Legacy Of Suffering - v1.01

One of the more underrated doom mods out there. The levels have a lot of detail and great use of 3D sectors, used for railings and other things. Not a lot of mods that I know of has these attentions to detail back then other than KDiZD. I like how the first gun, not weapon, first gun in the mod is a quad barreled shotgun. This might be bias but I don't see any other mods or games give the player a quad barreled shotgun as a starter weapon.

The cutscenes and artwork used for them are REALLY well made. I like its story and the protagonist John Logan. His design looks like a cross between Daniel Garners from Painkiller and the Doom Marine from well, Doom 3.

Speaking of Painkiller, the mod uses tracks from Painkiller, which is a nice touch. Admittedly, there are things in Legacy of Suffering that I don't like, such as the Painkiller/Serious Sam arena wave sections. Not all of them are bad, but the later levels that uses them are the worst offenders. Often spawning mancubi, pain elementals, and revenants that just makes the fights more tedious.
DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS AHEAD

END OF SPOILERS:
In conclusion, Legacy of Suffering is a really well made mod and I really want other people to try it out. I would suggest to start on the easiest difficulty, do NOT get fooled by the normal difficulty Ultra Violence, it will kick your ass, and anything higher will probably break your soul. Other than that, I would highly recommend you to play this mod. It can be played on GZDoom, Zandronum, and Skulltag. That is the end of the review, have a nice day :)

Large and boring hordes of enemies, respawning enemies, very small maps. Quadruple shotgun is the worst weapon I've ever saw. To kill an imp, you need to shoot 2 shells, and the game won't autoreload it. You need to find a safe place, and reload it. Chaingun takes some time to actually start shooting. Even with auto regenerating health, you still need to use medkits since it takes forever to health to start regenerating (any damage stops it from regenerating)

Now this wad is sorta conflicting, for one if you suffer from any of the following problems: lack of ammo,regenerating health,the maps,multiple deaths. You can't play doom for shit but the i also have issues with this wad.

1. The doom 3 type design disgusts me, mainly because i don't like doom 3 that much

2. I hate the painkiller esque moments

3. It's unfinished and dead

That's all.

RATING:3/10

Pretty awful: uninspired, square layouts; boring, repetitive hordes; bad map design which leads to accidental telefragging by monsters; questionable sound design. Half of the time in a map is spent trying to figure out where to go in the map because the automap does not work and there is little sensible layout of the maps (plus some access points are hidden and difficult to discern). Earns 1 star just because of decent graphics, but that's about all that's decent in this wad.

Awful experience. I'm giving it two stars due to nice visuals & decent map designs but this is where the positives stop.

The quadruple shotgun's controls suck. Primary firing mode fires barrels separately while secondary fires all four simultaneously. If ONLY one shell is missing in the shotgun, pressing the secondary button will reload the gun instead of firing the rest three shells inside. Also, firing all four shells with a primary button won't actually reload the weapon. In fact, the game will tell you to reload, so you have to press the secondary fire button just to reload it.

Regular shotgun has a huge spread. Heck, no weapon is good at taking enemies down from a distance in this mod.

Pistol is absent & the weapon keys are oddly placed. '2' slot is a regular & super shotgun, '3' is quad shotgun, '4' is a chaingun & chaingun with rocket launcher mounted on it & '5' is a plasma rifle.

Most of the time, I got confused with these buttons & at the worst moments, like places with hordes of enemies, I took quite a punishment for switching weapons nonstop due to the weird design, causing large annoyance.

The author stated that it is basically Doom 3 with classic gameplay. Well, I assure you that the mod's amazing ambiance & atmosphere is destroyed by so much enemy spam, cheap moments & strange weapon keys, it's ridiculous. The AI's behavior is also modified. Zombies have sliding attack to surprise you & some new attacks are implemented into enemies. Not a bad thing but combined with the flaws mentioned above...yeah. Not fun.

Enemy spam or hordes are usually either frustrating to fight or just plain tedium & borefest. I'm not too keen about the regenerating health but since the gameplay is so poorly designed for the most part, it did help ironically. The way demons teleport is also questionable & there are lots of arena battles. Lots of them.

There are some pointless cutscenes & Painkiller soundtrack killed it for me. I like that soundtrack better in the Painkiller itself since the game isn't a horror game.

Automap is useless. Nothing is displayed except for the player indicator. The reason for such thing is unknown.

In conclusion

I don't recommended it. Doom 3 had perfect ambiance & atmosphere, so this could've been amazing fan-made thingy but instead, we got basically salt & sugar mixed together or in this case, horror/ambiance & slaughterfest. They just don't go together.

All maps have primitive layout which consist of small rooms and tiny corridors and all look almost exactly the same. Gameplay is too repetitive and tedious. I have nothing against arena shooters and some of them are my favorite, but this is a bad example of implementation of such gameplay type. Everything here is: enter in another small square room and getting swarmed by another pack of monsters and multiple times. Balance is almost nonexistent.  At some points you may completely run out of ammo. Health balance is so terrible so author added health regeneration to compensate it. The only really good thing here is music, which is mostly Painkiller's soundtrack, but it's better to listen to it separately or while playing Painkiller itself.