The DWmegawad Club plays: Echelon & Mutiny

[Demtor]

MAP11 - “Lunar Escape”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


Beautiful blue base is very blue and I like it!

A more moody music track here. Perfect for a lunar map. Right away your struck with the blue on grey moon visual and it just kind of sets the tone. Then the first little ambush comes and it's nice to see a heavy dose of demons used as opposed to a, expected isolated low key moon base feel I was thinking would be done here. Far from it!

For instance, past this elevated group, through the first door there is a step down in to a long landing beneath the open windows with a lot of imps lined up to be mowed down. Loved that bit. Just let that chaingun fly! The design of the interior is gorgeous as well. I like the background with the far off base. Give you a good sense of being somewhere. Too bad there weren't any Cacos to use up all that nice space. Or the new floating blue baddie.

Which, I enjoyed quite a bit. They look like angry floating blow fish with teeth who have exploding electricity balls and drop health potions.... bwaaaaahahahaha, sweet. Snake men and floating angry bluefish. This is a trip! Also, it took my a long time to realize that when the snake men die, they blow up and cause radial damage much like an exploding barrel would. Hah!

The little bit outside was okay. Nice to have something to do out there finally. Climbing into your space ship is always a neat feature. I would've preferred rocks instead of boxes, but ah well.


MAP12 - “Crash Landing”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


Crash landing? Where? I see a blue key, but where is my ship??


Another mood filled midi, almost like a Hellbound map. The color and tone here gets much darker. Especially when you see the weird creepy blood fused tech in the health cubbies.

The tech base sections are really well done, even with a mix of spikey plants. I liked the lighting used in those areas. Especially in side rooms with the oscillating ceiling lights. Just a good choice of colors and details.

I thought the slowly lowering switch for the plasma rifle was pretty cool. Needed the red key which was staring right at your back if you missed it. Very glad to have that weapon if we're going to start facing Revs without a double barrel problem solver. I can take them with chainguns too but that's not nearly quick enough.

To get that red key, the fire room was kind of weird at first, but if you just jump in and start running circles around everything... it really works well!

The exit was my favorite so far. Just the thought of having to jump in some red slop and wade to the next area provides a nice exploratory feeling.

[Demtor]

JudgeDeadd said:

MAP06: Home

That's a city? Looks almost like a train depot to me. There's one building with a neat if deadly security system... wonder what's that fish-shaped thing on the ground there though.

Hah, that must be a pressure plate for the security system? This is a funny little detail I missed. Must have played through that map about four different times too. What a weird obsession this author has with crushing ceilings.

JudgeDeadd said:

@Demtor: I'm fairly sure the note says "Gone to Mars <3"

Ah, I can see it now. Thanks.

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP11: Lunar Escape

More Lunar base-crawling in an overwhelmingly blue environment with a creepy electronic track providing the backing. The blue cacodemon-kin that fires bouncing bullets and explodes into health potions is an entertainingly quirky addition to the bestiary.

MAP12: Crash Landing

A fun little technological map that brings back the intense reds of demonic subversion as interpreted by Echelon - increasingly there's a sense that this particular flavour of Hell is so alien that human eyes simply don't (or can't) perceive it properly, hence the colour-satured environments with their overtones of unreality.

[Demon of the Well]

^^ The note says "gone to Mom's. <3" ;)

[Demtor]

Waaaait a minute... you're telling me that our slacker Echelonguy has a kid and is perhaps divorced? I smell a sitcom!

[Demon of the Well]

Map 13 -- Shortcut - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Obligatory sewer map here, continuing the relative strengths of the previous level. Again rather grim and gritty in tone, it's immediately clear that the subterranean route is not as demon-free as one might've hoped, little skull-totems and half-eaten corpses being immediate signs of the presence of squatters from the otherworld. Once again the level shape and structure are very basic here, and once again some new assets debut, mainly in the opening moments, to help the proceedings maintain some sense of diegetic freshness. The opening tunnels are lined in filthy green concrete composite eaten through with ratholes and other surface damage, and a darkened imp-nest off of the main tunnel bears a colorful bit of graffiti designed by a member of the community (which one is not terribly difficult to guess in this case ;) ) as a part of Sverre's "Pimp My Textures" event, the first of many we'll eventually be seeing. On top of the generally simple construction, here we see a return of some of the fine-grain sector detailing used for flavor in the earlier parts of the mapset, with some of the best 'sector blood' I've seen seeping out of the entry point, and features like flickering sectors seen through ragged tears in otherwise 'solid' midtextures and pixel-minute braces on the walkway adding a sense of depth to scenery. The main chamber features some stylized blood-spout fonts suggesting something horrible deeper underground, and the CEMENT/piping resting chamber on the east side bears some of the set's more elaborate room-shaping to this point (somewhat masked here by the low ceiling and deep shadows), but all in all it's that first small area which makes the biggest impression.

