Wonderful Doom, v.1.3

I was pretty suspicious at first, but "ultimately" a very nice experience. Such an "alternate" endeavor can be a dangerous one as the mapper's rubbing elbows with an already established, and quite iconic, map set - but he did well I think.

If you're into the "classic Doom" and want some new stuff to play which is different but not too different... give this a "shot"!

 

p.s.: E3M9 seems quite different.

If you like Doom The Way Id Did serie of mapsets, this will probably be of your liking, as this mapset was release a few years before of the TWID serie began, and its possibly the mapset that give the idea to the original designers and is actually a precursor of the serie.

 

Wraith made his own version of Ultimate Doom, adressing all the problems the original IWAD has.

Maps are rehashes of the original maps, so even when the maps are similar aesthetically and contextually to the orignals, they are by no means the same, and most have the touch up to difficulty and navigation Wraith thought would make them even better.

The principal change is that most map are interconneted, especially after map E1M5 and all E2, E3 and E4. So its hard for you to get stuck or lost as most on the original maps suffered with deadends and some oneway only sections.
The tweaks to difficulty is apparent as this maps are more challenging than their IWAD counterparts, and that mostly thanks to Wraith more than enough experience on mapping that let him design better enemy encounters and moster placement but still being respectful of the original design of the map.

Another great enhancement is that the boss maps are actually maps and not just an one on one arena anymore. So the added challenge is greatly appreciated in here.

 

For certain, Wraith made an excellent megawad that not only its faithful to the original school design, it also adresses the problem of the original maps making them even more fun, entertaining and challenging than before.

Why it doesn't win a cacoward and was just a runner-up when there was no vanilla winning mapset that year, it something that totally baffles me.
So for me, this one is the vanilla cacoward winner of that year.

An award it totally deserves.

Done with these settings:

 

- Crispy Doom 5.3.
- Ultra-Violence
- Continuous combined with pistol start mindset.
- No saves, mostly.

Very decent tribute to the original game. Each map is essentially a remix of the ID's levels, built around the same theme and music tracks per episode, albeit with the author's personal changes to the design. Aesthetically, the only notorious difference, and by no means less important, is the texturing he decided to use in some sections. In general the maps look extra polished, there were no signs of misaligned textures, but I wasn't that attentive to be honest. He did left the most distinctive visual features of each map untouched, for example where it's supposed to be a dark secret dungeon, it is a dark secret dungeon, just not copy-pasted. 

 

As said before, Wonderful Doom is just a revamped Ultimate Doom. If you know the game by heart, there may be little room for surprises, so you can take it as a memory test. Of course, the author added his own touch to the gameplay. I would underline the size of the rooms in comparison to the iwad, tending to be more compact though in no way less attractive. In consequence, they lead to a bit more claustrophobic combat, specially throughout the latter episodes, sometimes you'll find yourself in a hairy situation like a slow drop in a cluster of imps and barons coming from the shadows, or starting surrounded of pinkies and barrels to detonate using your ol' peashooter. Another thing is the resource balance, sometimes giving more leeway where there wasn't originally, other times less obvious for the pistol starter. This is part of several plot twists Wraith added here and there to the main concepts to keep it somehow fresh and interesting, but I'm not going to spoil any in particular. 

 

Secret-wise, I guess it's not needless to say almost all of them can be found normally, there is one in E2M9 that can't be triggered due to the teleport line. Otherwise, there are no broken sectors or staircases of secrets (sorry to burst your bubble ;P). There are no disliked maps, and so I'll avoid to pick favourites this time. I also didn't care if most maps were extremely similar to the iwad ones, but that could not be the case for you.

 

Overall, I won't lie and say this turned out to be thoroughly enjoyable. It's what I expected from an author with such love for plain vanilla Ultimate Doom. Nostalgia fans should give it a go. Well, as long as you wish to "play Original Doom one more time", otherwise if you expect a thing like "Doom the Way ID Did", it might not be wise to download this. My rate is 8/10.

This feels like a very well done remake or somethint like that, its pure vanilla and has an amazing layout based on the original Doom, I also enjoy vanilla a lot like some other Doomers so overall, this is a great megawad.

This was a blast to play through. Everything felt familiar (like I was playing the Ultimate Doom) while still doing its own thing. Granted, some things felt a little too familiar but for me that wasn't a bad thing. I can see why that wouldn't appeal to some folks though.

 

I'd still recommend downloading this and giving it a shot.

A good throwback to 93's Doom.

Official maps with with different map layouts.

