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CROSSING ACHERON

   (101 reviews)
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About This File

As in my first level -- DANTE'S GATE -- I have tried in CROSSING ACHERON to achieve a gaming atmosphere that is not only fast-paced (once the fur starts to fly), but just plain creepy. Once again, I went for the aesthetics (you know: The Look); but this time, I also tried to keep the game from being too easy. I think once you get inside, you'll find that CROSSING ACHERON has been fully optimized for DEATHMATCH. But it's just as enjoyable (if I do say so myself) in Single-player and Coöperative modes.

CROSSING ACHERON (pronounced 'ak eron) is a sequel to DANTE'S GATE -- thematically, anyway. (It's an E1M3 only because I thought the music was more appropriate than M2.) For any of the two or three of you out there who have read Dante Alighieri's THE DIVINE COMEDY -- or even only "Inferno" -- I'm sure you've been able to appreciate the many allusions to this work in DOOM. I have tried to take a tack of my own along the same lines. (I do this not only because I think the idea is neat, but so that people will think that I'm very clever.) I'm not so naïve as to expect everyone to rush out and get a copy of "Inferno" (I mean, it IS pretty tedious stuff, at times), but it's well worth the read -- and a little patience is a virtue that is often well-rewarded.

(By the way: Acheron is a river in Hell (basically). But don't look for any rivers in here: I tried it several different ways and just wasn't convinced.)

I thank those of you who sent me mail on my previous effort, and I hope to hear from more of you about this one. (Just a line would do: "It's great!" or "It sucks!" or "Now I know what John Cormack MEANT to do in "Unholy Cathedral.")

Thanks. Hope you like it.


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Guest

Unknown date

  
Amazing, a great old school style with nice clean map design

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Updated version here: http://www.doomworld .com/idgames/index.p hp?id=13978

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Gameplay in singleplayer is good, so its hard to think that he designed this with deathmatch in mind.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Oldchool flava -- Brun Ohn

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Hooking graphics and level design, with enough difficulty and enigmas to keep the gameplay entertaining. Still, the supposedly "plain creepy" part is kind of a failure. Overall, pretty enjoyable for one of the oldest maps released. 4/5(Pretty Good)

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Guest

Unknown date

  
yeh this ain't a bad level i mean its the second in the canto of inferno series but yeh its worth playing through i hav this and the other wads that complete it =P so overall the levels are quite good but this and the first level (Dante's Gate)are better then the later levels with the expection of Geryon which was awsome! but yeh they are worth playing through =]

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Guest

Unknown date

  
not bad 3/5

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Normally, I would give this a 3/5. It seems to be an average wad. Considering it was made in 1994, though, it gets 5/5.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
A really really good old-school Level. A worthy Download 4/5

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Obsidian

Unknown date

  
I think this map qualifies as legendary. :) 5 stars. - Obsidian

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Guest

Unknown date

  
average, gets a half extra star for its age 4/5

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Fantastic, hyper realistic map, and of course one of the very first wads ever created, this brings back the old times when I was playing Doom

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Great wad kinda hard at some parts though.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
A classic, one of the old maps that fails to ever leave one's head.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Much better than some of modern maps. -NMN

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Being a true classic, this wad is a must play.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
A vey vey old level, from a time when PC owners (and thus Doom level designers) were grown-ups who had wives. Doesn't take too long to finish; design is nice and clean with some clever bits for July 1994. One of Doomworld's top ten wads for 1994, has a nice mix of gameplay styles. Although it's not really legendary, it wipes the floor, absolutely crushes 99% of the other 1994-era wads.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Pretty good playthrough, really, and considering it was 1994, this absolutely dominates. I imagine people were pretty thrilled with this at the time, and a good wad in 94 is still a pretty damn good wad. The last room can be a bit hectic if you just start sprinting at the wrong time. Fun playthrough! -Snakes

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Guest

Unknown date

  
interesting..but door texture is so strange..

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Guest Unregistered account

Unknown date

  
Wow! Even by today's standards, the architecture is fantastic, and by then's standards... bloody hell. But "M3's music is more fitting than E2's"? I think E3M5 would have been better, for not only more fitting music, but also more appropriate sky and map name. What a great WAD! 4/5!

