one.

 

MAP03: Reservoir Dog (5/5)

"Reservoir Dog" brings together the epic scale of "Subway Sandwich" with the extreme verticality of "Construction Co." for an absolute masterpiece of a map. "Reservoir Dog" puts you in a gloomy subterranean grotto filled with filthy, algae-choked water, dominated by a towering, grimy water pumping station. You'll be once again dashing and scrambling to establish a position at the beginning of the map as the muck is crawling with all sorts of beasties and hardly any angle will be safe for the first few minutes. Every surface is perfectly aligned and textured, oozing with disgusting beauty—thank God Doom doesn't come in Smell-O-Vision!

 

You'll get a second submachine gun in this map, which turns what was a pretty standard chaingun replacement into a deadly pair of bullet hoses that absolutely shred whatever they're pointed at. The twin SMGs saved my life once, when I miscalculated and let three bruiser demons trap me in a corner and unloaded almost all my bullets into them. Of course that meant I couldn't count on them when faced with several pain elementals immediately afterwards, but hey, you win some, you lose some. You also encounter Vader's monster the grell, essentially a cacodemon snowclone that's faster, more damaging, but frailer, and has a creepy horse mouth. The speed makes him a superior harasser to the caco, though grells lack the hitpoints to box the player in like a good old-fashioned cacoswarm.

 

When you finally work your way up to the top level, surprise! You're sent back down to the bottom, and now the water level descends, opening up an entirely new half of the level below you! This half features some absolutely vicious fights where the hordes will try to try to completely crowd you, though spotting and eliminating the suicide zombies while they're still bunched up with the other monsters will do a lot to lessen the odds against you. Now you get to fight your way back up to the top again, and the rocky parts of the previous map now stand as ledges and arches suspended over the pit as you do some acrobatics to retrace your steps while several ambushes provide additional entertainment. Topping it all off is an excellent Stewboy midi that calls to mind the best of Ancient Aliens. Did I already say "don't miss this one"?

 

MAP04: Routine Flaring and Flailing (5/5)

The watery industrial theme from "Reservoir Dog" continues, this time under an open sky. Pistol starters will have to run like hell in the beginning, but continuous players would be better served by drawing most of the initial monsters into the starting area. Monsters will continually harass you from high above, and I had to use Eternity's rather ropey mouselook several times—I recommend binding it to a mouse button rather than having it on full time. There are no real horde battles here, but many smaller ambushes, many of which combine suicide bombers and cybruisers into perilous tests of dexterity and efficiency. Here, the techbase feels less like a single structure like in "Reservoir Dog", but rather some sort of almost organic growth emerging from nature, spreading rigid, brutalist tentacles and infiltrating the cliffsides like iron fungus. You'll be going up and down several times, seeing nearly every part of the map from multiple vantage points, and as you progress, the keys unlock shortcuts to quickly get from any part of the map to any other.

 

Observant players will be able to get their hands on the plasma gun replacement, the flamethrower, towards the end of the map. It will come in very handy for the vicious pincer battle on the bridge leading to the exit, though it obscures incoming projectiles. Overall it's a great map, if not quite as striking as the previous three.

 

MAP05: Titan of Industry (5/5)

A menacing midi announces that this dark, vast, ominous Unreal Tournament-style brick factory is ready to kick everything a notch beyond what has come before. If the previous maps were huge, this one is humongous, and the vast silent halls that once built machines of nearly unimaginable proportions now are host to huge pitched battles involving nearly the entire expanded bestiary at once. You'll find a number of green and orange armors lying around in the early parts of the level and you'll need to conserve all of them to have enough ammo to see you through the legions of heavyweight monsters you'll be facing. The initial count on HMP was 544, but the numerous archviles that deploy throughout the map's impression brought my kill total over 560.

 

Ambushes from high-threat enemies like suicide bombers, cybruisers, and archviles happen suddenly, and you can die almost instantly if caught off guard. Fortunately, the map hands out the flamethrower and plenty of cells, even for those who do not get any of the secrets. There are a few impressive Eternity Engine setpieces, like an elevated bridge that moves left and right above a huge assembly area, at the behest of switches, to give you access to different side areas. Overall it's a brooding and atmospheric piece and a fine adventure, but the intro text that kicks off the level promises some sort of dreadful secret at the end, and all you get is just another industrial map—a great map, but no kind of revelation or surprise. Maybe the next few maps will change that…

 

MAP06: Get Shafted (5/5)

Hold on to your butts, it’s a full-on slaughter map! The HUD counts 1446 monsters at the start of the map, and that's before the any of the many archviles you will encounter have had their fun. "Get Shafted" is an archaeological dig site of truly epic proportions, catwalks and towers and supporting scaffolding suspended over a fathomless abyss housing...something. Something evil. But to get there, you will have to survive countless brutal shock encounters, much larger than any in previous maps, often unfolding in multiple stages Sunlust-style. Keeping your nerve is more critical than ever as the actual floor area of the map is fairly small—there are just so many floors—and space is almost always at a premium (another thing that makes me think of Sunlust). The heavier monsters are used with abandon here, fleets of cacos, legions of hell knights, archviles traveling with entourages, and you're never more than a couple of seconds or a single bad miscalculation from being pinned and destroyed. Panic means instant death, and the map is seemingly always trying to make you panic. While the music in the previous maps was fairly mellow, here the midi is a high-octane power metal-ish piece that fortunately has enough length and variation not to get repetitive, though I would have preferred a broodier, more atmospheric soundtrack.

 

There are so many cool vistas and setpieces here, the moments were you pass under grated catwalks and see the corpses of demons you killed earlier in the map above you, the glorious and terrifying ride on a three-set of gondolas where you're Unlucky Pierre as the cars to your left and right fill up with monsters multiple times, the way a series of lifts bring you back up several levels near the end to give you a chance to scavenge for resources or gaze in awe at the sheer scale of the megastructure that you have just conquered. The cluster bomb launcher first appears here, though its debut fight is an inauspicious one as it is perhaps the most cramped and frantic battle in the entire map. It is so, so easy to blow yourself up in this fight with your own cluster bomb, as I did many times.

