Tarakannik 3

A megawad over three years in the making, with 43 maps (!!)—and every single one of them is completely ridiculous. One may describe it as "The Sky May Be meets Chillax". The comparison to Sky is mainly courtesy of the bizarre level layouts with nonsensical (downright ugly, in fact) texture selection, as well as the crazy enemy replacements which are liable to catch the player off-guard. Most enemies have been beefed up, and they come in many troublesome varieties: for instance there's normal Demons, fast Demons, and Demons which shoot a rocket after they die, and there's no way to tell them apart visually! To deal with this menagerie you're given two new weapons, a "blaster" which replaces the chainsaw and seems to be a distance emergency weapon, and a "mortar" which is a rapid-fire rocket launcher. For added craziness, all newly added English text in the mod is broken and childlike; I'm not sure if this is due to the author's poor grasp of the language or if it's a deliberate choice.

The levels are filled with over-the-top challenges, with tons of monsters coming at you and no room for error. Add to this the author's love for big, long maps, and you've got a mapset which tests the limits of the player's sanity as much as his skill. ZDoom features are used heavily throughout, whether to create oddball challenges such as strings of swerving missiles coming down the hallway at you, or for special effects such as the rain of rocket pickups at the beginning of map05.

The true strength of this mapset is the sheer amount of ideas on display. Every map is different, and some sport special gimmicks: for example, you might start with no weapons, or with a rocket launcher that keeps firing on its own after you shoot it. Some of levels are particularly memorable: MAP09 is Doom II's "Refueling Base", only upside down (mind you don't fall into the sky and die), and then there's the strange, almost poetic MAP41 which I recommend seeing for yourself.

Do I recommend Tarakannik 3? Hell no! Playing this mapset will be tedious, unrewarding, and barely fun at all for most people. Still, if you have time to waste, you can at least take a peek at its weird levels.

[Originally written Dec 2018 for The /newstuff Chronicles]

What happens when you try to make chillax more interesting and perhaps more difficult by spicing it up with a daring selection of custom monsters? You get Tarakannik 3...

This maximum-ridiculum spans 43 maps and is loaded with fierce opposition like you wouldn't believe. Make no mistake, this thing is hard to a point that even HMP-difficulty will stop most doomers dead. The author had the courtesy of warning me when I started playing this on UV-settings, and unless you want to bash your head against this madness like I did, you'd do well to listen to the advice given and tune it down. No, seriously, consider not playing UV unless you're either a doom-god, or you want to hone your skills to eventually become one.

So, what's going on here, how does it compare to, say, chillax? Where chillax liberally flooded the area with overwhelming opposition by way of numbers, tarakannik 3 oftentimes favours quality over quantity, even your seemingly bog-standard imp is a bit more threatening now, and imps, like many other demons in this set, come in different variations, some of which put scytheII's zombie-marine to shame. If you want to see a pinkie shoot a rocket at you when it dies (Which I think is hilarious), this is where that and many other things are going to happen.

The author expects rock solid execution when it comes to avoiding incoming damage. Whatever it is that you can possibly evade, you almost always need to evade it. Mistakes will get punished severely.

Aesthetically this is a mixed bag. Most of the maps are crafted either by way of copy+paste or with a fairly broad brush, without much attention to details in general. That's not to say Tarakannik 3 looks disgustingly ugly. There is some utterly absurd eye-candy to be had on occasion, map 41 and 42 in particular were... Oddly fascinating to just look at. If you've nothing better to do, you might want to consider IDCLEV-ing through this thing and have a gander, you may see something you actually like.

Note that you won't be able to run this set in PrBoom+ (at least I couldn't). I loaded this with GZDoom, and most of the maps worked properly, some just didn't for reasons beyond my knowledge/understanding. A fraction of the maps might cause the average machine's framerates to take a nose-dive to the point of being unplayable as a result of absurd bullet spammyness among other things however.

So, is Tarakannik 3 for you? If you're the type of player who actually enjoys playing chillax legitimately, however difficult it may be, this is a must-have. If you're curious to see how much frustration you can handle, this is where you can put your limits to the test. If you're looking for utterly ridiculous difficulty, you'd best start downloading right away.

I would have given 2.5 stars if I could, since some of the maps were unplayable no matter what I tried, but considering that this set made me laugh quite a bit here and there, and I generally like these utterly absurd maps, there's 3 stars for Tarakannik 3. How quaint...

This wad is shit. WAY TOO HARD.