Gameplay is again pretty simple stuff, which is of course to some degree a function of the continuous balance (between finding various secrets, there has literally not been a single combat engagement to this point where I've not had the protection of a blue armor vest), but overall design is for the most part still just lobbing underhand pitches. The biggest fight is the fracas which potentially breaks out in the central junction if you breach/assault it aggressively, with mancubi bursting out of floor grates and small zombie squads emerging from alcoves along the back wall. All things considered, what we're dealing with here is still little more than child's play, but that extra little edge of designed malice which started slowly seeping into the proceedings in the previous map is still present here, with a cheeky hell knight gangbang trap prosecuted by sneaky silent fast-raise bars upon entering the eastern chamber, and some phasing flankers as a final small barb as one prepares to enter the western/exit area.

Map 14 -- The Lodge - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
The mysterious Lodge gives the impression of being some sort of cloak & dagger secret society, dabbling in teleportation technology (and perhaps more abjectly occult subjects?) from the secluded sanctuary of the dour old early 19th century manse which houses their establishment. The layout here marries the mapset's generally simplistic geometry with its representational design slant in a way that reads a lot more naturally than in most previous maps, which tended to use spots of prop-detailing in the context of very vague/abstract bounding spaces, and more of the ZDoom engine's capabilities are on display as well, particularly the over/under walkway leading into the back of the building--note here that monsters can path freely both over and under this 3D bridge, and can even move over each other along the Z axis as a result (though the way the scenario is laid out this is unlikely to be something you'll actually witness). The brooding green city masonry that is something of a mapset signature is the predominant material element, but again some specialized new art assets are used to help flesh out the location, ala the barbed wire around the compound's perimeter walls or the musty old scarlet curtains and rugs lining the main entry halls. Sticklers will note that the workmanship is again not entirely immaculate--there's another rather blatant failure of perspective out of the south window of the exit antechamber, for instance--but on the whole this is one of the set's most convincing presentations thus far.

Action is also a little more engaging here, I felt, continuing the slow but significant upward trend. The main fight again occurs early on, as you must try to breach the heavily defended building through its front door. This is a doorway/threshold fight, strictly speaking, but it's a strong example of the type (yes, they do exist!), presenting a genuinely heated firefight as you swing from side to side and pour fire through the creatures piling out of the front door while teams of shotgun-toting miscreants fire into their own little Murder Alley from the side windows. It's easy to soak a lot of attrition here unless your techniques are very precise (or the RNG gods are feeling particularly benevolent), so some may be inclined to charge right into the lodge, chaingun/plasma gun blazing, which also plays fairly well, with gasbags emerging in ambush and many of the creatures blinking erratically back and forth between the two French wings via the pair of teleport pads located in them. The sense of cracking a fortified location continues throughout, ala the chaingunners in murderholes facing the natural chokepoint presented by the elaborate suspended gantry leading into the building's back half. Clusterfiends also make a fairly strong showing here, the ricochet property of their projectile attacks (do they even have a melee?) being more of a factor in the many-angled confines of the Lodge interior than in the spacious surroundings of the lunar base map where they were first introduced.

[40oz]

Its funny to see people writing reviews that take far longer to read than to play. :)

[Spectre01]

MAP13 - “Shortcut”
Sewer map. Also, it's possible to fall in/die to the Mancs and Snakes that rise up later from those blood pools with the steps.

MAP14 - “The Lodge”
A small apartment complex in the green brick style we've been seeing with some fancy curtains inside. Not sure why this is a place for some high powered teleporter but there it is. Got that pcorf exit Baron to balance out your cell supply.

[baja blast rd.]

40oz said:

Its funny to see people writing reviews that take far longer to read than to play. :)

:D

[baja blast rd.]

