The DWmegawad Club plays: Hell Revealed

[joe-ilya]

3

It's another dull map, this time there are several lifts that take too long to ride and breaks the gameplay, but there's also more play with the height which makes this map more interesting and interactive.

3/5

Set of average maps so far, not that good.

[antares031]

MAP04 - The Garden Terminal
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

Another vanilla level with mild, simple gameplay. I thought this wad is a slaughter wad, what's going on here? But don't worry. The true face of this wad is yet to come. And yes, this level provides a BFG9000, but do not try to get that one because it's impossible to get it on single play. Unless you play it in co-op mode, so you can "jump".

[T-Rex]

antares031 said:

I thought this wad is a slaughter wad, what's going on here?

Hell Revealed isn't entirely a slaughter wad, there's only a handful of maps that could qualify, but you'll get to the actual ones later on in the megawad.

[antares031]

T-Rex said:

Hell Revealed isn't entirely a slaughter wad, there's only a handful of maps that could qualify, but you'll get to the actual ones later on in the megawad.

That's correct. I just wanted to inform that fact (not all of levels are hardcore levels in this wad) to others who have never tried this wad yet.

[scifista42]

MAP03 - "The Dumpster" by Yonatan Donner

Similarly basic and generic as before, and even more heavy on narrow corridors, although slightly more varied in terms of features (teleporter, crate climbing, closing trap doors) and potentially more lethal, as my health got reduced to 10% at one point. I cheated to find the 2nd secret, there seems to be no hint to it at all, which I don't like.

[dobu gabu maru]

MAP03: A quirky, mazey map that is packed with hitscanners. It’s a bit fun trying to take out all the baddies in a room before they can do major damage on you, but like with the first couple of maps, there’s barely any substance here. I’m a bit weary I might sound like a broken at this point.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP03: The Dumpster
100% kills, 1/2 secrets

Another boringly orthogonal map filled with squares and 64-wide corridors. Again, there's one curved hallway and one - one! - wall at a 45 degree angle. At least there's some verticality and texture variation to help keep things a bit fresher. Not sure what the point of the tiny little stair builder at the start is.

[driftyloon]

I am little late to the party but never mind :) . Hell Revealed has a reputation and I hope it lives up to it, I have heard a lot of praise for this WAD.

Source Port: PR-Boom
Difficulty: UV


MAP01 - Into the Gate
Secrets: 1/1 Kills: 69/69
A very unimpressive first map, the first map is supposed to be the most polished (like E1M1 for the original Doom was the last map to be finished and took the longest to be made). It has very few rooms but a damn lot of pinkies XD. Waiting for the enemies to come out the teleporter is tedious; the only main challenge is a bunch of hitscanners populating a few of the rooms and the aforementioned pinkies. Not a great start to the WAD.

MAP02 - Gateway Lab
Secrets: 1/1 Kills: 112/112
Another linear and small map. This one is a little better than the first map but still not great. Mixture of wide open space with tight knit corridor mazes. Got the super shotgun, so that’s nice I suppose…

I am really struggling to find things to say, the maps are just so boring. No nice architecture, no interesting monster encounters and no interesting map layout.

The weird dark bit at the end in combination with “the healer stalks” really made want to go to sleep (it is just such a relaxing track, like elevator music).

[wallabra]

Me too :D don't feel sad.

============ (caham) ============

MAP01 (| Into The Gate |) = Demo Info
__
Type: ITYTD-Max
Status: Sucess
Kiss Ratio: 100%/100%/100%
Source Port: PRBoom+
Demo Link: Here
__

Overall nice little map for it's time. Good as a starter map. At least in my difficulty since I don't seem to git gud :(

Still quite boxy design as mentioned, but nothing that stops you from having quite some fun playing it with friends or bots in a server (even in 2016, but there are better WADs to play and stuff to do now). ;)

[mouldy]

Gonna try and join in with this one. I've played this a few times over the years, the first time I gave up on it because it just looked a bit rough, and I couldn't figure out if the gameplay was too hardcore for me or just a bit slapdash like the visuals. A few years later I gave it a proper go, and it was more interesting to see how experimental some of the gameplay ideas must have been at the time, but still looks pretty ropey in places. Here goes UV pistol starts..

MAP01 - "Into the Gate" by Yonatan Donner & Haggay Niv

This map looks better than I remembered HR being, I even had to check I was playing the right wad. The gameplay is a little simplistic, basically serving you a bunch of meat through a doorway/teleport pad. I quite like the track on this map.

