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This had lots of fun exploratory elements and fancy visuals, but I wasn't so keen on the abundance of dark caves crammed with the larger Doom 2 beastiary. At first it started to feel like a commitment playing this wad with the first few maps leaving much to be desired, but I started having more fun when I reached maps that had more breathing room for running and gunning. The lesser maps really feel like they were early efforts, with some consisting almost entirely of cave crawls - made worse by the fact that many of them have hidden lines on the automap. Another thing to note: Ritenour seems to like putting things very close to the edge like a key or a switch, so make sure you check every corner carefully, as some solutions were very close to a cliff edge. Falling off could spell your Doom, as often the lower cliff ledges damage the player with no escape. There were also very thin ledges which could be climbed, so that was another easy to miss solution. Despite the low points dragging the experience a bit I greatly enjoyed the visual work of crashing waves, a clever skybox and nice island locales with mountainous structures and buildings. It was worth a visit in Doom's earthen vanilla equivalent - and it's quite the achievement for something this old, I just wish I could see where I was going in those darn caves...

here for the seventeenth installment of dwspd, the theme is to build a canyon. like the previous installment, this is a relatively common theme for mapping, therefore the maps are expected to be pretty decent, and well they mostly deliver. once again Fredrik's map is the first one, and it blows everything else out of the water. kind of a bad thing to make it the first map to be honest though, because it could make some players believe that the other maps after it would be just as good, but that won't be the case when you play the rest, as they don't really have as much bite as that one does. to further exemplify that, once again the MAP02 slot is disappointing in comparison, while MAP06 and MAP07 are both unfinished (nothing but layout in MAP06, while it's pretty much impossible to get the red key in MAP07. not the worst to offer, and Fredrik's map serves as an insane opening challenge.

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dwspd's sweet sixteenth installment focuses on the theme of abandoned mines. now that's a good map to make a theme on, MAP26 is a personal favorite of mine for Doom 2, and these maps as a whole do pretty well to capture that theme. of course there's a few weak ones like MAP02, but at least they adhere to the theme. many of the maps have low monster counts and low challenge overall. the exception is naturally Fredrik's map, one of his most unforgiving. pretty ballsy to actually make that the first map to play here (you don't need the blue key by the way). not much else to say overall, other than thematically speaking this did pretty great.

here we have the fifteenth iteration of dwspd, which also invokes a specific set of rules known as WYSIWYG or "what you see is what you get". relatively speaking, no doors. which seems like it could be easy, a simple outdoor or cave-like map that completely lacks any doors works well enough. the first map is an example of what I'm talking about. ugly as fuck all with no detailing, but it does what it needs to do. the next two maps sadly actually have doors, which sort of ruins the theme. MAP03 is worse than MAP02 (MAP02 has a problem with the beginning as well as the key door not being marked), while MAP03 you can go through a certain fence. and yeah, there's only three maps, but not one of them is really good. MAP02 comes closest, and just because it has doors, it at least has windows so you can see what's behind. but this is easily a weak dwspd compilation that isn't worth checking out.