Zalewa

You expect Paul Corfiatis to deliver and he always does.

A rather tame level with low monster count. Correct, playable, simple, straight-forward, well looking (nice tile texturing) and good - that's how I'd describe it. It ends before it begins and there isn't much challenge. It would be a good map for a beginning of a larger WAD.

So, as this is a speedmapping project, what was the time limit for each map? Anyway, some things you can do with this WAD: Contemplate what kind of maps can be made during 1-week 32-map speed mapping sessions. Try to play as recklessly as possible and see how far you can get without dying. Not play it. Visual quality seems to be on par on each map, but the monster placement is crammed - you will often see groups of enemies stacked in neat rows. Not bad, in overall. This can be beaten in less than 30 minutes. In the end, I can't recommend it or not recommend it.

Turd. Avoid.

The first few maps in this WAD are nothing to write home about - just some homages to Doom 2, playable but nothing special, with little expectancy for improvement. But it does improve. A lot. This WAD is fun, fun, fun. The homages to Doom 2 don't follow crude recreations of the same maps, but rather the ideas are taken to create something new. You will recognize some scenery, but its done in an eager way and not just to grab the original map and shift some vertices around. The maps range from great to moderate, but never dipping below that. You will see many different approaches to detailing, combat and layouts. You will find some sandboxy maps, good for exploration. You will also find some maps with pathways paved out for you. It's a fully-fledged Doom game, with all the variety for everyone. Drawbacks: 1. I didn't care for most of the music choices. Doom music was more melodic, here it is mostly shredding. 2. Monster Condo is a bit too much like the original.

For a first attempt, this map is pretty nice. Sure, you'll see the Doom 2-esque texturing, a bland brick maze, a layout that is not exactly smooth to navigate; but the map has a certain charm and in overall plays well, with gradual increase in action intensity. I liked it.

Mild action with mild difficulty but with lots of visual clutter that builds a detailed tech-base map. Very convex layout. Good in overall.

I have recently booted this historical WAD for a full, UV playthrough in single player. How does it fare now in 2017, 20 years after its release? Unfortunately, not so well. This is a WAD full of contradictions. Sometimes the fights are numbingly easy - sometimes you are immediately surrounded by a flock of arch-viles and some rocket moo-moos. Sometimes the action stales and you become a stationary turret, blasting away doors-with-health - sometimes the action is packed with running around and picking off singular targets until you are done. Sometimes the levels have good design - sometimes it's really, really awful. My favourites? The sandboxy city MAP14? The circular MAP15? There are more good levels here, but there are equally many poor ones. I didn't know I remembered so many of those levels from ZDaemon days, where this WAD was hosted to death on many coop servers. This was a strange thing, because there are several places in this WAD where you can get the map stuck - and not only in coop, mind you, but also in single player if you act quickly or rashly. To this day I remember entering servers which were always on a map already stuck, awaiting admin action to push the game forward. With the "vote changemap" feature not being present at the time, it was an odd WAD to host. The authors provided items for 4-player coop, but also forgot that players die in coop and then respawn at the starting point, behind the wall/door/lift that closed forever. This is a classic; a one of the pivoting points of Doom history, but it did not age well. I salute it, but I also walk away from it, glad that I'm done, without desire of ever coming back.

A standard tech-base map. You will be running around with just the shotgun and chaingun, and other weapons seem to be provided as you will collect ammo for them but they're probably hidden in some secrets I didn't find. You won't need them though, as the map doesn't throw high-HP enemies at you and there are only about 150 monsters in total. At the beginning you unfold a spiral of lifts and moving floors, which allows you to arrive at a U-shaped span of outdoors where monster invasion happens. Once you defeat that, you must visit some peripheral areas to collect the keys and find your way to the exit. A commendable feature is that areas are being reused and the courtyard seems to be the central part of the map, albeit serving as a form of crossroads rather than the center around which the action revolves. Visuals are decent and exactly what you would expect from a map with this theme.

WADs like this one are symbolic to the longetivity of this modding scene. No matter what, no matter how long, we'll still be getting those. It's a charming piece, playable but with some odd bumps that stand out. There's one imp stuck on the ledge and one health bottle stuck in a too narrow hole so you can't pick it up. The geometry, at least in maps 01-03, is fully linear and produces only gameplay area without any visual clutter. MAP04 stands in complete contrast to the others and you will see it immediately as you spawn. There's abundance of SSG ammo, armor and to some extent also health, but there's severe lacking of rockets - a common thing among many WADs, probably because rocket boxes give you a small amount of them in comparison to the other ammo boxes. Any player will probably blaze through this map set with no difficulty.

Four years to build this WAD and fourever bind it to idgames/ archive. Fourteen hundred enemies to kill, out of which I did only 700 before giving up. Four weapons - chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, chaingun - these many you will use to kill these 700 enemies unless you're lucky and stumble upon that rocket launcher and that switch that gives you access to it. Four ways (or more) to enter each area. Forty times four combinations of getting lost in these halls of Doom. Four laughs at the description's quote "The layout is not too confusing": ha, ha, ha, ha. Four-walled room which hosts the forlorn blue keycard, sitting there at the pillar, taunting you eternally with its blue presence. (seriously, I noclipped my way through the way that leads up to it and I still don't know how to get it.) (also: "blue" has four letters) I haven't been such confused ever since fourth grade. No rating for this one - only contemplation. In gameplay and effect of awe this is similar to the Dawn of Reality, however whereas Dawn of Reality uses highly realistic environments with lots of attention to detail, here the biggest focus is interconnectivity. The rooms seem to be built around functional purposes in a "realistic" setting, but the detail inside serves only either combat purposes or pure visual clutter to make the rooms "less empty". Despite the huge size of everything, you can get around very quickly. The only long-wided pathway that I found was connected with teleporters that allowed you to skip all the unnecessary running. That said, there are also other one-way teleporters that will move you far away from the area which you were just exploring - so you either need to backtrack, do F3 or do "warp x y" if you're using a ZDoom port. The combat focuses on large amounts of low-health enemies with some stronger ones thrown in to the mix. There isn't a big amount of the latter, given your weak weapon set. 700 enemies in and still I didn't find a super shotgun. This map also uses lots of time-based switches where you need to lower a lift and then jump into a pit to get onto it. If you fail - F3 or backtrack. If you succeed you will most likely only discover that you reached an area that you've already been in before. If I could I wouldn't give this a star rating, so have 5 stars instead.