MAP02 - "Gateway Lab" by Yonatan Donner & Haggay Niv

Surviving the start was the most difficult and interesting part of this map, having to wrestle your weaponry off the shotgunners while everything else wants a piece of you. After that its pretty much rooms with monsters waiting for you to shoot them, and even the design looks like they gave up after making the first area and just went for square boxes.

MAP03 - "The Dumpster" by Yonatan Donner

We are definitely in square town now, very little effort in the visuals of this one, and most of the drama comes from being deposited infront of a room full of enemies with no cover or retreat. Not so bad when you are ready for it with guns blazing, but feels a little bit cheap taking unavoidable damage. My main complaint with this one is the navigation, which is a bit round the houses and elbow bruising. If anyone is put off by the basic nature of these early maps i would recommend sticking with it for a while, I can't remember if it gets much better visually but there are some quite memorable scenarios in future maps. I think.

[wallabra]

MAP02 (?) Demo Stats:
____
Difficulty: ITYTD
Status: Sucess
Kiss Ratio: 100%/93%/0%
Retries: 0
Cheats: None
Style: Casual
Demo Avaiability: Here
____

That blue key door openable without a blue key fooled me! I can't believe. Other than that the map is fun. I did not find any secrets, however. There was no clue! But I didn't cheat the map :) which is the important.

==============================

MAP03 (The Dumpster) Demo Stats:
____
Difficulty: ITYTD
Status: Failure
Kiss Ratio: Unavaiable
Retries: 0
Cheats: None
Style: Casual
Demo Avaiability: Here
____

I have nothing much to say, except that I can't reach that yellow key by any normal means. It's impossible! So I gave up. :/

Sorry bros, me not going to follow any further! It was cool :(

[gaspe]

MAP04 - The Garden Terminal

Kills: 100% | Items: 100% | Secrets: 100%

A long hallway leading to 4 squares. The structures in the gardens try to develop something for the theme and the ending base was kinda cute, but everything is just too simple. Even the gameplay.

[Magnusblitz]

Gustavo6046 said:

I can't reach that yellow key by any normal means. It's impossible! So I gave up. :/

There's a switch that's kinda hard to see (I missed it at first as well) here that raises up a bridge to the yellow key (it's on the wall near the medkit, to the right).

[dobu gabu maru]

mouldy said:

Here goes UV pistol starts

Oh you poor bastard—I'm eagerly awaiting your MAP13 thoughts.

MAP04: This map is a better snapshot for what is to come later down the line. The first half features quadrant-based architecture that you’ll be running around a bunch, and the latter half just has a lot of meat in a row for the player to mow down. Mostly innocuous stuff, but a better appetizer to say the least. I prefer it to the corridor mazes.

[Cynical]

Ribbiks said:

heh. dear lord was that an ordeal. resorted to briefly perusing the map in nomo to figure out where things were. missed all 5 secrets and single-shotgunned by way through more mobs than I care to remember. your first comment rings true it seems that these maps are pretty much designed to be carefully routed before playing (uv pistol-starts, anywho). so.. I guess I'll just watch a uv-max or something before loading up the later maps, then :p

There's some grinding, but a lot of that was because your route there was kinda bad (or at least it was for the first two attempts on "C", I didn't watch past that). A combination of pacifist-trolling and smart use of the Invuln lets you have more fun here. Here's an example (it's not great; I haven't played the level in over a year, but it'll at least give you an idea of how to play the start) (prboom-plus cl2, of course):
http://www.mediafire.com/download/mtmo1bppkzbznf0/hr14betterroute.lmp

[Ribbiks]

well, after realizing sg first was a bad call I went for the pacifist trolling into the RL. belial's uv max sort of confirmed this was a good idea, with the addition of grabbing the invul and picking up the BK immediately afterwards. even that max was quite grindy though, bfg and all :p. my poor routing wasn't the point though, more hitting home the "for palatable results: you should look at the map and plan it out before playing" thing

[Cynical]

I dunno if "plan first" is the best idea if playing for fun; a lot of the fun in HR, for me, is dying, coming up with a plan based on how I died, and repeating until I come up with a good route, at which point I probably win easily because HR only has three maps that require any kind of dodging skill. Having a ton of foreknowledge of the level would hurt that "Doom as a puzzle game" aspect where HR shines, at least for me (this is probably why I can only really play the wad every few years, after I've had time to forget the details).

[Pirx]

MAP04 - "The Garden Terminal" by Yonatan Donner & Haggay Niv

a path with some former humans leads to an open area that may have been a garden and now holds only dead trees and a kind of stone gazebo. the ssg is given right at the gate, to make short work of a few knights and lots of imps. so far good, albeit underdetailed architecture in hr's blocky geometric shapes.

the latter half of the map breaks the brown-green picture with an ugly silver wall and a square outdoor area with former humans to mow down. should have continued with the garden theme.

