FATAL
June 24th, 2007, 11:47 AM
Map 29- Strayed from Sanity.
While playing this map I remembered DoomedAce, a member of these forums that has been away for a while... I first remember his Rants and Raves stuff when saying his name on the txt file and later into the map I started to remind myself of him each and every minute: was him that evil to craft a map like this?. But wait, we´ll get to this evil later...
Strayed from Sanity is a map whose name fittingly defines the state of mind of the player once he finishes: the map is set in a large, red and green hellish structure thas has the makings of a church or temple. This structure is largely decorated with blood, flesh, skin and red-hot lava and intelligently connected with an array of well thought out underground caverns... Most of the map takes place in the dark, sometimes near pitch black, other times lighter but always barely enough to see around the corner with the only exceptions of some outdoor sections, lit it by the blood red sky. The whole layout itself is beautiful and florishes with curved fleshy walls, cracks and details that, without being excessive, create the adequate atmosphere for the map that just stands between you and your final foe... Everything in this map is beautiful (in the sense that all these evil imaginery can be worth beholding) and well crafted as far as the eye can see: there are even little homages to original Doom maps or even a strange, black monolith that plays a crucial role in the solving of the map during its first minutes.
All this wonderful layout is visited by constant backtracking, discovering or opening of areas in a way in wich the map seems much bigger than it actually is when you come to an end: connectivity is excellent and while there´s not always a clear sense of where to go next there are landmarks, like key-locked doors or different height levels that will help and guide you in your quest for the exit... Expect to do a lot of backtracking and also expect some mindlessly wandering around and getting lost in the caverns while you try and guess what your next step is.
Promising?. Indeed... So far we´ve talked about the great things about this map but we also said that this map will, in the end, stray yourself from sanity. How´s that?. Well, with a pistol start the very beginning is evil and for a couple of seconds it only gets worse: you´d never guess that shotgunners and chaingunners can cause that much trouble but, what are you expected to do with just a pistol?. Anyway, this first battle is solvable enough to arm yourself and keep on playing through some battles that have, considerably, a lesser difficulty level. You can get you witness a future tricky battle around here but will forget soon enough as you try to guess your way during a good ten minutes just to finally discover a teleporter by pure chance. From this point to its very end the map is just evil: unbalanced foes will be thrown at you in the shapes of legions of imps, many mancubi, revenants, barons of hell, hell knights and cacodemons. Sometimes they will be clearly waiting for you and some others they will teleport at your sides in cheap manuevers as transparent spectres block your only exits in the dark. You will even have this cheerful Archvile moment when a couple of seconds you go like "Hey I am in flames. Cool!. Hey, I am dead!. Cool!" without even knowing what happened... Sounds fun but it is not: at some point it just becomes a save and load festival and the more you get into the map the less and less ammo you seem to have. In the last battles I was not sure if I was supposed to make all those foes infight but little did it matter when the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind made their appearance... Really, do you know these moments when you say "That´s enough!!!"?. I can tell you this map will make you say it like five times. Specially right at the end when the author seems to think "If you got through all that you can manage this too!!"...
If you didn´t figure it out this map never seems to be fair with the player: outnumbered, outgunned, with little resources and space to move the player is expected to break through like 200 powerful foes. It just doesn´t work. At points the player is really forced - read forced - to look for secrets in order to survive the next battles... Some other times you will be blocked by some spectre you can´t see because of the darkness or even by a hanging corpse that blocks your path (but is too high for you to notice it), wich seems to be a common trend in this wad lately... Maybe incorrect testing?.
Anyway, I´d like to love this map for its gorgeous looks, evil atmosphere and good layout and planning. But I just can´t. I have to be fair and say that the gameplay totally kills this level. Cheat if you want to in order to finish it (or just run, as I did to avoid cheating). Cheat a lot to get your ammo and health and to be even with your foes as this map was much too difficult and full of cheapness in its battles, even for Ultra-Violence. Serious, don´t feel guilty for cheating or maybe try another difficulty settting (wich I didn´t, by the way... I was much too deep into the wad to change now!) because the difficulty will eat you alive if you don´t. I am so sorry about this map because it was so promising but the fun was missing.
Map 30- Mortis infinitum.
Mortis infinitum is just another "map30" styled level with all its characteristics: you collect all weapons, you find the enormous source of evil, you solve a small puzzle and you pump rockets into the head´s brain until it dies. As the original last level of Doom2, it goes no further than this.
As expected, you will be fighting a legion of hellspawn and some large monsters put in your way whose purpose is to distract you from achieving your objectives. They may succeed a lot of times but it´s only a question of very careful trial and error to finally figure out how to solve the puzzle and end the game. I can´t deny that the puzzle is short but hidden and well thought: though it didn´t take long to take the good direction I tried other approaches several times and always failed... Now that I think about it after having finished all levels the puzzling seems a bit unnecesary here but I guess the author wanted to add his own original ideas to the already worn concept.
It´s curious: there are not such a lot of wads that I´ve played depicting this gameplay in the last level but the idea already feels old: I expected for some kind of different level, maybe just a regular level or a different structure but, in that sense, the level is dissapointing. Also dissapointing are the looks: replace the bloody tech of the original map with green marbles, but keep all the blood and the blocky architecture and you have the outcome of this level. Some details are interesting, like the effect the impaled bodies have in the final room or the gate you enter to get to it but some other things, like enourmous HOM effects at both sides of the monstrous goat -too big to be done on purpose in a map so small to have such a problem- and the overall feeling of "this map took only some hours" detract the pack from having a decent closure.