 

Cons.

 

E4M2 in Wonderful Doom is less balanced than the official E4M2. Needs either less barons or more plasma ammo.

At E4M3, Chocolate DooM likes to crash, so I recommend Boom engine for it.

 

Lots of tutti frutti & found one HOM on E3M9.

Some floors or bridges have pain sector applied, which should not have them since the nukage is around them.

Example: E1M5 starting area.

basically it's like playing Doom as if it was a PWAD. it's fun if you are already familiar with Doom and want to play it again except with things different in it, but with the overall feel remaining the same.

I had a dream once, true story, where I was playing DOOM and everything was kinda familiar but kinda not. Such is dream logic. Keys were the wrong colour, layouts were reversed or had new sections. And yet it still looked precisely like DOOM, the one I've come to know and love.

 

This is a set of maps that does the same thing; even some questionable choices like the damaging start sector of E1M5 add to the 'dream logic'; everything's familiar and yet, it's somehow wrong.

 

Definitely worth a curious look even if all you're going to do is get drunk and/or stoned and give it a shot to freak yourself out or something.

Meant for people who know the game by heart and want to experience it differently. Fun concept, diligent texturing, uneven execution.

The amount of variation from the originals ranges from pointless to almost new. As an E1 fan I found it disappointing (save for E1M7), but E2M1, E2M2, E4M9 and E4M3 in particular were great.

 

Really lovely. As a lot of people have said here it feels like playing Doom for the first time, the difficulty being similar - just substituting the awkward old tank controls back then with the ninja WSAD abilities we have in modern times. My only complaint would be that the secrets are a bit obnoxious to find but this could be a nod to the original Doom so I'm willing to let this go. And the clumsy textures on E1M1 almost put me off but I'm sure glad I persevered.

Absolutely awesome, better than I imagined.

Brilliant! Just like the original, but different. This takes me back to the 1990s all over again; I'm discovering DooM just like it was new, yet with a strange feeling of nostalgia. Cheers!

These are some very nice remixes of the DOOM 1 maps. They all stay true to the original designs, which is good if you loved the originals (E1, in my case), and not so good if you think they didn't age so well (E2-E4). 4.5/5 for a doing the job you wanted to do, and doing it well. - ZZ

Wonderful stuff. 5/5 dwrTag

i played this on a one off like "meh lets give it a download". this map pack is a braeth of fresh bad ass. i had a blast blasting through it. so download it. just do it. theres nothing to say other than "this looks familiar...this feels way different" everyone compares to dtwid. guess what...wasnt impressed. this is a fresh remix that was actually fin to blast through.

This is great fun, but some levels were so similar that it raises questions about whether you really built from scratch. Nonetheless I suppose that was the point of this wad. It does succeed at putting you back into the original doom experience. It gets a 4 from me, but with some hesitation.

You either hate this for being too close to the original, or you love it for staying true to the classic gameplay and bring welcomed variations to the levels we all know so well by now. I think everyone should play this. It replaces all levels from all four Doom episodes, and they are well (re)made. This is version 1.3 which is the final update for the WAD, bringing some fixes for several maps and changing some architecture a bit more. I can only recommend it. 5/5 - NightFright

There's a weird texture in E1M2 near the end, but other than that it's absolutely top-notch.

An interesting take on the original doom levels. Definitely captures the feeling of classic Id levels.

So cool! 5/5

This is clearly a rip-off of Ultimate Doom, the levels IMO look too similar to originals, the difficulty is slightly harder than originals and this tried to copy DTWID. There is no reason to give more than 3 stars for effort, the maps are well done but they are too similar to originals so try better next time. 3/5 -Doomer95

DTWID is nice and all but the older wd12.wad is from 2008 and that wasn't even the first version. the WD is disorienting sometimes, but that's part of the charm, it's like you're in a parallel universe or something. anyway it's a lot better than a bunch of shitty broken zdoom "vanilla" wads being released these days.

Super crap!!!

Pretty different from DTWID, to be honest. This wad has a clear attempt to recreate the original Doom levels but with a few modifications and twists. DTWID is simply a clone in terms of style; the levels themselves are entirely new. If you want to play Doom again but a bit different, play this. If you want to play levels that could have been in Doom but weren't, play DTWID. Nonetheless clearly these are not the same goals.

it is amazing how a little bit of differance can change the gameplay experience, yet still has that classic and nostalig feel. Im not kidding!! When i launched this, it awakened in me that same feeling which ive had years ago, when i first launched the original Doom.