[Devalaous]

Hell Revealed, hmm. I tried this once eons ago, on HNTR, got up to at least Map 7. Even then I hated how ugly everything was. I tend to play ugly old maps with Doom Expanded to spice up the visuals, but good luck doing so with large monster counts, especially on my craptop.

Might try it again sometime soon, I beat all of Graytall on UV so I assume I'll finally have enough skill today to beat it as intended.

[Budoka]

MAP04: The Garden Terminal by Yonatan Donner and Haggay Niv

Old UV-Max demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4738ONHtl2E

Not so fond of this one. It's rather dull, and trying to speedrun it only makes the bunch of inconvenient crap that's in the way of your movement rather noticeable. Also', "Garden Terminal"? In what plausible context do these two words belong together...?

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP04: The Garden Terminal

A level of two halves, garden and... I guess the techbase is the 'terminal,' or at least contains terminals? The exit room is flagged as secret, which is a bit weird, unless it's intended as an oblique way of telling the player that the prominently-displayed BFG seen toward the level's start is impossible to collect (I wonder if it was supposed to be tagged as multiplayer-only but was missed in playtesting?). Anyway, lots of imps and hitscan grunts to chew through, but otherwise it's a speedbump.

[NuMetalManiak]

MAP04 The Garden Terminal

what the fuck, they pick that as the midi for the map, and despite the level being short, it still manages to loop about 10 times before I manage to finish the level. two sections, the starting one is more visually polished than anything I've seen so far, and that's cool. The inaccessible BFG is a tease, and I'm likely thinking that the baron getting telefragged was a tease too.

[driftyloon]

MAP03 - The Dumpster

Secrets: 2/2 Kills: 112/112

Forgot the music wad, so I had been playing with vanilla doom music up to now. Oh well, that has now been rectified.
This one had a little more variety with the heights. The first secret was found through pure spacebar spamming… and the second was easy to see but annoying to nail the fall. This weird looking part of the wall kind of irritated me as I kept thinking it was a secret but sadly it was nothing.




Apparently the WAD only really picks up at about MAP10 so I guess we are just going to have to slog through these maps until we get there.

[antares031]

MAP05 - Core Infection
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

Okay, this one is a different one. It's a little bit tight compare to the previous levels. Because this level gives you few ammo until you almost clear the level, and this level does not give you a SSG which is essential to beat this kind of narrow level. Are you playing this level without pistol start? Then, that's good. This level will be an easy one since you bring the SSG from the previous level. But if you're not, try to grab a rocket launcher and berserk pack. Or you better know how to "grab" the plasma gun on the table.

[joe-ilya]

4

Finally some fresh air! I'm sick of being inside generic bases, although those kinds are OK to some degree.
Layout's simple yet effective and still makes you think more than you'd imagine. Pretty short too, got some demonfear vibes from this.

5/5

[Cynical]

TheOrganGrinder said:

The exit room is flagged as secret, which is a bit weird

This is a concession to demo-runners in vanilla; a map with no secrets will show a 0% secret count on the tally screen. A lot of maps intended for vanilla demo-running that have no secrets will therefore have an "unavoidable" secret somewhere so that the tally reads 100% instead of 0%.

[mouldy]

MAP04 - "The Garden Terminal" by Yonatan Donner & Haggay Niv

Fairly quick map to blast through. The beginning with the avenue leading to the four courtyards sticks in my mind for some reason, I think because I've seen something very similar on another map. I just realised what it is now, map04 of Jenesis, which is even named as the sequel to this map. So there you go, you can't say it isn't influential. Still feels very cramped despite the open air.

[driftyloon]

Map04 – The Garden Terminal

Secrets: 1/1 Kills: 77/77

I agree it is nice to be outside, however the design is even more linear. It doesn’t help that I have played Jenesis only about 3 weeks prior to this so I can’t help but think of the sequel to this level. The enemies or the lack there of is the main thing which irritates me. The BFG tease was somewhat mean but meh. Having the exit as a secret was a bit weird but Cynical’s comment clarified the reasoning.

[joe-ilya]

5

Fun little tech base, even without the ssg it's fun and strategic. Non-linear too!
I'm impressed how the map manages to be to fun in such simplistic layout, although it's too claustrophobic for my tastes.

4/5

[gaspe]

MAP05 - Core Infection

Kills: 100% | Items: 100% | Secrets: 100%

This is basically MAP03 re-textured. I took the "wrong" routes and almost ran out of ammo, but I managed to survive. I picked up the plasmagun only before going into the room with the arachnotron, and from there the map was really easy.