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Good for a 1994 Wad its just fun for a quick playthru.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
This 1994-wad is playing in a mildly mazy temple-like structure. Detailing is good for those times and still looks decent today, though not overwhelming. The map begins quite linear but becomes a bit confusing later on, with all its teleports and lifts. But this is not affecting the gameplay (which is very easy) as it's a rather small map. 2/5 -Milian

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Guest

Unknown date

  
Wow, for such an old map, it's still quite playable and good fun. Just shows how good level design can stand the test of time.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
^The updated version is even better, but yes, it's a great bit of Doom history.

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Guest

Unknown date

  
As far as 1994 maps goes, this has stood the test of time as well as any. A real classic.

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  • File Reviews

    • By el macho gaming · Posted
      I like the the sprites and the mechanics of the gun is cool just as advertised Can I use some of the sprites for my wad?
    • By Dari · Posted
      An ancient wad, featured in the wad compilation NEWDOOM.WAD. Like most wads of the time, stepping into the wrong room will get your shit rocked (don't go in a straight line from the beginning!). Otherwise, it was a decently fun level, visuals are acceptable for the time, layout's alright.
    • By AdministrationCenter21 · Posted
      I love the lil' pills, but I'm just too used to the red crosses to utilize this, honestly.
    • By Majin · Posted
      very creative and concise. 
    • By ETTiNGRiNDER · Posted
      This one is all over the place with several disparate "chapters" to how it progresses linked vaguely by themes of texture choice, and it's mostly not good; at times I felt like the author was trying to make the most infuriating level possible.  One of the biggest issues is the seeming obsession with timed door scenarios, where you trigger a switch, then have to run somewhere else to get through a door before it closes again.  These are placed over and over again across the map, and the first couple, before you work out that they're the main gimmick of the map, are pretty cryptic in trying to figure out what the switches do.  From then on it's kind of "oh, it's THIS again, couldn't it be something different?"  As the fighter, none of them were bad enough to force speedrun tactics, but they were tight enough to be annoying and would probably be even more so as one of the slower classes.   In the beginning, you're in sort of a dark labyrinth of waterways and caves, and it's a bit difficult to navigate where you're going in the darkness; there's a torch that you might want to burn early, but there are later parts of the map where it would also be useful so there's a tradeoff in saving it or not.  This part of the map is also pretty brutal when it comes to count and nastiness of monsters vs. the available resources, tending to result in the hard beginning, easier later type of issue though it never quite gets generous enough to be super easy.   Breaking past the start you come across the dam proper, which is huge, and has some fiddly jumping and ledge hugging (along with the timed door gimmick, which here can potentially kill you if you don't get through certain tunnels before the polyobject comes back and crushes you).  There's a section that's like Doom 2's Chasm, with the addition of having to jump between the platforms and dying to fall damage if you miss, but at least this part isn't on a timer.  A few switches are retriggerable and can block your progression if you hit them more times than needed.  At least one of the essential timed actions is rather hard to figure out, too.   In the second half of the map, after completing the dam, you get the Wings of Wrath and can fly around some big spaces battling a big mass of creatures, which might be the most fun part of the map, but it's not enough to really redeem it and soon enough you're on to some dark, confined catacombs where the timed door gimmick comes back in force.   Finally you break free into some larger and better lit arenas where you fight a couple of class bosses and their minions.  After that you get a message that you won the map, but that you can still explore if you want to; at this point you have wings and a loopback is open, so I did so, found and killed a couple of optional sort-of-hidden bosses (with not much reward for doing so beyond beating them for its own sake), but ultimately couldn't find the last four monsters.  So I issued the console "kill monsters" command to see if any final scripted thing would happen if you wiped everything, but nothing apparent did; the "you win" script line is all the ending you get, with no formal exit.   There are also some missing texture errors; they reference flats from the Hexen beta version so if you load a texture pack that includes them, it'll fix the issue, but it's puzzling why they weren't included with the WAD.  There's some other weird texturing that almost feels like some walls were missed in the process of changing texture choices, and the way the ZDoom skybox feature was used is a bit weird and ugly.   I've seen worse by a lot but I would not recommend this one.
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