"Shortcut" (13)

Echelon is hitting its groove, finally. This one was kind of spooky, thanks in no small part to a well-fitting background track. Also there is something quite frightening about some of the design motifs: the repeated pattern of flaming squares, the HK room with its multiple tiers and tight quarters in blood and shadow. The four HK encounter marked the first time in the set I felt threatened, and I finally whipped out the plasma rifle. Later on, a surprise contingent of revenants greeted me when I charged past the pinkies to take care of the pain elemental. Good stuff. It looks like the vipers do in fact trigger infighting.

"The Lodge" (14)

These last two are big enough to satisfy me (twss!). Another cool map. The overhead looks very much like something out of the first installation of Scythe. Also the first map where the gameplay is somewhat interesting in itself. Enemies can phase around in the lodge's lobby between a couple of teleporters, which the player can also take. The constant noise of teleportation was quite disorienting, which added a lot to the map's tension in the earlygoing. The visuals are also unique for a Doom setting. Those lush red curtains are contrasted by the drabness of most of the interiors -- this is clearly a third-rate joint that is fooling probably no one but the most naive of patrons, but perhaps the previous owners thought otherwise. Funny stuff. It's also amusing how so many of the small windows have a hitscanner poking out.

[Voros]

MAP14 - The Lodge
HMP - continuous

Good map. Big-ish building. Ooh, it uses one of Freedoom's MIDI tracks! This map is pretty satisfying with its good detailing and thing placement. The Chaingunners in those windows were a damn surprise though.

MAP23 - Stone Web
HMP - continuous

My first impression of this map was "Oh no." Lots of thin cracks acting as bridges, over several floors too. Map pretty much made me feel like I was in a cave or something underground. The first Cyberdemon is also introduced here too. Feeling disheartened, I randomly ran around the map, hoping to find the exit. Found it, great map, can play again, won't play again.

[SleepyVelvet]

Voros said:

"Oh no." Lots of thin cracks acting as bridges, over several floors too.

This is my favorite type of map :)

[Salt-Man Z]

Voros said:

MAP14 - The Lodge
...
MAP23 - Stone Web

Um, you went from MAP14 right to MAP23? (You're like a week early, dude.)

[Demtor]

MAP13 - “Shortcut”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


Sewer map! I never tire of these. The exposed wiring in the wall that flickers was very cool.


Right away these hanging slimy green skulls stand out much like these hanging skull lamp clusters which were used before. The skull kid graffitti was a funny touch. This wad has tons of new textures and oddities all over the place making for a very unique feel. Oh and don't forget to look back behind you at the entrance. Cool stuff there.

The big red blood fountains with steps make for a fun area to fight in... until they get used against you, heh. The area you get trapped in with 4 hell knights was a good challenge with space and very dark corners which hide exploding barrels. The four snakes that come at you from the dark can catch you off guard. Dirty pairing of a PE with pinkies and revs waiting at the side. I aggroed them all at the same time... whoops. Lol. I ran a lot of circles up and down and a around those fountains... whew. Glad there was a hidden blue armor as I needed it at that point. Wasted rockets on the final baron instead of going up the other side and using the barrels to help. Bah!


Map14 - “The Lodge”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


The new sky texure really shines here with the barbed wire.

That sky texture looks so good that the exit room puts it on full display in weird invisible wall sort of way beneath the red drapes. I noticed too that so far all of the sky textures in each episode serve as various end map stats backgrounds in some way or another. It's very good custom artwork.

I've also got a running album of all the story text and the background choices there are interesting too.

Ok, on to the map design. Urrrrgh, the tiny windows here are the worst. Shotgun guys you can't see sniping at you. Chaingunnners hiding out in the dark. All arranged tight areas with lots of other things coming at you from many angles. VERY aggravating. For how small this map was, I found it a very frantic and bloody affair.

This lodge has some nice interiors with lots of more weird looking green bricks and water underneath a walkway along with some awesome lighting and a winding stairway back up. The blue electric fish really show what they can do here, damn. They can hurt if your'e not careful and there are lots of them here to surprise a player multiple different times.

The secret server room had a cool look with the lighting mods I use. It was a nice touch with the automatic lights coming on once you enter. Lost souls do seem to love their server rooms.

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP13: Shortcut

Neat little sewer crawl here with a good balance of dark and claustrophobic tunnel combat versus a large arena in the middle more suited for pitched battles and larger-scale combat, with a mixture of low-tier shotgun fodder and big bullet sponges to keep the pace varied. It almost feeds odd when this WAD is doing something more conventionally Doom-like given its other quirks.