 

Finally, though, you reach the very bottom and the architecture takes a turn for the demonic as you at last reach the demons' home turf, and what a welcome they have prepared for you! You're given a few moments to explore the area and dread what might be in store for you before skillsaw uncorks a white-hot megaslaughter, over six hundred demons pouring in from the sides, flyers descending from above, entrenched mancubi blasting away from every angle. After the sadistic Ribbiksian beatdowns that came before, however, it's actually not all that hard if you keep your head on straight and don't plow bodily into a Grell and die like an idiot. If you use the mine launcher to clear out enough of the initial onslaught fast enough, you can do laps around the arena--by far the largest area in the map--and have plenty of room to move around and avoid being Good at Doomed by your own submunitions as you pound the walls of demonflesh with an entire Gulf War's worth of explosives. Rockets are handed out in vast numbers and you're highly unlikely to run out before the floor is carpeted with bodies and all that's left is cleaning up the snipers. Indeed, it feels less like a final challenge but a final, spectacular reward for beating the previous challenges, especially that aforementioned close-quarters fight with the mine launcher. I felt like a Champion of Khorne after completing it, soaked head to toe in demonic viscera. What a rush!

 

MAP07: The Beating Heart (5+/5)

"The Beating Heart" is an absolute design and layout masterpiece, starting off with one of the most foreboding and intimidating introductions of any Doom level I've ever played, where you descend into a titanic, towering hell citadel that is almost like if Arcane Dimensions had a map set in Peter Jackson's rendition of Mordor. The vast towers reaching up into the darkness, with tier upon tier of burning galleries, is an awe-inspiring sight, especially considering that you will visit nearly every place you can see from the beginning over the course of this truly colossal map. There's so much verticality and clever use of space here it rivals the best of what the Quake scene has to offer.

 

The MIDI, too, serves as a musical and emotional climax, recalling the epic intensity of classic Final Fantasy boss music (especially "Dancing Mad" from Final Fantasy VI) with its symphonic arrangements and brooding organ theme, while sometimes coyly hinting at "Sign of Evil" from the original Doom. It also has enough variety and use of dynamics to keep it from getting stale, which is greatly appreciated in a map that will take most players over an hour.

 

Skillsaw breaks up the action here with carefully judged quiet sections, devoid of enemies, and the intro is the first of these, gradually building the anticipation as you circumnavigate the base of the city, looking up at its battlements. But surely, with the huge supply of ammo you built up at the end of "Get Shafted", you can kick down the doors and take the fight to the enemy, right? Wrong. Soon you come upon the gate to the city, which demands a sacrifice of...your weapons. All of your weapons. One by one you place them onto the altars, and watch helplessly as your hard-earned guns are sacrificed as a burnt offering to open the way.

 

Hope you have some Tyson skills, as you're going to need them. Immediately beyond the gate is a berserk and the fire axe and you are raised into a gladiatorial arena for your first test. There are no small, intimate fights here; every encounter is a huge, multi-stage frenzy of carnage, and this one sets the tone as you're set upon by dozens of imps and hell knights, with more waves of hellspawn on the way. The axe is much more fiddly and requires more precision than the similarly long-ranged melee weapons from Hexen, but still this fight is one hell of a power trip that pulls its punches a bit to let the player feel the rush of ripping and tearing without the need for perfect footwork.

 

That's the last mercy you're likely to get, however, as then you're thrown into a desperate struggle to recover some of your weapons as you're hounded hither and yon by the legions of hell—revenant kill teams, mancubi sniping from on high, and even a spider mastermind dominating one end of the arena. This bit might be the hardest part not only of the map, but of the entire wad, as you'll have to lean heavily on the rocket launcher in exactly the sort of desperate circumstances when using explosives is most difficult.

 

Other than that though, all of the major encounters exemplify a viciously intense but deceptively simple and accessible sort of slaughter gameplay I like to call "NASCAR slaughter", similar to what you see in the last episode of Eviternity or the later maps of Mechadon's Counterattack. Each arena is set up like a racetrack, with big wide paths that loop around each other, allowing you to survive indefinitely, stoke infighting among the monsters, and take potshots as long as you can simply keep running laps at full speed like you're playing an ultraviolent game of Mario Kart. Don't stop, don't ever stop, and if the monsters block your way for even a second, you're likely to die then and there. However, the effectiveness of this tactic kind of takes away some of the fear factor this map tries so hard to build up.

 

When you escape the second setpiece and reach the Dark Souls-like weapon shrine that forms the heart (heh) of the map and its primary safe area, you'll have most of your arsenal back, but the three most critical weapons—the super shotgun, the twin machine guns, and the cluster bomb launcher—are locked away with skull keys that you have to obtain in yet more arena slugfests, each again with multiple stages. However, the fights are distinct enough (aside from having the basic NASCAR strategy in common) that they don't run together, and you can tackle them in any order you wish. My favorite bit (and the second hardest behind when you first get the rocket launcher) is a series of frightfully narrow catwalks in the latter half of the yellow key arena, which force you to temporarily abandon your loops and think carefully about your positioning so you don't get trapped by the waves of meat that will try to pin you into a corner—and then as a last hurrah you're sandwiched between two columns of suicide bombers, imps, and finally hell nobles approaching from opposite sides, forcing you to act quickly and decisively to force your way through the pincer before you're annihilated. Each key will return you to the shrine, and you can return to previously cleared arenas to scavenge before tackling the next, though skillsaw is generous enough with supplies that this isn't really necessary.

