If Doom 2 were a PWAD, how would you review it?

Doom 2: Hell on Earth - id Software
doom2.exe - Solo Play - 14,604,584 bytes


Do your stuff, Doomworld. /newstuff that is.

Nightmare mode: you can't use the word "average".

Looks nothing like Doom 1.

Haha, great concept. Somebody do it.

The maps in doom2.wad are pretty crappy. Mostly random rooms randomly put together. The resources (sprites, sounds, music, textures) are cool though.

The levels are boring and uninspired, and the new monsters and weapon, while good looking, make the game feel nothing like Doom at all. Avoid unless you're one of those kiddies who cum on non-Doom-like pointless extra content. There are also a lot of resources stolen without a permission from Wolfenstein 3D, which will hopefully get this crap removed from the archives as soon as possible.

You forgot the screenshot of the secret level entrance to show off the horrible texture alignment.

some maps are more intersting to play in DM though, such as map01 and map07, and the new super shotgun easily becomes the preferred weapon of many players.

overall, this megawad is bunch of various maps strung together, some with good playability and others looking bland and underdetailed like they're from 1994 :p

Rumor has it that Doom2 was once a pwad called "Sandy Petersen's Pro Doomer" but Tony hawk took that nomen idea and made millions from it.

You know I've often wondered this myself, though mostly while looking at all the unaligned textures around E1M1.

Doom2.wad starts off wonderfully, lags in the middle around the city maps, builds up again in the later third before crashing to disappointment in the last 2 levels. A few maps are great concepts, such as MAP07, and I will love/hate the Revenant and Chaingun guy for years to come. Mancubus and Archvile are brilliant. The final boss is confusing and lame, though at least it's something different. Better story cohesion and flow from one level to next than most megawads.

This wad is nothing if not ambitious: instead of a normal 8+1-level episode, they made a 30+2 levels one. It also features many new textures, new tunes, and most spectacularly, new monsters and even a new weapon. Sounds good? Yeah, but it falls short.

Let's talk about the monsters first. The first is a new zombie, a fat guy with a chaingun. While still an easily-dispatched threat, they can be dangerous, especially from a distance. When they start firing they don't stop until you get cover, and they're surprisingly accurate. Graphically, though, they're a bit disappointing. They look kinda like something out of Wolfenstein (more on this later), and their death animation looks silly: contrarily to the shotgunner, their sprites retain their weapon, so when they die you see two chainguns, the one they dropped and the one that's part of the corpse.
Then you've got the Hell Knight. Frankly, calling it a new monster is a stretch. You've seen the Baron of Hell, right? Make a palette swap on it, cut its hit points in half, and tada!, you've got the Hell Knight.
Then you've got the Mancubus and the Arachnotron. Behind these silly names hide monsters that are trying to cheapen the bosses from Doom by making them look like just regular mooks on steroid. The mancubus is a big bloated demon that has replaced its arms with cannons. It's slow and spams fireballs like there's no tomorrow. The arachnotron is like a mini spiderdemon. And you've got to wonder what the forces of hell were thinking, because these downgraded bosses have superior equipment to the full version. The mancs have two arm cannons (though admittedly their fireballs are weaker than rockets), the arachs have plasma cannons. Stylistically, these two don't fit with the other demons normal demons; they rob the bosses of their uniqueness.
Next up are the gimmick monsters. The revenant is a tall skeleton (he's like twice as tall as you) and fires homing rockets. It looks silly because it fires one rocket but the sprite has two cannons that shoot at the same time. Huh? The pain elemental is a brown cacodemon (nice sprite edit by the way) which doesn't spit fireballs -- it spits lost souls. They can quickly create a little horde of the critters, which will spend most of their time infighting, but it's still a nuisance. The archvile incinerate you, and you can't dodge it, but the flames don't hurt you until after several seconds when they explode, giving you time to dive for cover. If the archvile can't see you, it can't make the flames explode. How much sense does it do? Not much IMO. And the archvile is a double-whammy gimmick monster: when he's not creating flames-that-don't-burn-but-explode, he resurrects monsters. Areas you thought cleared of monsters can be reinfested entirely if you don't watch it.

