Black Room

weird how this one uses the Grove midi. anyways, yes, this is challenging, but very setpiece oriented with a predominantly black color throughout. almost every fight involves usage of midtier enemies, and cybies can be used to infight when necessary. it's like a ribbiks map except without too much awesome detail, and that's okay. the wad played pretty nice with a decent curve.

A challenging but well thought out and balanced map. Skill is rewarded and mistakes punished.

Sorry , I'm too lazy to translate my long review in french without using a translator , so I will summarize in one sentence :

It's a really chalenging map with a moody but magical atmosphere , I really loved it.

You can check my detailed review here , I hope google translator will work well :

http://doomfrance.forumactif.com/t4691-review-maps-de-paul977#141921

Here is my demo in Ultra-violence , I didn't have enough ammo to kill the very last vile. :(

DEMO

3.5 / 5

genre: modern, tight setpiece fights strung together; mostly linear except a choice between two starter fights at the beginning.

visuals: iirc. mostly doom 2 textures, with a few extras mixed in.  it looked solid.

personal playtime: ~40 mins.

FDA: noisy_Blackroom_fda.zip

I started on UV and got thrashed.  It felt technically balanced up to what I played but too tight for me to play blind.

I downshifted to HMP after five deaths:

Quote

Difficulty Settings : Yes (HMP reccomended)

Well that's a big difference.  Beat it one go, with some foreknowledge of the first few fights.  I peeked at HNTR afterwards, and it didn't seem too different from HMP, for me personally.

I'm gonna start with what I didn't like:

-The MIDI is not for me.

Now the good stuff:

-Slightly non-linear progression

-Tricky and interesting gameplay aimed at doomers of higher skill levels.

-Slick visuals combined with very gameplay-effective layouts

-Nice variety of setpieces that will challenge your timing, movement, and spatial awareness.

You got to have more than just one trick up your sleeve to beat this map in one fell swoop. If you have trouble beating the original doom2: Stay away from this map, it's not for you (yet).

Level design is pretty good.

Nice layouts and details all over the map

Honestly looks like a 4 star map, but it's like a 2.5/5 because I don't think that this is challenging, this is just annoying. When I wasn't even halfway through the map, I only had  two shotguns and a chaingun. That wouldn't be a problem, if there weren't so many monsters. Arch-Viles everywhere, a Cyberdemon, dozens of revenants, hell knights, baron of hells in a kinda medium sized room. That sounds fun right? Well, not really.

If the map would provide enough cover (from the Arches), more ammo and weapons than it would be alright. There are a lot of masterpiece wads/maps, with a lot of monsters, and I don't have problem with that. But I don't think that this is executed well right here.

Fantastic looks, but the gameplay is just mindless. That's a shame.