The Villa of Pain

A short and sweet classic level. Some interesting architecture in some areas. The warehouse type area with the boxes and wooden structures is my favorite fight in the level; feels great to run around blasting everything in there with rockets and plasma. I guess my only point of critique would be that the area is inexplicably bright despite having no visible sources of light, using a couple flat textures with some lights and a couple of torches would be a nice improvement. 

Overall, a fun classic map. 

Villa of Pain, designed in 1996, is a medium sized map with a rather cozy and cute design. As the name suggests, it's a sort of villa in a setting without much detail, but the villa interiors are incredibly well structured (for 1996) and the layout of the map flows sweetly as if it were a simple Dungeons & Dragons dungeon. The use of textures, despite being super simple, is cohesive and non-intrusive, creating a fairly clean look that vanilla (and brown) lovers will find very positive. The map design is quite varied; despite not being gigantic it has multiple rooms and different areas that give it a refreshing feel without feeling too extroverted; hence why I compare it to a dungeon. Exploration is challenging, but it feels good.

 

And Villa of Pain, of course, has pain; this is a map that, I imagine, was solidly challenging for 1996. A huge crowd of enemies in tight areas and ambushes designed to surprise the player without crushing them unfairly. From hordes of shotgunners in columned rooms, to a fascinating box area with plenty of vertical combat and good variation. A marvel from start to finish; those little vanilla flavored gems that get lost in time, but from time to time are found for new appreciation.

 

 

Sure, it's a 3/5 for modern standards, but hell, it's a solid 4 for the 90s.

Cool lighting and simple gameplay. The secrets are too grateful. It's not so memorable like hoover dam.

Awesome classic level from the good old days!

Starts off fun, interesting, and very promising, but quickly deteriorates into mindless, unexciting shootouts. I do not care for the modified imps either. The opening plaza is fantastic though. 5/5 - cjwright79

good

Great medium-sized map from this classic author. You can really see the improvements in Reed's use of flow and especially texture usage, no longer are secrets impossible to find. Cool wood/crate maze. 5/5

Super cool. Umm i thought it was very good but the gameplay to me didnt stand out as 5 star quality. Nontheless it was very enjoyable. I did it on UV, first go, and found 2/3 secrets (found megaspheres). Most importantly, nothing in the level annoyed me, or was unfair, and the pace was very nice, which says a lot about the level since this is rare to see. -- 4 Stars.

Nicely paced and no overly cruel traps. Sometimes the gameplay is kind of silly, with overly large groups of monsters, but on the whole it plays good. And it looks just fine, although there's a number of misalignments and detail isn't anything to gawk at too long. **** -sargebaldy

This is from September 1996. It's very good - the design is competent in a mid-period style, and there are lots of monsters. It basically consists of two fighting areas (a castle bit and a crate maze) with a couple of lesser sections, and although there's a tonne of health it's action-packed and entertaining. Not hard, but fun.

This was pretty fun. The opening area looked really nice. 4/5

Some nice action in this map.Worth a playthru.4/5-d.d.koo p

Cool