 

Return with the final key, and the level resounds with the sound of the titular beating heart, calling for you, beckoning to you... In the map's final atmospheric interlude, you proceed to the central keep and encounter the heart itself—well it kind of also looks like a scrotum, which deflates the tension a bit. Attacking the heart opens the way to the final arena, where skillsaw has prepared his ultimate challenge.

 

That challenge, considering the frenzied mayhem that has come in the previous two maps, is actually a big step down in enemies. Yes, there are four waves with tons of heavyweight enemies, including many cybruisers in the final two, but the arena is the most NASCAR thing that ever NASCARed, a loop containing another loop with yet another loop in the upper tier. There is ample maneuvering room unless your crowdshaping and herding skills are completely nonexistent, an absurd amount of ammo, and numerous soul spheres, megaspheres, and blue armors. The biggest danger will come from your own explosives, especially as you'll want to use the cluster bombs on some of the bigger thickets of demonflesh. With each wave you get another crack at the heart, and with the fourth wave down, you can deal the killing blow and the source of the demonic onslaught explodes in a welter of gore. You stand victorious!

 

...Or do you?

 

MAP08: Arrhythmia (N/A)

"Arrhythmia" is a cute little horror setpiece, sort of like The Legend of Zelda's Forgotten Woods meets "Ghoul's Forest", but there's nothing to do but wander around futilely as the Doomguy's heart sputters and dies, and your own quiets down to normal from the pounding it was likely doing in the arena encounters of the previous map.

 

Overall, I can’t recommend Heartland enough. Corporate propaganda might have turned “game-changer” into one of the most pernicious clichés in the English language, but Heartland quite literally changes the game of Doom, exploring for the very first time the full implications of making Doom a truly 3D game, and not skimping on quality level design in the process. I can only hope that Heartland inspires more level authors to map for Eternity and try out some portal magic for themselves; seeing what skillsaw can do with the engine absolutely blows my mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have to play Heartland again...

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[baja blast rd.]

I'm not going to say "this should have way more likes [than the 6 it currently has]" because the merit of something has extremely little to do with how many likes or views or subs or reads it gets. But that is a wonderful review and some people are missing out. 

[LadyMistDragon]

On 4/19/2022 at 7:19 PM, Woolie Wool said:

Technical Issues (techissues.wad)

Author: Endless

Release date: March 2, 2022

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Limit-removing (played in Doom2-plus v1.9

Completion time: 20 to 40 minutes

Visuals: 3 | Layout: 2 | Combat: 2 | UV: 2 | Overall: 2

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/techissues

 

"Technical Issues" is a fairly long limit-removing single map for limit-removing exes. Though it was not tested with an actual DOS port, unlike some recent -complevel 2 or "vanilla" wads, it does indeed run under the original DOS engine. However, aside from its admirable commitment to compatibility, it has little going for it; aside from not having been tested to the original Doom engine limits, it feels like it would have easily fit in--and sunk into the depths of /idgames largely unnoticed--in 1995 or 1996, and not in a good "lost gem" way.

 

"Technical Issues" bills itself as a "complete map that felt like a progressive adventure", but an adventure map is made or broken by its sense of place and immersion, and the aimless sprawl of cramped, boxy rooms and corridors that makes up "Technical Issues" completely fails to deliver either. The vast majority of the map is decorated in bland gray and silver textures that recall nothing so much as the early Doom alphas. 

 

 

Unfortunately, Endless has a rather monochromatic palette which even his stuff I've liked the best (Ruins of Sathryn and his concluding map in WMC04).display.

it's like, there are more than 3 colors. In all honesty, he picked that name for a reason :.)

[Woolie Wool]

On 5/15/2022 at 5:45 PM, baja blast rd. said:

I'm not going to say "this should have way more likes [than the 6 it currently has]" because the merit of something has extremely little to do with how many likes or views or subs or reads it gets. But that is a wonderful review and some people are missing out. 

 

Glad to see people like it! I was worried that, because of how long it took me to finish, it would have come out a bit incoherent.

 

I've got another episode-length review in the oven, so in the meantime here's the very first one I did on Tumblr, a wad by the infamous King REoL.

 

REoL Tough: The Uprising (6fiffy1.wad)

Author: George "King REoL" Fiffy

Release date: September 6, 1998

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Boom-compatible (played in LZDoom development build)

Time to completion: 20 to 45 minutes

Layout: 2 | Visuals: 3 | Combat: 2 |  UV: 2 | Overall: 2/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/0-9/6fiffy1

 

This wad made quite an impression on me when I first played it in 1999 or 2000, shortly after discovering PWADs and source ports for the very first time. Colin Phipps’ Doom Underground gave it a positively glowing review, and being a cheater using the default keyboard controls, I really had no idea what made a good level and just marveled for what, at the time, seemed like incredibly detailed architecture. In his day, Fiffy was a notorious internet troll going by “King REoL” who declared himself “The MetallicA of DooM” [sic] but the only quality he shared with said band was his pathological grandiosity (versions of his website from before he embedded it inside a homebrewed Flash monstrosity can still be accessed on archive.org and make for interesting reading), and while his level-design “brand” did garner some notoriety, it was mostly a secondary effect of the drama he generated everywhere he went. So how does this map hold up over 15 years later? Not too well, I’m afraid.

 

“The Uprising” is a sort of fortified compound built into a cliff face; with the “back” of the fortress being a rock wall, and all approaches to the gatehouse except from the front blocked by other rock walls, the need to actually plan a coherent castle layout was obviated, and it really seemed like George Fiffy had no real plan for this map but just kind of added stuff as he went along, starting from the start across the moat and working his way in a mostly straight line back to the bailey, and then sprawled out in various directions for the key hunts. There is a succession of five or six areas, but each is its own “thing”; they don’t connect together or look into one another, and correspondingly there is very little sense of place (for instance, the underground chamber you access from the moat to raise the drawbridge has no connection to the fortress at all; it’s just there, with no way to tell that they’re supposed to be part of the same structure, and a teleporter near the drawbridge switch just dumps you back at the start of the map. The color selection is very drab; almost exclusively dull greens, browns, and grays; a strongly colored sky would have added greatly to this level’s eye appeal, but knowing Fiffy’s taste in custom textures (the Taz-Mania yellow sky from 2fiffy4, anyone?), perhaps the drab look is for the best. On that note, there is a really ugly new status bar and a set of modified sounds; I strongly recommend opening the wad and deleting them. Fiffy also included a breakable glass texture; as usual his art looks awful but the effect was so novel in 1998 I can let it pass.