Needless to say, these two monsters will wreck the statistics counter at the end of the map. It's easy to get more than 100% kills, even if you actually left some monsters alive in the map. Hmm.

Next up, the new weapon: the supershotgun. With a name like that, you would expect a futuristic fully auto shotgun or something, but it's actually just a double-barreled, break action shotgun. Looks more like something you'd take to hunt fowls rather than a military weapon. But it's a nice weapon for hunting demons, all things considered: it fires two shells at once, and takes twice as long to reload as the pump-action shotgun, and its spread is about twice as wide as the normal shotgun's, but the damage it inflicts is more like three shotgun shots. A good close-quarter weapon, if you have the footwork to dodge counterattacks from the tougher demons. Great for dealing with pinky/spectre swarms, nice for tightly-packed groups of imps and zombies, and also makes fighting barons less tedious. Absolutely sucks for long-range combat, though.

Next up, the maps. You start in a techbase on Earth. It's okay at first, but many of the maps are gimmicky, too. Like, there's this map called "The Crusher" which features a crusher. You've got to flip a switch, and it starts crushing the demon that's behind it. In Ultra-Violence, that demon is a Spiderdemon. Gee, to have a brain that big and to go lie in ambush in crusher? You've also got a map called Tricks & Traps which is just that: gimmicky situations: either you've got a hellspawn-filled room and can trick the monsters into doing your dirty work for you with infighting, or empty rooms that are in fact monster-closet traps. Gimmicky maps like those abound.

For the non-gimmicky maps... After the techbase levels, you get into city levels. What a joke. The sky texture shows improbably large, burning skyscrapers. Other than the perspective problem, the flames and smoke are not animated, so the effect is ruined right there. The city maps where also a terrible choice because it showcases the limitations, rather than the strengths, of the engine. Doom is not a game for attempting to create familiar and mundane architecture. Let's just say that city levels don't look like cities at all. And then you get back to Hell, once again. The common theme of Hell levels is that it has no common theme. You get a techbase in a cavern with nukage falls, then city-level like building, then a more fire-and-brimstony place... Mostly, they're random. The last map is the ultimate in gimmickry: you must shoot rockets in a hole in a wall. There's a convenient elevator with a pile of rocket boxes on it to help you do that. But monsters are constantly getting spawned in the map, and the elevator doesn't stop at the right height for your rocket to hit the hole, you need to shoot just before it finishes climbing up, or jump down it and shoot. In either cases, it all revolves around having expert timing. Which is silly and merely emphasizes that you can't aim up and down.

Now I said I would talk more about Wolfenstein later. The secret levels are recreations of Wolfenstein's E1M1 and E1M9. One Wolfenstein enemy has even been included, the blue nazi. Contrarily to Wolfenstein, they happily infight. The sprite ripping was lazily done, you'll find some stray pink pixels in places which weren't reached by the "magic wand" tool in photoshop or whatever other graphic software they used. And they still have only one rotation for their firing animation, so it looks like they're firing on you even when they're shooting at something apparently "behind" them. It looks stupid. In the "super secret level", to win, you need to kill hanged Commander Keens. Yeah, you have to attack the corpses of defenseless, pixelated children. It would be in very bad taste if it weren't just hopelessly stupid.

To sum up, it had all the resources to be a really great mod, but sloppy mapping work and just weird ideas (what where they smoking?) bring it down.

Also, I expect that every body will start using the new monsters in every map they do now, just because they're available. Urgh. Please don't. They don't really fit Doom.

*standing ovation*

Gez said:

Also, I expect that every body will start using the new monsters in every map they do now, just because they're available. Urgh. Please don't. They don't really fit Doom.

Heh, I love the end of that post.

BEST WAD EVER - 5

You guys really think Doom 2 is crappy? Honestly I think it's better than a lot of the wads we see around here. I think it deserves some credit for some of their better looking maps, such as Underhalls, and Inmost Dens.

Csonicgo said:

Rumor has it that Doom2 was once a pwad called "Sandy Petersen's Pro Doomer" but Tony hawk took that nomen idea and made millions from it.