MAP14: The Lodge

The 'local lodge,' the intermission text says. Some kind of Masonic order, maybe, with a fondness for dabbling in technology rather than ritual? Either that or something doesn't translate neatly between English and Dutch.

Definitely as close to a Masonic hall as anything else, yeah - odd that Echelonguy would be so familiar with it, perhaps he's a member? Anyway, this is mostly a case of "storming the castle," investigating its elegantly appointed hallways, its gloomy cellars, its... server room, I guess? And the intermission text is right about teleportation technology being toyed with here, which lets the monsters dance around during your initial attempt to breach the gate and also serves as a path to thenext level.

[rehelekretep]

some more runs through maps 09-12 :p

[Pirx]

MAP11 - “Lunar Escape”

on the moon, you have to make your way to a shuttle parked on the lunar surface, it's visible from the corridor you start in. after some skirmishes with imps and humans in a mostly blue textured area you meet the second custom enemy, a kind of fat fish with big teeth that pukes ball lighting, and these balls bounce back from surfaces. there's only 2 or 3 of them. get the key and get out to the shuttle.



MAP12 - “Crash Landing”

more sinister than the maps so far, a drab base with partially blocked doors, crates, and one large area in flames, or is it being transformed into hell? ran here into the first mancubus and revenants (two of them) and punched them just because, although i had picked up the first plasma gun.



MAP13 - “Shortcut”

shortcut is through sewers, very nice detailing here despite the simple architecture, thanks to some custom textures and seeping nukage and blood. imps dwell in the sewer. then some arena-like hall, a trap with some knights who can be rocketed from above the stairs if you react quickly, followed by another trap with vipers, their closets opening can be heard. btw, the vipers definitely infight with other monsters, and are attacked by those they hit.



MAP14 - “The Lodge”

a teleport facility that looks like it has been placed in a old manor with mossy green walls and heavy red curtains, now that's a combination. entering is a bit annoying since all inhabitants will congregate behind the door, the imps block you from getting in quickly while the sergeants shoot at every pixel of you they can see from the windows, turning this into a game of sniping at windows. anyway it gets more dynamic when you're inside, with several of these electrofishes making for in interesting fight dynamic, since simply sidestepping, as with other projectile throwers, is not enough, you have to watch out for their shot bouncing back. getting the red key summons even more of them, and they infight easily with some nobles. meanwhile, the cellar (full of water) is a similar, interesting design as the sewer, with good use of textures and shapes.

[Salt-Man Z]

I gotta say, maps 11-14 are all solid, and about where I think the megawad really starts to hit its stride.

[Demtor]

MAP15 - “Factory Floor”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. - W. H. Auden


Hah, hope you didn't try and grab that shotgun right away. I veered left at the walls to look for secrets, then turned around to find the floor was missing! Lol! Another trap, foiled.

I don't know why, but the green armor is like a colorful decoration here.

What a cool looking factory with some very disgruntled workers. Well hey there, finally some neat rock designs. Especially leading up to the yellow key (disc) after you shoot the switch to bring them to life. Although some of the repeating textures and straight angles make them look bad.

One of the shorter maps with a tiny bit of exploring the rocks. Very easy for the most part with a couple Revs at the end. Good breather from the last map.


MAP16 - “Haunted Hood”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


What a cool looking area!

Beauuuutiful music. Wishlist by Ribbiks. Bravo sir! This one finally made me figure out how to get Slade to work and extract some Doom wad midis. Time to go back and grab some of my other favorites. Like THT's Map 20 - Sky Pillar with Legion of the lost remix by Eris Falling. Love it.

The wall murials are really neat and add some life to the otherwise bland green walls. Just a very cool underworld sort of slum with varied bits of graffiti all over next to other worn down areas with window ledges and trees. I like the use of the green slimy skulls hanging from them too. Nice touch.

Another new enemy type joins the crowd. This time it's another fat armored piranha only this time it's yellow who coughs up armor and it's energy ball spreads differently. If you take a blast of his energy to the face, you will definitely feel it. Most of the action takes place around this park area. Careful grabbing that green armor too, Revs are probably not a welcome sight when you need armor. Weird that instead of benches or something there are UAC boxes. The oddball looking doors are fitting at least to the rest of the area. I'd rather they were just Doom doors, but Echelon loves being different and that's fine.