 

You needed a Pentium II for this?! And this is the best-looking room in the whole map. Presented in hi-res instead of my usual 320x200 just so you don’t interpret the aliasing as any additional detail that isn’t actually there.

 

The infamous detail that old Socket 7 machines struggled with back in the day manages to be both elementary and gratuitous; almost the entire map is made of rectangular areas with straight walls, connected by long straight corridors and dotted with pilasters, sector furniture, and (very ugly) rows of stepped sectors to give the impression of sloped or vaulted ceilings. The only area that aspires to more than “a room” is the bailey in the center of the map, a walled courtyard with some buildings (the keep included, which doesn’t actually fit inside the wall but just kind of splatters outward in a diarrhea of nondescript birds and trees and rocks and rooms and corridors and things) which conjures memories of “Industrial Zone” from the original campaign but is more orderly and, consequently, less fun to play. Everything here is simple, regular shapes, with no overlapping geometry or structural complexity; all the detail is just ornaments tacked onto floor plans that look like the work of a novice, not an adult who had been making levels for five years. The lighting is very basic, with little contrast between light and shadow, and none of the complex chiaroscuro gradients employed by contemporary “extreme detail” wads like 99 Ways to Die, GothicDM, or Caverns of Darkness. Fiffy’s lazy lighting combine with his ill-chosen graphic and sound replacements to give a slapdash, amateur look and feel to nearly all of his work, but the sheer laboriousness of this level undermines any naive outsider aesthetic such art might cultivate in say, a 1994 wad.

 

The gameplay is very much what someone who can’t beat a difficult map thinks a good difficult map is; lots of monsters (431 after PE spawns) placed in blocks directly in front of the player or to one side on a flat plane, but not even the most perfunctory attempts at choreography or pressure. Furthermore, a lot of these monsters are shotgunners or chaingunners, which brutally punish any attempts to rampage through areas and sow infighting. The result is a festival of corner-camping, chain-sniping, and pie-slicing that some might call “tactical” but I’d rather just call a slow, tedious grind. Making this worse is that the plasma rifle and most of the rocket ammo are tucked away in secrets, so if you don’t find any, you just have to grind, grind, grind away with the SSG. A few revenants and archviles are placed throughout the map in situations where they cannot possibly pose any threat; one of the switches required to access the red key had the first two-archvile pincer I’ve ever seen with literally no difficulty because you can slice the pie to draw them down a narrow corridor one at a time and casually butcher them.

 

From where I was standing, these monsters were completely unable to reach me and all their fireballs hit the steps, rendering them harmless.

 

Fiffy’s love of narrow doors doesn’t help; there must be a hundred of the things, usually with some monsters right behind it to serve as a “door with health” to delay your progress. Most egregious is one small room, which, when opened, disgorges four Barons of Hell clown car-style to waste your time and your shells. They file out into a long L-shaped corridor with plenty of room to dodge them, but there’s not quite enough room to move around them without risking melee, so you just have to stand, dodge a few fireballs, and occasionally move back a bit while firing your SSG over and over until they’re all dead. A solid minute of your time wasted. It took me 37 minutes to complete this map (I got turned around a few times; I expect a player good at FDAs could manage a thorough exploration in 20) but because the layout was so incohesive and the combat so dull, there was no “epic” feeling to any of it. It’s long, bombastic, and superficially violent, but simplistic, rote, and soulless…just like a bad Metallica song, come to think of it.

 

Also, instead of a proper /idgames/ text file, the documentation is in a batch file full of echo commands called !!READ!!.bat, the relevant information being interspersed with bragging and grandstanding and force-fed to you screen by screen, because King REoL is just that kind of guy.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

A bite-sized review for a bite-sized map. Saw this in the WADs and Mods forum and I just had to play it.

 

Emerald Ambush (emeamb.wad)

Author: @Rook

Release date: May 19, 2022

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Modern limit-removing (played in PrBoom-plus 2.5.1.4)

Completion time: 5 to 10 minutes

Layout: 4 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 4 | UV: 2 | Overall: 4/5

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ju-3xtXk3DEg7y85WUIFw44T0hdD54Qt/view?usp=sharing

 

“Emerald Ambush” immediately caught my attention when I was browsing through the Doomworld wads forum. I am a sucket for Ola Björling's OTEX texture pack, and even more so for natural scenery and bold colors, and “Emerald Ambush” puts all three together in a beautiful and instantly memorable visual package. Aside from the eerie green sky, this industrial complex set atop some sort of watery gorge looks laid-back, almost friendly with its bright lighting and lush vegetation. The textures are very well chosen and skillfully aligned, and the energetic midi by @Crunchynut44 caps off the atmosphere quite nicely. “Emerald Ambush” advertises itself as limit-removing, but like many recent wads it was not tested with legacy ports and will crash any of the DOS executables available due to the presence of sectors with undefined flats. Any of the common modern ports should do nicely; Boom-compatible ports should use -complevel 2. My Athlon machine under Windows XP handled it just fine with no stutters or framerate drops; I probably could have cranked the resolution up if I wanted to.

 

Not a lot to this map, but it looks great.

