Combat Shock 2

Slaughter for the soul. Play aggressively for best results.

Fun and pretty looking set of slaughtermaps, though easy by today's standards. The cleanup after some fights can get tideous, but it's not a dealbreaker.

More slaughter fun!

And there goes Combat Shock 2, played through GlBoom+ 2.5.1.5 on HMP.

CS2 is a slaughter wad which features a total of 7 maps, with the final level acting as a sort of bonus that's completely different from everything seen until that point. It features a new status bar, a few new textures, recolored enemies, intermission screens, but no new weapons, enemies, ENDOOM screen, or sounds.

It doesn't deviate from the standard slaughter formula, meaning that the typical encounters with the enemies are difficult and their numbers are mostly large, the total number of enemies ranging between hundreds and a few thousands, with MAP05 featuring the most, a little over 3000 more exactly, at least on HMP. The early levels take plenty of inspiration from the first levels of Plutonia given their natural looking design with lots of green and overall tone and atmosphere, while the later maps get more hellish.

The difficulty curve is typical as well, starting easy and things get gradually rougher as you progress, while the later maps, notably MAP05 and MAP06 being the most difficult with plenty of tricky sections (platforming with crushers in your way for instance) and occasionally tough traps which can kill you in mere moments. Those parts rely quite a bit of trial and error until the optimal solution is reached so that you're not left with either low health and especially ammo. In fact, ammo is a very valuable and easy to exhaust resource in those 2 levels, therefore relying on infighting is recommended whenever possible, I have made the mistake of consuming the resources when I should've been more careful, making everything much more painful than it should've been.

All maps are challenging and really fun, my favorite being none other than MAP03. The atmosphere, the encounters, and the music just mix perfectly for me, the soundtrack of this level is one of the best I've heard in a megawad. 

I have mentioned the "bonus" level. MAP07 acts as a bonus for triumphing the trials of CS2 according to the intermission screen. It is neither a slaughter level nor is it long or difficult, but it's something you'd see in a wad such as Valiant or Lunatic, and it comes with 100+ enemies. I have to say that despite not mixing with the other levels (which was not the purpose anyway) it's surprisingly fitting for a conclusion to the wad from my POV, after all the intense fights it's nice to have one final, fun, but easy level.

Considering that the wad is short there's not much else to add, and there's nothing that stands out as particularly bad, which is why I don't recall terrible areas or anything. Although it's short, given the nature of the levels spending a few hours on it in total is probably something to be expected. I kinda wish it was longer, but this ultimately works in its favor given that its length makes it perfect for those moments when you want to play a specific kind of levels but aren't willing to invest as much time as a 32+ megawad would require.

It's been quite a while since I had so much fun, thus CS2 ranks quite high on my list of best megawads that I have played. Totally recommended, it's well worth the time.

The following review is comparing Combat Shock 2 to today's slaughter wads.

A pretty good wad overall. There are some design decisions made in the larger maps that make sense from an open-endedness design perspective.. but honestly I decided that it really detracts from the experience.

The following descriptions are from my play through on UV, using pistol starts, and no saves.

Map01: One of the best maps in the wad. There is very little downtime on this map and there is almost no tediousness cleaning up any of the fights. There are some filler moments but that is to be expected on Map01 I guess.

I wont talk too much about Map01 because there isn't much that I really dislike about it. It is Map01 difficulty.. but still threatening (albeit not lethal) and has a great start and a great final fight.

Map02: This map is quite slow in comparison to Map01 and introduces some of my complaints about the design decisions made in some of these maps. It seems a lot of maps follow a design decision which gives the player complete control over how the player wants to play the map. Unfortunately if the player is playing blind then the player will most certainly not be running around trying to aggro everything with reckless abandon.. but instead trying to survive. This means incredibly slow gameplay.

