Abyssal Speedmapping Session 27 (XXVII)

Abyssal Speedmapping Session 27 (ASS) is abysmal. The theme is revenants, lost souls and doughnuts to ensure no one ever plays these or has fun playing them. These are the torture Doom levels you make speed run streamers play for your amusement and then never watch the stream.

I can understand the doughnut theme as you'll be running in circles away from revenant rockets and lost souls belched out of pain elementals. Like a race track you'll loop around and joust with the revenants. Taking quick shots at them. Sure not every map is like that, some maps are a sheer brawl against a wall of revenants or lost souls. What's that I heard myself say... all the revenants are dead? Never think the undead stay dead, because there's always an arch-vile around. Oh but why stop at one? Even the first level has a pack of arch-viles clumped together where you need to run by, get a rocket launcher and clear the hallway of its festering skele-vile problem.

The second level was tough or impossible to see. There's something about darkness and replacing everything blue with purple. Purple water, purple rocks instead of grey ones and of course purple key cards. It was perhaps the least fun of the 10 out of 15 levels I managed to muster through. The purple, while it looks different, it feels in the way and hinders having different colors to look at when both grey and blue are now purple. I miss the variety of color even if the purple makes this map pack feel different.

Some of the doughnut layouts are subtle, 2 doors instead of 1, 2 walls open up and both lead to the next room and so on. Other times its a blatant big, round loop with things in the center or the entire level.

I enjoy pistol starts for community projects, that was its fair to how the author intended, but with these giving you a rocket launcher or a BFG before sending you to the next level felt welcome and almost necessary. These are just some painful maps to get through. I only managed to make it through 4 of the 10. Even if its 'resurrect' cheating on 'too young to die,' it still counts with these.

If you're looking for a steep challenge, this is it, but for anyone that doesn't like walking through graveyards, double barrel shotgunning the tall, walking dead, skip it.

When playing a map set like this one, one can envision the scene where Marcellus Wallace spends some inconvenient time in the store's back room, having close encounters with some strange men and waiting to be rescued by Bruce Willis. It really does give a new ring to the whole ASS acronym.

Speaking of which, ASS 27 looks good, though much of this can be attributed to the texture theme as the architectural design is your standard convexgonal set of cliffs/water sectors. Nothing original, but good. 4 out of 5 * for this part.

The gameplay is where you'll get your pounding, as already sufficiently difficult fights with Revenants and Pain-Elementals are spiced up with some Arch-Viles. These, given RNG's mercy or no mercy, will burn you up or burn someone else up allowing you to win. Don't count on RNG's mercy, though. Somewhat alike to Marcellus after his unfortunate encounter in the store's back room, after playing this WAD you might be pretty fucking far from being ok. Not all maps are like this, but most are. No rating for this part because I really can't rate it.