 

“Emerald Ambush” is a very small level and its compact, simple layout, with details tucked away behind barriers or impassable lines, make me wonder if it was originally intended as a deathmatch map; it would likely play very well as one. The map basically consists of two tiers, with the base and surrounding cliffs above and the gorge below, with many lifts, stairs, and pillars to allow fast and easy transit from pretty much any point in the map to any other. The gameplay is pretty standard but well-executed modern fare, with highly kinetic choreography. However, it is every bit as laid-back as the map's ambience suggests, I'd say too much so; after a slightly hairy start where you have to evade a bunch of monsters, including chaingunners and arachnotrons, to get yourself some weapons, I was never under any serious threat, and the heavily interconnected layout and the ability to use the cliffs for cover in many fights made it easy to disengage at the slightest hint of pressure and find an easier angle to approach a monster. There is also an excess of ammo in this map, especially of rockets and cells.

 

“Emerald Ambush” is a nonlinear key hunt, with three keys scattered around the map, unlocked by switches that trigger (easy) warp-in fights, and an exit door locked with all three. The final fight had some promise with two archviles that spawn out of sight along with some revenants and chaingunners, but I was so loaded up with cells I was able to dispatch them and the monsters they resurrected with little difficulty. However, it is a handsome, fun little piece of Doom popcorn, and I can forgive its lack of challenge for its considerable eye appeal and the way it kept me moving even though I was never really in all that much trouble. I liked it, but I would have liked it a lot more as a map01 or map02 for an episode-length set that built up to bigger, badder maps later on.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

And one more for this weekend, the one I was actually planning instead of the spur-of-the-moment choice of "Emerald Ambush", a review of the (formerly?) famous UAC Ultra.

 

UAC Ultra (uacultra.wad)

Author: Jamie "@Super Jamie” Bainbridge and Jon “40oz” Vail

Release date: March 28, 2010

IWAD: Doom II

Format: MBF compatible, -complevel 9 (played in MBF 2.04)

Completion time: 1.5 to 3 hours

Layout: 4 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 3 | UV: 3 | Overall: 4/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/uacultra

 

UAC Ultra was the talk of the Doom community about 10 years ago. Its striking and to this day still unique aesthetic caught the eye of nearly everybody, rocketed project founder 40oz to celebrity status in the community, and made it a shoo-in for the 2010 Cacowards. Its singular (one might also say single-minded) commitment to its aesthetic laid the groundwork for all sorts of major projects that chased a distinct and instantly recognizable “look”, from Ribbiks’ Stardate series to recent sets like Pagodia and even perhaps Eviternity and the OTEX texture megapack that it served as the vanguard for. In that regard, its fall from grace has been quite extraordinary; people bring up even such flawed, often crude wads as Memento Mori, Hell Revealed, and even my problematic fave Eternal Doom (I will never forgive id for ruining the search results for everything Eternal Doom related by naming their most recent Doom game Doom Eternal) as Great Wads and argue whether Doom community newbies should or should not play them as part of their Doom education; the few times I’ve brought up UAC Ultra on Doom-related Discord channels, I’ve gotten a mixture of “yeah, I remember that one”, complaints about it being overrated, or pure indifference. Indeed, in every other regard but its look, UAC Ultra is an incredibly conservative and unfashionable wad by modern standards—grinding, largely static corridor shooting with none of the high-level tactics and frantic swirl of motion that have become Doom’s most celebrated qualities.

 

This wad is unrelentingly dark, I recommend turning off the lights in your room and playing at night or with curtains drawn for maximum atmosphere.

 

To be fair to UAC Ultra, its aesthetic is quite masterfully crafted. From a purely visual and textural standpoint, the setting of a hostile, irradiated Mars housing a massive, decrepit techbase complex is masterfully realized. UAC Ultra commits to the look with utter dedication; every map, every room, every texture on every wall is dedicated to ramming it home as emphatically as possible. UAC Ultra’s Mars is a dark, grim, harsh place where the player feels decidedly unwelcome, even if the actual challenge factor of most of the maps is fairly mild (but there’s a big exception, which singlehandedly boosts the UV difficulty score from a 2 to a 3, and is also the best map in the whole wad, which I’ll get to later). It’s also, however, a very repetitive and monochromatic setting; everything, down to the status bar, is either the dark browns and grays of rusted metal, the deep reds of the Martian volcanic rock, and the blazing oranges and yellows of the Martian sky and the especially hot, scary-looking lava texture that also seems to double as molten iron. The look reminds me both of Doom 64 (which at least had a lot of psychedelic colored lighting to offset its monochromatic textures; UAC Ultra, as a software-rendered Boom wad, does not) and the seemingly endless string of red levels on Mercury, Mars, and Io that comprised about a quarter of Descent. And unlike Descent, there’s none of the cool purples and blues of “Callisto Tower Colony” and “Titan Mine” as your reward for sitting through all the red and gray; in UAC Ultra, those colors are all you get for the duration. UAC Ultra also uses the original Doom palette, so it can’t cannibalize any of the cool colors in the palette to add some more variety to its infernal hues. One nice (and in “Skagway”, quite stress-inducing) touch is the fact that exposed outdoor areas will damage you over time, forcing you to use radiation suits to survive under the baleful, burning sky.

 

Repetition aside, the textures look really good. Few of them seem to be truly original, with the majority coming from recolors of the original IWAD techbase set, Quake, and some mods for the latter, but the edits are all well-done with few rough edges or editing mistakes. The texture alignment is also very good, though the rectilinear architecture has few areas where good alignment would be difficult to pull off. If nothing else, UAC Ultra does an excellent job immersing you in its setting, so gritty and harsh that you can almost feel the baking heat and smell the rust-choked, sulfurous fumes of this man-made hell. There are few signs of traditional Doomy demonic corruption in the architecture, no marble façades or organic growths, but why would the demons bother? They already seem far more at home here than any human being.

 

You’re going to be doing this a lot.