The Archvile makes it's first appearance rather unceremoniously with his back to the door and a Baron trying to get around him. (Mooooove!!) The second AV went down pretty easy to some lucky rockets but... them's the breaks Mr. AV with your Rev bodyguard. I see what you tried doing there!

Cool looking sewage trap. That one got me good. Not too rough though. More or less just a fun surprise.

The exit passage past the blue door is pretty ominous looking. So far in Echelon, the map to map variety is quite a varied experience. At this point I never know what to expect, which is good.

I liked this map a lot. Varied combat with a surprise imp horde here and there. Some traps and AV trickery. Hitscanners, a Rev ambush, Arachnotron mixed in with a few more floaters. Couple of hiding snakemen. Just a lot of good usage of what little space there is.

[Salt-Man Z]

MAP15 was the first level to give me fits, as I started with very low health coming off MAP14, and after just surviving that initial trap, I had to face a room sneaky with revvies and hitscanners. Oof.

In MAP16, the green skull clusters hanging in the trees threw me off for the longest while, as they count as kills

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP15: Factory Floor

There's a nasty little trap to start this one off, plunging a careless player into a lava-filled under-chamber arranged in a way that can catch you off guard if you're still thinking in terms of largely vanilla layout and capabilities rather than ZDoom's ability to place spaces above one another. The primary threats present in the level's main spaces are revenenats; I didn't find the flight of cacodemons outside to be too much on the dangerous side, though they do a good job of drawing the player's attention away from sneakier threats, big and bright-red floating orbs that they are.

MAP16: Haunted Hood

Green is the dominant colour once again (this seems to be part of the visual theme of Echelon's city maps, just as the moonbase emphasised deep blue) as the player makes their way through a run-down courtyard and its surrounding sewers and utility rooms. Another new flying enemy makes its debut here, this time a yellow variation on the previously-encountered 'blue cacodemon,' only this one spits plasma balls that split in two for the rebound, and it seems to soak up more fire too.

[Aquanet]

MAP11: Lunar Escape

Echelon starts to spread its wings, and the run of levels to follow is really great. In a relatively support-and-detail focused era, 11's big monochrome spaces are edgy in their own right. They hold my attention without feeling retro.

MAP12: Crash Landing

There's a proper city facade, but you can barely see it through the flames in the on-fire room.

MAP13: Shortcut

Cool map. The multiplied bloodfall pyramids feel a bit underused, more enemies could be placed on top of them.

MAP14: The Lodge

The triangular-ish rooms you enter into have a way of throwing surprises at you, and I had some good fights. Again the green building textures are used to great effect. A lodge is a vague enough concept to entertain some mystery.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 15 -- Factory Floor - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Really not a whole lot to this one, though I suppose it certainly looks more substantial in comparison to some of the early maps. Depicted is a diminutive industrial building of oil-stained green iron (with a few more spots of community-made graffiti here and there) clinging to an equally scrawny island of barren shale floating in the middle of a molten sump--somehow, one suspects that OSHA probably had more to do with the factory's decommissioning than the present Hell-invasion. The most notable structural feature is probably the narrow metal gantry suspended over the work floor, though despite the ZDoom engine's ability to have monsters path freely over and under it its actual role in the proceedings is both limited and highly conditional. Sloped sectors also stealthily show up for the first time here (unless there were some even more stealthy ones I missed earlier) in the surrounding rocks/hills acting as the playspace boundary; this is an extremely minor feature, but it does underline the impression that the set is starting to take fuller advantage of engine capabilities as we move farther into the running order.

Action here is, perhaps predictably, more or less a non-factor, a few stumbling weaklings, a couple of cacodemons outside, and a skeleton or two hanging out by the exit. About as flavorful as plain oatmeal. The one big exception to this is of course the opening pitfall booby trap, which is mostly harmless given how quickly and easily it can be escaped, but nevertheless quite the jolt to the ol' ticker the first time all the same. The metal gantry mentioned above serves a nominal purpose in that it allows one to reach another RL and to hit the gunswitch granting access to the redesigned yellow key (looks something like the "MO Disk" item from the original Resident Evil, I thought), without having to adjust the viewpoint, but I reckon many players will just mouselook for this purpose (and no reason not to in this set's case, really). Otherwise, it's wholly uninvolved in the rudimentary action, and soon forgotten, which unfortunately has been the case with a great many of the engagements in this first half of the game.

