Deplorably Vile

This map is a tale of two design ideologies. Its larger areas are home to decent setpieces in varied styles. The first of these pits you against a single archvile with low-tier fodder as a distraction, 32-wide pillars as cover, and a shotgun as your weapon -- a bold decision this early, implemented well, that gave me a good feeling about the rest of the map. After that, you navigate a corkscrewing 128-wide hallway packed with meat that I assumed was placed to prevent you from fleeing the opening fight. Issue? Do the first fight, now you have to shotgun and a hell knight and two spectres and chaingun a baron, among other hall-mopping duties. That gave me a bad feeling.

It turned out neither feeling was "wrong," really. From there on, the map alternates with shocking consistency between dynamic combat and dull corridor filler. Most of Deplorably Vile's strengths and weaknesses fit this binary mold, but there are other, smaller issues: 1) Visuals can be rough. 2) In map that previously exhibited only vanilla-like behavior, access to an important pickup is directly tied to a monster's death. That monster and pickup are a cyberdemon and a prominently placed BFG. And yeah, I'd expect to use the BFG on the cyb, so a futile search began -- and thankfully didn't last long, because I know inexperienced mappers will mess that up sometimes in ZDoom. 3) You need to use Doom.wad as a pwad for textures, which is a sloppy packaging choice. (Bundling the pwad resource "Doom Textures for Doom II" would be better.)