 

As mentioned in the intro, UAC Ultra is an unabashed dungeon crawl, its gameplay and layouts having both feet firmly planted in the late ‘90s. Most of UAC Ultra consists of relatively small rooms, narrow corridors, and junctions where demons can easily be led to their deaths one or two at a time. Only in a relative few setpiece encounters will you find yourself in constant motion; most fights are easily demolished by finding the right spot to camp and using your weapons efficiently. Only the obligatory map07 “Haymaker” and penultimate blowout “Skagway” force the player to get serious about movement and routing. This aspect is another thing that reminds me of Doom 64, though more of Randy Estrella’s sprawling level design sensibilities; you won’t find anything like Tim Heydelaar’s neatly packaged hell fortresses here, and the detail put into the individual areas of a level rarely congeals into a genuine sense that the map represents a distinct space or place. UAC Ultra is mostly experienced as a single unit, levels running into each other in a continuous flow. There is no division of credit between the two mappers on a per-map basis, nor is there much contrast between their respective styles; if there are “40oz parts” and “Super Jamie parts”, they both blend seamlessly into the whole that is UAC Ultra. More likely, it seems that they both freely manipulated and added onto each other’s contributions so neither’s mapping can be extricated from the other’s.

 

UAC Ultra is billed as a Boom compatible mapset, but it uses MBF functionality for the changing skies throughout the wad; it runs fine in DOS under MBF with -complevel 9, and should also pose no problems with any modern source port with Boom features. Its use of Boom and MBF features is very conservative, mostly limit removal, the sky textures, and some very occasional transparency effects, so don’t expect any Phobos: Anomaly Reborn-style voodoo doll scripting or six-key trickery. It comes with an internal Dehacked patch that features a custom monster, the haymaker, which uses maulotaur sprites from Heretic, launches an annoying multi-spread of Mancubus fireballs much like Scythe 2’s afrit, and has a bizarre “skating” gait that is made all the stranger to look at with the blazing speed at which it moves around. I generally dislike Dehacked monsters, and the haymaker is not a particularly good or inventive Dehacked monster; it stands out badly among the otherwise unchanged Doom II bestiary. However, it is fairly rare and not all that obnoxious to fight, so it’s not a serious drag on the wad as a whole.

 

MAP01: Dig (4/5)

UAC Ultra's opener is mostly a mood piece, establishing the setting and texture theme while providing a mostly linear shotgun workout in terms of gameplay. Enemies usually come from only one direction at a time, and the threat level is mostly trivial, though the impressive visuals are able to redeem the pedestrian gameplay, especially on a first playthrough.

 

MAP02: UAC in Exile (3/5)

"UAC in Exile" starts out in the same vein as "Dig", though fully indoors this time. For the most part this map is a cinch and utterly straightforward, though the warp-in archvile who resurrects a posse of hitscan bodyguards, and the cacodemon/hell knight pincer in the final room can get out of control if the player panics or is not paying attention. The map withholds the SSG on skill levels above HNTR, though there is not enough meat here to be grindy anyway. That’s about all there is to say about this map, it’s An Level with nothing really wrong about it but not all that much right about it either, beyond the visuals.

 

MAP03: Sifting Adjunct (4/5)

UAC Ultra begins to show some teeth here, using the tight confines of the boxy rooms and hallways to stage pressure encounters where hell knights and revenants try to crowd the player. The key word is “try”; competent footwork will keep you safely out of reach of raking claws and bony fists, even if a couple of moments can look a bit intimidating to a newer player. The standout area for me was a simple but effective double archvile trap at the red key, where the pillars seem to be placed with just the right feng shui to make the archviles want to take opposite routes around them and pin you in a crossfire. The creepy burning circuitry sky is a nice touch, suggesting the UAC facility is not only vast, but has somehow melded with the geology of the planet itself.

 

MAP04: Pyrolysis (5/5)

"Pyrolysis" is the first standout map of the set, some sort of geothermal powerplant deep within the bowels of Mars. The centerpiece of the map is a series of columns with crushers, rising out of a sea of molten metal, that appear as set dressing near the beginning of the map, and then force a narrow and perilous descent through them in the last dash to the end. Cacofleets are out in force in "Pyrolysis", though the architecture usually allows them to be funneled into narrow side passages to neutralize most of the threat. It's still pretty easy going, but just spicy enough to make you pay for poor situational awareness. The atmosphere and architectural setpieces are what really make this map work, with the moving sector machinery and the stark contrast of the greasy, soot-stained metal with the molten steel below. The maps are getting longer, though, and the short, perfunctory Abuse midis really aren't doing the job anymore...

 

MAP05: Hardware (5/5)

This mini-adventure features a lot more natural cavern areas than the rectilinear maps that preceded it, techbase seeming to penetrate and intertwine with Mars' lava caves like an organic growth. The secrets in this map are really good, especially the huge level-wide puzzle that opens up the BFG that is dangled tantalizingly in view, but out of reach, near the beginning of the level. My only complaint is that none of the fights here offer a sense of occasion worthy of the mysterious, threatening atmosphere of this map.

 

MAP06: Collapsys (4/5)

A rough, action-packed start and tense midi by James Paddock signal from the very beginning that "Collapsys" is upping UAC Ultra's ante again. Though there are no big Scythe 2-style setpiece encounters, the fights here aren't the short, claustrophobic affairs of earlier maps, requiring tactics and planning on a slightly larger scale. "Collapsys" feels something like an episode ender, both with the cyberdemon stinger near the exit, and the death exit itself, which strips away all your hard-earned weapons so you can't carry them into the next map.