Map 16 -- Haunted Hood - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
More flavor to this one, fortunately. Still under 100 monsters, and still a very short map, but monster density here is higher, with the first area and its unwholesome little park (note the unholy 'fruit' on the tress!) making for a larger mashup fight. Attempts to break into the side areas early will stir up more creatures, including the game's first arch-vile, framed as a sort of jumpscare. Another new monster, the mindfiend, debuts here as well; similar in visual design to the clusterfiend, its attack is fairly formidable, a large energy projectile that explodes into a smaller semi-radial pattern of bolts (think the wendigos from Hexen) upon striking a solid object. This complicates dodging in most basic types of areas, and the initial projectile is potentially extremely damaging, but the monster's most threatening attribute actually seems to be that it has a fairly hefty amount of HP and thus often can't simply be burst down before its attacks come out, given Echelon's weapon balance. The northerly reaches of the map, consisting of a little perambulation around the blue key's area through some narrow corridors, doesn't really work as well; monsters from the elevated BK area don't enjoy very effective vantage and will likely be killed from outside, making the actual breaching of the BK room a few moments down the line something of a minor anticlimax.

Quite like the atmosphere of the map, though--very cool music track, one of the best from its batch of Ribbiks creations. The fatalistic, pensive tone here sits well with the presentation, a dingy green slum or 'project' with a sad little poisoned park festering in the night air at its center. Apart from the monsters roaming about and the sinister growths on the park's trees (which are subtle enough to be missed as a detail, I think I only really noticed them the first time due to an autotargeting coincidence), overt infernal corruption is not really evident here in the way that it has been in other recent maps. Yet, the air of the place is still very sinister, somehow, with all manner of ominously suggestive graffiti, some obvious and some in very out of the way places, to be taken in by the careful observer--it seems as though some of the former residents of this place foresaw the demonic invasion long before it occurred, and there's a poignant sense of inner urban occult at play, ala films like Candyman and literary works by China Miéville or the like. Pretty unique.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 17 -- Neon - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Hey, look, wanton and gratuitous violence just for the sake of it! 'bout damn time, says I. "Neon", in layout terms, is two short corridors joined at a perpendicular angle, lousy with fodder-class alien vagrants for the player to steamroll through. This is the most elementary of corridor-shooters, and even with my tendency for longwindedly pouring over minutiae there's really not much depth or nuance to be teased out of this; the map loads, you shoot a barrel, you make a left turn, and then you stroll forward and hold down the trigger until the map ends a couple of minutes later. Other than the lone hell knight perched up high at a blind flanking angle a few virtual yards away from mapstart and the 4-5 imps in alcoves looking down over the grassy little side-yard where the yellow key/disk is found, there's nary an occasion to ever turn around. The action is oddly satisfying for what it is--fun to fire 100 plasma rounds or so down the main alley and watch as the crowd is rapidly incinerated by it and by the inevitable explosions of a few barrel clusters. In a way this is welcome, and yet also somewhat revealing--is the first half of the WAD really so bereft of real action sequences that something like this comes off as a breath of fresh air....?

Since the layout is mainly just a couple of narrow, seedy alleyways, there's not really much to discuss as far as architecture goes; the most elaborate bit of sectorcraft is in the semi-subtle pentacle highlight on the ground near mapstart. Visual character here elides from the usage of the set's signature grimy green textures alongside a few traditional stock Doom II 'city' materials, mainly modwall and concrete. The marquee element is the various neon signs hung over the streets, and a couple of new grafittos (apparently this locale has been informally dubbed "Beat Street" by some unknown artist); some of the signs are humorous in nature, others more strange than anything ("Phoodus?"), but it's evident that this pool is not nearly as deep as the one from which the graffiti is being pulled, as even over the course of this very short map there's a lot of repetition in these assets.