I rarely see additional maps done for existing PWADs; and these ones here are good. The WAD is quick to beat with rather easy difficulty but the levels have good balance between exploration and action. Some triggers will not be obvious, especially on MAP03, but it's nothing too iritating given the overall small size of the levels. I also liked the puzzle with closing doors on MAP02.

4 stars for 4 maps, but when going in to this, keep in mind that it indulges/awakens masochistic tendencies. Oil your F3 key well, lest it will squeak. Visually the maps are green and based on pillars - the architecture serves the purpose of building arenas to fight the monsters in. The low monster count of each map is deceptive, as they are used in a way that maximizes hurt. Expect all rooms to contain arch-vile & cyberdemon invasion. At least on UV. I don't know how are lower difficulties.

I judge this Whiskey fueled misadventure as way below the quality level of the first IWAD, whereas I consider the first IWAD to be of rather high quality. This is a room-corridor chain with non-orthogonal linedefs, red/green stone textures and next to none sector height variation. Everything is very bare and shooting is straight-forward. I would rate this 1 star if 0 stars were still available, but they are not, so have 2 stars instead.

Automap is very unfriendly in this map of hexagonal shapes that form terrain taken straight out of UT2k4 map editor but with less curves and more sectors. I find this map... entertaining. It's nice. The happy guitar shredding music makes me think of Rainbow Dash soaring through clouds.

I like me some Egyptians. This WAD plays very ok, looks exactly as advertised and has consistent gameplay. Visuals are a bit bare but maybe this fits the theme?

Amateur design reeks from this. You kill enemies with a bow that is more powerful than super shotgun - you can kill a hell knight with two arrows. Who knew? Doomguy should have taken that bow when invading Hell instead of BFG9000. The bow graphics come from Daggerfall. Locations have some detail and thought put into them, but it's not enough and they don't look good. It's all very rough and progression is room-to-room based. I stopped playing once I reached the foggy halls maze where you can go anywhere but all paths except from the right one will teleport you back. I didn't find it. I'm happy that you know your dungeon crawler design, but I'm playing Doom here. Not recommended.

This map? One big meh. It's a fairly large Doom 1 map clocking at about 230 monsters on UV, but I stopped playing at about 130. It has certain charm, considering how you can explore the rooms that seem to imitate a real-world location, but at the same time it's bare, squarish, contains inescapable death pits that look like progress and it's easy to get lost in the very small area. Not recommended.

Excellent, hands down. There is certain ammo tightness, especially in the earlier maps, but I think it makes this WAD even greater. A must-play.

What a bloody good map set. Excellent use of GZDoom visuals. The maps are atmospheric and gloomy, they have great architecture, there's good use of GZDoom features and high difficulty. Top WAD! Multiplayer could be made to work if respawn scripts were present to reassign PlayerTID after player death.

Quote from the text file: I'm really not sure what to think, really, because I have no idea what's the author's idea of "everyone else's UV", but I think it's not the same as mine. The description consists of telling the player over and over again to play this on HMP, not on UV, and so I did. The maps will either punish you with wailing revenants, arch-viles and other monsters that crush you from all directions in a wild orgy that even this new Westworld show would be jealous of, or, you will be stuck trying to figure out which piece of the level that looks the same as every other piece of this level has opened up after you have crossed over an invisible linedef or pushed a strange button. I look at all these beautifully crafted sectors and think how mapper has put lots of effort into pressing CTRL+D and dragging vertices and aligning textures and then I can't think of these levels as nothing else but not fun to play... for me. This probably means that I'm a piss poor player and that's okay.

I have played at least 2 of those maps before, but I don't know where I got them from. This wad will tear you apart, tear you down and tear you to pieces and then it will leave you in tears. The maps are good, but I'd recommend cautious expectations or using lower difficulty levels.

The visuals are very blocky here, plain and rough and brown. Lot's of brown. But they work; somehow they create a nice skyscraper architecture. The gameplay is constant action, with enemies sniping at you from long distances - both horizontal and vertical. There is at least one dickish Arch-Vile placement. This is a good map with minimal geometry - an example that detail clutter can be avoided.

I like this particular ZDoom level. It uses ZDoom features in ways that enhance gameplay. Level visuals are interesting, if the proportions are a bit off; I'm not sure why, though. Texturing - good. Detail - good. Layout - not bad, with some verticality, but not much. Coop play is impossible due to missing player starts but I edited those in and we had some coop fun. Boss battles are orchestrated good with little helpers coming out that prevent circle strafing and hiding behind cover.

Surprisingly difficult WAD with very well done graphics. Quake textures work very well with Doom, maybe they work even better than with Quake. Most maps play well, the layouts are interesting and the resources are scarce. The few last maps leave a bit of a bad aftertaste, unfortunately, as difficulty progresses into downright shitting down your neck. See that Cyberdemon? You're gonna walk into an invisible teleporter that will teleport you right next to it where it will shoot a rocket in to you. See that circular, small room where you have to avoid enemy fire? Part of the floor will soon lower into unescapable death pit. Stupid.