 

MAP07: Haymaker (4/5)

"Haymaker" is yet another "Dead Simple" clone, but this time the order of the fights is backwards, the monsters all have high ground, and your weapons are scattered throughout the map, forcing you to recover them (sans plasma and BFG, unfortunately) while under fire from all directions. Once the arachnotrons and then the mancubi are down, you have to face the titular haymakers—they're fast as hell, tougher than barons, and fire huge floods of mancubus fireballs that can instantly wipe out a clumsy player. You can avoid the worst of it by dodging to the left, but in a small circular arena where the two haymakers come from both sides, one's left is the other's right. It's a short, sharp shock to the system, and damn good looking, too. There is only barely enough ammo to deal with all the monsters, so don't waste it.

 

MAP08: Worst Case Scenario (4/5)

The title fits—this really is a "worst case scenario" for continuous players, who will likely start this map in an even worse situation than pistol starters, with virtually no ammo, and down on health as well. With the berserk only available towards the end of the map, and no chainsaw at all, you can't rely on Tyson to save ammo, either. The bulk of this map takes place in and around a large U-shaped arena which hosts three increasingly difficult fights as you collect keys and open the map up, with both a cyberdemon and spiderdemon awaiting high-pressure buckshot infusion. The secret plasma helps, but it's not enough to kill the cyber on its own, so either way you'll have to use your rocket-dodging skills to give Cybie a double-barreled lap dance to finish him off.

 

MAP09: Counteraction Terminal (4/5)

"Construction Terminal" attempts to turn up the heat again with more spectacular and (theoretically) lethal encounters, but it's pretty hit or miss. The biggest hit for me is one of the smaller fights in the map, where a baron distracts you from several chaingunners pouring onto a ledge to your right to enfilade you. The big blowouts I didn't really care for; the first is a straightforward encounter with a haymaker that evolved into a twin-spider battle that is merely a matter of setting the two metal mothers against each other, and corner-camping the survivor of the duel with the single shotgun until she dies. The other starts with two cyberdemons in a huge hall where your only real danger is letting the cybers wander to opposite sides with poorly thought-out movement. Killing them and hitting a switch triggers a mini-slaughter with imps, mancubi, and a haymaker that is initially rather scary and yes, got me once, but simply moving to one end of the arena just as the imps start teleporting lets you trivialize the whole thing. All the boxy rooms in brown are really starting to run together—the limitations of UAC Ultra’s uniform texture theme are really showing at this point.

 

MAP10: Skagway (5/5)

"Skagway" is the UAC Ultra map everyone remembers, and for good reason. After the stodgy, sometimes tedious room-and-corridor fighting of the previous maps, "Skagway" is a fast, desperate blastfest where shocking mini-slaughters are backed up by the ever-ticking timer of your radiation suit, as much of the map takes place in irradiated, lava-filled canyons similar to the opening of "Dig", only this time they're filled to bursting with cacos, revenants, hell nobles, archviles, mancubi, you name it. It's an evil and unexpected turn for a set like UAC Ultra, and had my hands quivering like your grandmother's aspic as I abandoned the goal of 100% kills and ran pell-mell through the wastes.

 

There is something of an inverse difficulty curve; the big final fight is actually the least intimidating of the major encounters, simply because you're not on a damaging floor and are not under any time pressure, while the first few canyon fights, before you get the BFG, are pure terror as you have so little room among the hordes to fire the rockets you need to clear a path before your suit runs out and leaves you to fry on the desolate Martian surface. Stressful but rewarding, "Skagway" made me feel like the rest of UAC Ultra had been holding out on me. If you play no other map in this wad, play this one.

 

MAP11: Sick (3/5)

"Sick" is more of a visual setpiece than a boss battle. The opening scene strikes an eerie chord with the huge expanses of burning sky in what had hitherto been a claustrophobic, mostly indoors mapset, building up to tension that the combat completely fails to capitalize on. Can you circle-strafe? Can you shoot an SSG? Then you're golden. The Chimaira creature is a neat piece of sector art but without any actual pressure to go with figuring out how to open his mouth—the boss arena is only lightly defended and there's no monster spawner—he is effectively a non-threat. The streams of slow-moving imp fireballs he vomits when his mouth opens do little to deter the player from force-feeding him rockets and watching the fireworks display.

 

MAP12: The End (N/A)

Just a little doomcute scene, a shuttle interior with no exit and a scrolling HUD in front of the cockpit window displaying the credits, along with a text screen hinting at the UAC Ultra 2 we never got. Apparently the UAC spacecraft run on Windows 95, which seems on-brand for them.

 

Should you play UAC Ultra? Unless you have a thing either for slow-paced dungeon crawl maps or the wad’s particular aesthetic, I’d say not all of it, just -warp to “Skagway”, play that, and move on. It’s certainly not one of the Great Wads, though it does have one great map, but I’d be lying if I said the dismal, dusty Mars of UAC Ultra didn’t work its magic on me. If its aesthetic appeals to you, it will suck you in and hold your attention even through the less inspired parts. It’s got a few great highlights and the lows don’t get any worse than “meh”, so I recommend UAC Ultra with reservations. It doesn’t run on long enough to really get old, and as a baseline it is at least competent all the way through. It’s also an excellent wad for a new player who feels intimidated by the fast, merciless action of modern wads, with its ample opportunities for kiting, crowd control, and disengagement, while still giving a taste of the wild side of Doom with “Skagway”. Good, but not quite a classic.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool

[Woolie Wool]

I've got another largely forgotten oldie for this week, this one being "Enjay's Marine Assault" from 2003. Taste that delicious early ZDoom cheese. 🧀

 

Enjay's Marine Assault (njma01.wad)

Author: Nigel “@Enjay” Rowand

Release date: July 18, 2003

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Classic ZDoom (played in ZDoomLE 2.8.1f)

Completion time: 20 to 40 minutes

Layout: 2 | Visuals: 3 | Combat: 3 | UV: 3 | Overall: 3/5

Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/njma01

 

Doom scenarios where you find yourself fighting against other marines, outside of multiplayer deathmatch, had fascinated Doom modders virtually since the beginning. I made a crude attempt with Dehacked in 1995 and again in 1999 or 2000 (fortunately both attempts are lost to history), and DMARMY3.DEH was a fixture of later releases of Dehacked, even undergoing multiple revisions. However, it was “Enjay's Marine Assault” from 2003 that is the most famous and probably the best of all the “evil marines” mods from the early days of the Doom community (think about this: in a year this ZDoom wad's release will be twice as close to the release date of Doom shareware v0.99 as the present!). It was a major showcase for the ZDoom engine's burgeoning capabilities at the time, and provided a lot of the resources I used to make my own Mutiny gameplay mod for ZDoom in 2007 (not to be confused with Mutiny the community map set headed by 40oz; playing Mutiny with Mutiny loaded is not recommended). I had fond memories of “Enjay's Marine Assault”, but also had not played it in a very long time, and never before on UV.

