LANCE.WAD

very creative and concise. 

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.

Impressive use of custom monsters, textures and sprites, considering the time period. The Mission Impossible-derived soundtrack fits the goofy nature of the map well. First map is my favourite, final map drags a bit.

I'm so thankful that they changed the ugly red and white pill symbol to a green cross in the Doom Classic Unity port.   The text file going into incredible specificity with why it needed to be changed originally gave me a good chuckle though, so I won't give it 1 star.

Oppressive amounts of hitscan, tunnels and paths of limited lighting, plus very little health, turn this into a cover-shooter in the extreme