My first experience with this map was quite a stale one. I had plenty of room to move around at all times.. and was able to take every fight one at a time (none of the fights are really threatening on their own save one which I will get to). This one fight involving tons of pinkys, a cyb, mastermind, and hks can be cheesed completely but simply running out of the area. It is quite obvious that you can leave the area immediately so I can't really say it is cheese.. just a design decision to allow to quicker play if the player wants. I think this is fine if you want to open the map up for speedrunning or something.. but it is something that really made a poor experience for me when I didn't go into the map with a mindset of aggressive play.

The final fight is really great. Making 3 monsters threatening is kinda hard and Danne pulls it off well with 2 viles and a cyb.

Map03: Incredible map. I really enjoyed how my experience was made harder or easier depending on the decisions I made at the start of the map. Sure you can get rockets early.. but that rocket fight is quite hard because of specters, and viles in a close quarters fight. I found that I could actually get plasma first.. and then return to the rocket area with plasma. This made the area easier and gives the player something to think about when playing the map. Great stuff.

There are these groups of lost souls that appear when you raise the platforms leading to the final 2 arenas.. all they did was make it a bit more annoying to kill the hks (I just took an extra 30 seconds to kill the lost souls prior to dealing with the hks).

Final two fights are fun. Especially the final area.. pinkys + cybs is always a fun combo.

Map04: This map is half good.. half incredibly tedious cleanup.

The first half is fun.. you get an awesome fight with imps/mancs/cacos/cybs in a medium size area. Very easy to get blindsided by fireballs/rockets here. The following bfg fight is also really great. You need to sort of figure out how long you can be aggressive vs the viles while still finding room to escape so you dont get cornered. The mastermind usage during this fight is insanely good too. Probably one of the best wandering masterminds I have seen in a map.

Unfortunately the map slows to a crawl after getting to the next large area. While it is INCREDIBLY easy to eat errant cyb rockets at the initial reveal of this room.. it is complete circle strafe for your foreseeable future. I assume this area would be fun to speedrun.. but again casually this room is kinda meh in my book. The vile horde at the end is also quite stale since there just arent that many and the viles just sort of funnel towards your bfg. ezpz.

Map05: Another map which falls victim to the open ended gameplay trope. There are many fights here which would be fun if you were going to play the map fast.. but playing slow it is an hour long map consisting of a long grind with almost no threat.

The start is full of areas with very low threat and a very high monster count.. I don't really have much to say about them individually except that they didn't kill me. Eventually after grinding through many nonthreatening fights you get to the bfg area. This area looks great and has some great platforming to get the bfg. Unfortunately the bars which prevent you from leaving open immedately. I don't really understand this design decision unless you are just trying to allow people multiple ways of playing.. if you want you could just jerk off and spam rockets until you win. Hardly any threat in this area and almost no reason to use that big fucking gun you just grabbed.

The final fight is also a slog playing casually. The meat of the room is triggered by a switch.. but if you dont want to hit the switch then you can just circle strafe for days while the center of the room kills and mancs on the outside of the room kill each other so then when you hit the switch.. you have almost no threat from the group of monsters which are spawned from the switch press.

Quite an easy/grindy map. It overstayed its welcome. But it looks phenominal.

Map06: My favorite map in the set. Almost everything in this map is good. There are a couple incredibly trivial fights later on if you know how to use bfg well.. but luckily these fights don't last long. The finale is kinda meh casually.. but it still isn't free so I ended up liking it. Great map.

Map07: Bonus incidental combat map. I enjoyed the larger area around the yk door.. but everything else is whatev. Not really a fan of this map.

Overall: A solid slaughter wad made in the vein of Sunder. C-shock 2 is definitely easier than Sunder and in some maps outmatches Sunder in gameplay and quality (Maps 01, 03, 06). C-shock 2 is also completely void of incredibly offensive maps such as The Cage. As far as slaughter wads go c-shock 2 is a must play and is a huge improvement over the original c-shock. 4 stars.

Also.. it is really fun seeing wads made from 1/2 of the Sunlust/Italo team. While I think Danne improved a lot as a mapper his early maps still pack quite a punch.