 

The map begins, as did many ZDoom wads of the time, with an ACS scripted cutscene in which a dubiously animated marine officer gives you your mission briefing a line at a time. Your job is simple—infiltrate the four guard towers of a genetics research facility guarded by corrupt ex-marines, and plant explosives in all four of them, like the airbase level from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, so dropships bearing loyalist marines can land and secure the base. It is ridiculously cheesy by modern standards, not even rising to the standards of the character animations from Wing Commander in 1990, but it gets the job done in the scrappy tradition of early Doom modding, where ambition always exceeded skill and having the audacity to even try was the better part of achievement. It's also a fairly short cutscene and can be skipped if you want, which is a luxury not all contemporary ZDoom productions afforded to their cutscenes. Note that I played this in ZDoomLE on the Athlon, and while it ran great, the same is not guaranteed for modern GZDoom. For older projects like this I always recommend ZDoomLE, ZZDoom, or other ports based on the old ZDoom 2.8 codebase.

 

Enjay provides a number of a different skins to help tell different types of marines apart.

 

While “Enjay's Marine Assault” was a flagship ZDoom release and used a very early version of its (in)famous DECORATE definition system, this is still a Dehacked mod at heart, with the enemies and the one new weapon (a railgun, just like the one from other old ZDoom wads like Assault on Tei Tenga or Securitron) all being defined in Dehacked with Boom and ZDoom extensions. While this keeps a lid on special effects and gimmicks (like I unfortunately employed profusely in my own Mutiny), it also means “Enjay's Marine Assault” offers no real surprises (if you've ever used a ZDoom railgun before, anyway); everything on display here comes straight out of either Doom II or Hexen, just tweaked a bit. Hexen provides the destructible computer monitors that produce a shower of broken glass, and the inventory hand grenades that are based on the Fighter class's flechettes, and have a similarly obnoxious bounce physics, behaving as if they're made of Silly Putty. Many of the textures, especially the iris-style doors in certain key parts of the map, come from Strife, but they lack the special sounds and seem jankier than Strife's own behavior, suggesting they were hacked in before ZDoom got official Strife support. There's also a custom palette of the sort that was just beginning to become fashionable at the time, with more intense greens and a “cool” blue range similar to what would later appear in wads like Simplicity and Back to Saturn X.

 

As befitting a wad where you fight marines, most of your opposition will be hitscanners, although some of the more powerful weapons like plasma rifles, railguns, and even a “rocket launcher” using repurposed revenant missiles, appear in marine hands. The marines are much faster than most of the Doom II bestiary, and can be quite dangerous to face in open areas, but crumple more or less instantly under fire from the heavier weapons like the SSG, plasma rifle, or rocket launcher. These enemies are bolstered by several types of robotic enemies using sprites from Duke Nukem 3D and Strife, which provide a more traditional Doomy challenge with their slower movement, higher health pools, and projectile-based attacks. “Enjay's Marine Assault” is a fairly difficult wad for 2003, though this is mostly due to the scarcity of health and armor pickups; health lost in the early stages of the map will not be recovered quickly and the courtyard in the middle of the map will suck your health dry if you are slow in traversing it, with hitscan, railgun, and plasma snipers scattered liberally on the cliffs above.

 

By modern standards, this level isn't much to look at, but it did the job at the time.

 

“Enjay's Marine Assault” is a map of two halves connected by the central courtyard, with a big concrete base area in the west, and the caves and guard towers in the east. The base is surrounded by rocky badlands, and the barren rocky cliffs surrounding the central courtyard ringed by gray concrete curtain walls strongly reminds me of the Mobile Infantry base on Planet P from Paul Verhoeven's film adaptation of Starship Troopers. It imanages to convey some atmosphere, but is annoying to play, both due to the aforementioned scarcity of health, but also do the boxy room-door-room-door layout; a lot of your time here will be spent camping doors and hallways connecting large square rooms with little to look at other than the occasional computer console row sticking up out of the floor. There is virtually no architectural detail or non-orthogonal geometry; it's about as basic as level design gets. There is a bit of colored lighting but it feels half-assed, affecting only a few small areas of the map and being in saturated primary colors. I also have to issue a demerit for the Terminator 2 theme midi; in addition to being one of the most overused midis of all time, it is also not long or complex enough to carry a map the size of “Enjay's Marine Assault” without getting repetitive.

 

“Enjay's Marine Assault” should take a competent Doom player about half an hour to complete. Though it doesn't shine as a map in the harsh light of 2022, it isn't terrible either, and gave me a good ZDoom nostalgia trip for its duration, especially considering how the “fighting marines” theme has basically died out in the years since I released Mutiny 3 way back in the Obama years. Personally I think that's kind of a shame, especially considering the advancements source ports have made and the greater facility modern modders and mappers have with them compared with 2003. If there's anybody with the passion and skill to make the next marine wad happen, maybe “Enjay's Marine Assault” will provide them with the inspiration to take the idea up where the ZDoom elders left off. For everybody else, it's a fun little novelty, though not much more than that.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Woolie Wool