Map 18 -- Possessed Plaza - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Another welcome changeup in style here: rather than being a very short map set in a tiny space, this is a very short map set in a much more expansive one, taking place as advertised in an airy open plaza containing many large, ostentatious, vaguely Georgian-looking structures (to me, they all look like either major municipal buildings or posturing banks) divided by an irregular network of waterways, of all things. While the principal construction material is again the moss-green plate/concrete suite, somehow the impression is of a space much less squalid than the other parts of the city we've seen previously, which I would chalk up to the stately architecture and to the 1-2 punch of deep blue contrast from the waterways and the sky. The open air locale, independent of all other aesthetic factors, also likely has something to do with it; claustrophobic spaces tending seem more soiled as they naturally do. Even the graffiti dotted here and there (mostly around the periphery) is decidedly more happy-go-lucky in tone than the spraypainted doomsaying found in the hood, I thought, and if you take the time to stroll around and look at it you'll continue to see pieces you've never seen before, and a few little emergent jokes ("Frag the SYSTEM" -- walk three steps -- "Defrag the system", etc.).

The level's 50 monsters don't really seem to quite fill out the space, perhaps expectedly at this point, but here the pitch of things reads in a little more of an authentic IWAD vein, I thought, in contrast to many earlier levels which read more like patronizing preschool nappy/story-time outings. Most of the monsters are set up to fire from the various buildings, which markedly limits the 'growing mob' phenomenon but for practicality's sake is just as well, as the unusual waterway plan would heavily curtail the mobility of biped-type creatures anyway. A decent numbers of flyers are present to compensate to some degree (no mindfiends or pain elementals, though, oddly), and even with the limited staffing there's some decent crossfire early on. Also it's fun to run and jump around at will here, might as well since the mapset allows this. Spacious plan aside, at base it's still a very small and short map, however, and so actual progression is very simplistic--the early impression as one just enters the level is of a sandbox of sorts, but the order of events is very rigid/linear, as most of the buildings cannot be entered/climbed upon without first possessing the correct security card, so the impression of non-linearity is paper-thin at best.

Another note concerning the secret here--it contains a very valuable/powerful item in the context of Echelon's overall thing balance and so is very much worth the time the search for it takes, even moreso than the early plasma rifle from earlier in the set.

[baja blast rd.]

"Factory Floor" (15)

3D floors (and slopes and colored lighting, for that matter) in most ZDoom maps I've played tend to be used haphazardly. The author makes a map that would otherwise be perfectly at home in a classic format, and then suddenly there is a crude 3D floor, almost as if the author put it in just to test the feature. This map reminds me of that -- it's the first in the set to make such overt use of the feature, and it comes off as more of a quirky curiosity for the sake of it than anything that actively adds to the action or the aesthetic. The brightly lit rocky outdoor region is the first of its kind in the mapset as well, but I liked this. With so many radsuits, it would have been nice if there was a bit more combat outside, however. Not a highlight, but at least it's not a stub level.

"Haunted Hood" (16)

Cool setting! I'm a fan of greenery, as anyone who has been playing my recent-ish maps knows ;). I think the action could afford to be a bit more hectic in the opening moments, to parallel map09 and map14, but not so bad. The yellow key (or CD, lol) is hidden in plain sight and grants you another blue armor. I like these blue armors! But one of the main luxuries afforded by ZDoom format is the availability of new powerups and such, and it would have been nice to encounter something like that, although I suppose that is asking too much.

"Neon" (17)

Fun little map, unified by its love of low-tier monsters and barrels! It also has some of the verticality that I was calling for early on in map07 or whatever it was. The secrets are easy to find in this map as long as you look at the automap, but amusingly enough I did not find a computer area map! Maybe that little bit of irony was intended.

"Possessed Plaza" (18)

This one would feel kind of like a skillsaw map if it fielded twice the body count, with some replenishments at the various keys. The upbeat synthy music certainly helps that impression. But I think the similarities start and end at the open tiered layout, the existence of three keys, and the projectile-based turrets. The steps that allow you to navigate from tier to tier lack color contrast and thus blend into the surrounding materials, which meant that the minute or so it took me at the beginning to dispose of 80% of the map's monster count wasn't much like a fun Run 'n' Gun experience -- it was mostly standing around in a few places and getting rid of the romaers, and then stumbling around to take out some turretted monsters. It really started to feel a lot more like the Doom II sandboxes where you can kill nearly 80% of the monsters very early on and then be left to hunt for keys and do what is required to exit the map in relative silence, which was my experience, and not a particularly engaging one. A couple of the keys do nothing but lead to other keys, with nothing in the way of an interstitial fight, and I found that both irritating and uncharacteristically videogamey for the mapset so far.

I do like the setting, though.

