NuMetalManiak

Review of Czechbox by @Matthias, @Pipicz, @Kloki38, @damned, Sulphurit and jaeden.

the Czech community megawad projects always tend to have the weirdest things some times. the first one I'm familiar with is Beyond The Hell, made exclusively by four Czech Doomers in 2005 but it was one of the more dreadful ones. of course not one of those names I would recognize. the second and more famous one is Zones of Fear, a more recent megawad with several of the mappers who participated in this year's Czechbox. the authors in particular were Damned, who made mostly compact levels with great detail and attention to quirky yet wonderful gameplay; Jaeden, who was more or less over the top with any and all outings being marathon levels to some extents; Matthias, aka enkeli33, who also made big maps but were a little less over the top; and Pipicz, known for making the slaughtermap MAP28 as well as being the creative one behind Bloodstain.

now ZOF definitely had its share of mixed bag and Czechbox isn't as different, but it was a lot nicer to go through than ZOF due to the levels not being huge in any ways. I'm quite surprised at how many maps Damned contributed this time around. jaeden only had a couple or so maps but they weren't big, and Pipicz as usual only contributed one (MAP19) but it was a good one of course. the new mappers, well, Sulphurit's work is amateur, and it seems that they are at the beginning of the mapset just to give the megawad a feeling of "it gets better from here", and indeed it does. Kloki's maps are weird ones, and Matthias, the second biggest contributor, did a number of things that are normal and abnormal. the Kafkaesque world (MAP10) and Orwell's Nightmare (MAP18) are middle episode highlights with cool gameplay, followed by the crate level MAP23 and MAP24 the big arena one. some of these are certainly speedmaps or rehashes, and are treated as such. be mindful of the platforming especially in Damned maps. overall though Czechbox is perhaps the most fun of the Czech wads to go through, even if you do it only once or so.