Hahaha

JohnnyRancid said:

You guys really think Doom 2 is crappy? Honestly I think it's better than a lot of the wads we see around here. I think it deserves some credit for some of their better looking maps, such as Underhalls, and Inmost Dens.

I'd say there are maybe four maps tops worth playing in Doom 2...Inmost dens, Suburbs, Tenements and Living end. Pretty much everything else, while playable, is mediocre at best.

I disagree with Gez. The new monsters and weapon are the HIGHLIGHT of Doom 2. Making maps for Doom 1 is sad, because there are no serious threats like revenants or arch-viles.

printz said:

I disagree with Gez. The new monsters and weapon are the HIGHLIGHT of Doom 2. Making maps for Doom 1 is sad, because there are no serious threats like revenants or arch-viles.

But the point of the thread is that we're supposed to assume Doom 2 is an unofficial PWAD...just like NeoDoom, for example, and Doom 1 is the only "true" Doom. You don't see people mapping for NeoDoom specifically, even though it has even more threatening super hoes with BFGs and what not. ;)

Jodwin said:

I'd say there are maybe four maps tops worth playing in Doom 2...Inmost dens, Suburbs, Tenements and Living end. Pretty much everything else, while playable, is mediocre at best.

Just remember the levels were made in the early 1994.

A substandard effort from accomplished mappers. Must have been a real rush job. Gameplay is all right, but the aesthetics and atmosphere are nothing like that of their earlier stuff.

lareman said:

Just remember the levels were made in the early 1994.

Doom 1 has maps that play a lot better than most of Doom 2, despite being older.

Most of it could have been better, but it beats Doom's e2 and e3 with a big stick.

esselfortium said:

Most of it could have been better, but it beats Doom's e2 and e3 with a big stick.

Yeah, seems like most people are just remembering e1 when they think of Doom 1.

I think of e4 mostly when I think of doom, because that's what I played mostly.

I find E2's levels better than those of Doom II. E2M2 and E2M7 rival anything in Episode 1. Episode 3 can get pretty bad, but even still I find its hell maps are more hellish than those in Doom II. It doesn't help that most of the enemies added in Doom II look more like aliens than demons to me.

esselfortium said:

Most of it could have been better, but it beats Doom's e2 and e3 with a big stick.

I liked every episode of Doom.

Jodwin said:

I'd say there are maybe four maps tops worth playing in Doom 2...Inmost dens, Suburbs, Tenements and Living end. Pretty much everything else, while playable, is mediocre at best.

Thats all? The Gantlet, The Focus, Refueling Base, Circle of Death, Bloodfalls, The Abandoned Mines, The Spirit World? None of those? If those were standalone maps I'd give them pretty good reviews.

WARNING: This wad is an illegally modified IWAD that uses most of the resources from doom.wad. This wad needs to be deleted from the archives ASAP.

If it had been a PWAD it would have been superior to practically anything produced by the community until then, particularly due to the intense game play on many of the levels.

Gez said:
and their death animation looks silly: contrarily to the shotgunner, their sprites retain their weapon, so when they die you see two chainguns, the one they dropped and the one that's part of the corpse.

JohnnyRancid said:

Thats all? The Gantlet, The Focus, Refueling Base, Circle of Death, Bloodfalls, The Abandoned Mines, The Spirit World? None of those? If those were standalone maps I'd give them pretty good reviews.

Eternal's remake of it in Remain1 makes Circle of Death alot better, or maybe I just didn't play the original enough.

Even though so many people hate it, I'm going to say I really enjoy Monster Condo. I seem to like alot of the levels people hate :P

I think American McGee's maps are strongest in Doom 2, though they are mostly the easy starting ones. I wish he'd been involved more in the ending maps. Sandy's quality varies between cleverly planned levels with alot of time put into them, and bare levels with small sector counts in themes it seems he was almost forced to do. Most of Romero's maps are pale shades of his Episode 1 quality, though he later proved with E4M2 that he's still definitely got the knack.

Maybe it's just easier to make good entry-level maps than more difficult maps which appeal to everyone.

myk said:

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Yeah, but that's just one frame, the first in the death animation. On the next frame of the animation, it's no longer there. Compare with the chaingunner which keeps it up to CPOSN.