[Pirx]

MAP15 - “Factory Floor”

an abandoned factory with really nice 3d steel girders. after escaping a pretty obvious pitfall at the beginning, one continues through a large factory hall with said girders and platforms where some workers are not happy about the visit, but are easily shot, especially with mouselook. rocky area with lava and cacos outside, and 2 revs in the exit room - the only time i took a serious hit, because one missile flew in a circle inside the hall and hit me in the back of my head as i thought it went outside.



MAP16 - “Haunted Hood”

entertaining fight in a large in the same graphic style as map15, with some street art on the walls. entertaining because it offers plenty of opportunity for infighting and using hapless imps as fodder for an arach and some of these flying piranhas, including 2 of the yellow, meaner kind that fires exploding plasma (i still tend to back off more than i should because they use the bfg charging sound). they complement the more colorful style of echelon well. but despite this palette, it's a decayed, dire place.


btw, i still don't have an ssg, did i miss it?

[Demon of the Well]

^ Nope, there's no SSG until very late in the game (on skill 4, anyway), and no BFG at all IIRC.

[Spectre01]

MAP15 - “Factory Floor”
Finally seeing some more ZDoom features used in the wad with the walkways and <3slopes<3 outdoors. Very small map with not much of a factory to be found here.

MAP16 - “Haunted Hood”
Yeah, word word. We in da hood now poppin' caps in yo Imp asses! So this is an interesting map in a few ways and has surprises in store. We meet another custom Cacodemon, yellow this time, who has quite a bit more HP and fires a rather devastating projectile that splits in 2 on impact. I ate one direct blast and went from 100 to 20HP, and that's with blue armour. Seems to hit nearly as hard as a rocket. The Archvile also makes his debut, appearing with a Baron and then in a very annoying position where he can revive Revenants and Imps trying to snipe you on some upper ledges. Even playing continuously, I was quite low on rockets and cells here and an SSG would be nice as Shotgun/Chaingun combat against Viles is quite shitty. Also, we got some #dope graffiti and some #OG sector trees in the middle of da hood. #westside #hunnids #cashmoney

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP17: Neon

The focus on 'short but sweet' builds works here, as I suspect the type of action this level serves up - mostly cannon fodder with the occasional tougher morsel to chew your way through as a pacing device, and a handful of elevated snipers - would get irritating quickly on a larger scale. Here, though, it's a palate cleanser, after the tendency toward open spaces in the preceding couple of maps, to be presented with a narrow corridor filled with zombie flesh and told "let 'er rip."

MAP18: Possessed Plaza

And after MAP17 does it's "nothing but one big choke point" thing, we're back into the open here, with most of the level consisting of a single battlefield through which enemies are largely free to roam, from the Aerial Blueberry Squadron to the clusters of imps teleporting back and forth between balcony vantage points. The secret here brought me the first backpack I've found so far on Hurt Me Plenty, though it's entirely possible that I missed one in an earlier secret. Not crazy about the blue 'step' texture that ends up used for both steps and walls around the water-filled bottom level of the map, since on the default renderer it's often hard to tell one from the other until you're pretty close.

[Demtor]

MAP17 - “Neon”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous




Huh, this is a weird kind of city map. Complete with weird music. It was fun... when it was being fair. This tiny murder hole in the upper left, complete pisser. So are these halls where you get cut to ribbons from potentially three different groups of hidden hitscanners. AND if you just dash through it, there's a Rev on the other side. That's just mean.

There was some more interesting graffiti designs. Seems like some people really had a fun time donating art to this wad.

I like the visual theme of neon signs in a night setting, kind of like a back street Tokyo vibe, but it was a bit too sparse and had no doors... anywhere. Not one. Something like this could use a little more detail IMO. The nicer looking building with the potted plants at the end of the map was interesting. Would've liked seeming more structures like that.

All in all, I blinked and the whole thing was over. I left considerably more bloody then when I entered.



MAP18 - “Possessed Plaza”
gzDoom - UV – Continuous


The wall art really adds to the opening view

Now THIS is a city map! Not too complex, not too straight forward. Just a good violent romp around with open areas, cramped stairs, teleporters and back alleys with high walls. Lots of water next to all of these buildings for some reason. Different. Sverre Kvernmo sure is a fan of the dark green on blue but it's hard to argue against when it looks as good as it does. Could've used a few more hordes of baddies though. As good as this map looks, it was missing some teeth. So to speak.