I just hope future megawads that I review to feature something different in their endings other than the background picture of the closing scene!.
While playing this map I remembered DoomedAce, a member of these forums that has been away for a while... I first remember his Rants and Raves stuff when saying his name on the txt file and later into the map I started to remind myself of him each and every minute: was him that evil to craft a map like this?. But wait, we´ll get to this evil later...
Strayed from Sanity is a map whose name fittingly defines the state of mind of the player once he finishes: the map is set in a large, red and green hellish structure thas has the makings of a church or temple. This structure is largely decorated with blood, flesh, skin and red-hot lava and intelligently connected with an array of well thought out underground caverns... Most of the map takes place in the dark, sometimes near pitch black, other times lighter but always barely enough to see around the corner with the only exceptions of some outdoor sections, lit it by the blood red sky. The whole layout itself is beautiful and florishes with curved fleshy walls, cracks and details that, without being excessive, create the adequate atmosphere for the map that just stands between you and your final foe... Everything in this map is beautiful (in the sense that all these evil imaginery can be worth beholding) and well crafted as far as the eye can see: there are even little homages to original Doom maps or even a strange, black monolith that plays a crucial role in the solving of the map during its first minutes.
All this wonderful layout is visited by constant backtracking, discovering or opening of areas in a way in wich the map seems much bigger than it actually is when you come to an end: connectivity is excellent and while there´s not always a clear sense of where to go next there are landmarks, like key-locked doors or different height levels that will help and guide you in your quest for the exit... Expect to do a lot of backtracking and also expect some mindlessly wandering around and getting lost in the caverns while you try and guess what your next step is.
Promising?. Indeed... So far we´ve talked about the great things about this map but we also said that this map will, in the end, stray yourself from sanity. How´s that?. Well, with a pistol start the very beginning is evil and for a couple of seconds it only gets worse: you´d never guess that shotgunners and chaingunners can cause that much trouble but, what are you expected to do with just a pistol?. Anyway, this first battle is solvable enough to arm yourself and keep on playing through some battles that have, considerably, a lesser difficulty level. You can get you witness a future tricky battle around here but will forget soon enough as you try to guess your way during a good ten minutes just to finally discover a teleporter by pure chance. From this point to its very end the map is just evil: unbalanced foes will be thrown at you in the shapes of legions of imps, many mancubi, revenants, barons of hell, hell knights and cacodemons. Sometimes they will be clearly waiting for you and some others they will teleport at your sides in cheap manuevers as transparent spectres block your only exits in the dark. You will even have this cheerful Archvile moment when a couple of seconds you go like "Hey I am in flames. Cool!. Hey, I am dead!. Cool!" without even knowing what happened... Sounds fun but it is not: at some point it just becomes a save and load festival and the more you get into the map the less and less ammo you seem to have. In the last battles I was not sure if I was supposed to make all those foes infight but little did it matter when the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind made their appearance... Really, do you know these moments when you say "That´s enough!!!"?. I can tell you this map will make you say it like five times. Specially right at the end when the author seems to think "If you got through all that you can manage this too!!"...
If you didn´t figure it out this map never seems to be fair with the player: outnumbered, outgunned, with little resources and space to move the player is expected to break through like 200 powerful foes. It just doesn´t work. At points the player is really forced - read forced - to look for secrets in order to survive the next battles... Some other times you will be blocked by some spectre you can´t see because of the darkness or even by a hanging corpse that blocks your path (but is too high for you to notice it), wich seems to be a common trend in this wad lately... Maybe incorrect testing?.
Anyway, I´d like to love this map for its gorgeous looks, evil atmosphere and good layout and planning. But I just can´t. I have to be fair and say that the gameplay totally kills this level. Cheat if you want to in order to finish it (or just run, as I did to avoid cheating). Cheat a lot to get your ammo and health and to be even with your foes as this map was much too difficult and full of cheapness in its battles, even for Ultra-Violence. Serious, don´t feel guilty for cheating or maybe try another difficulty settting (wich I didn´t, by the way... I was much too deep into the wad to change now!) because the difficulty will eat you alive if you don´t. I am so sorry about this map because it was so promising but the fun was missing.
Map 30- Mortis infinitum.
Mortis infinitum is just another "map30" styled level with all its characteristics: you collect all weapons, you find the enormous source of evil, you solve a small puzzle and you pump rockets into the head´s brain until it dies. As the original last level of Doom2, it goes no further than this.
As expected, you will be fighting a legion of hellspawn and some large monsters put in your way whose purpose is to distract you from achieving your objectives. They may succeed a lot of times but it´s only a question of very careful trial and error to finally figure out how to solve the puzzle and end the game. I can´t deny that the puzzle is short but hidden and well thought: though it didn´t take long to take the good direction I tried other approaches several times and always failed... Now that I think about it after having finished all levels the puzzling seems a bit unnecesary here but I guess the author wanted to add his own original ideas to the already worn concept.
It´s curious: there are not such a lot of wads that I´ve played depicting this gameplay in the last level but the idea already feels old: I expected for some kind of different level, maybe just a regular level or a different structure but, in that sense, the level is dissapointing. Also dissapointing are the looks: replace the bloody tech of the original map with green marbles, but keep all the blood and the blocky architecture and you have the outcome of this level. Some details are interesting, like the effect the impaled bodies have in the final room or the gate you enter to get to it but some other things, like enourmous HOM effects at both sides of the monstrous goat -too big to be done on purpose in a map so small to have such a problem- and the overall feeling of "this map took only some hours" detract the pack from having a decent closure.
I just hope future megawads that I review to feature something different in their endings other than the background picture of the closing scene!.