Hello again, Internet. Only my second week on the job and I'm already fashionably late with my reviews. It doesn't terribly matter, though, we've got a measly three mapsets available for you this week, one single player and two deathmatch, so let's get cracking on this week's /newstuff. Heck, with any luck we can get through this week together without any "Doom community is dying" soothsayers.
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Catharsis - Wills Hines
GZDoom - Solo Play - 527 KB -
First, the good stuff out of the way. This is a reasonably nice looking wad...when you can see where the hell you're going. And, if you're looking for a tough-as-shit challenge, this is a perfect wad. However, for me, I found this wad very frustrating to play through. It seems like the author went out of his way to place you in extremely unfavorable situations or at impossible odds. In addition, the cacodemon replacement is one tough cookie, with a revanent-style homing fireball and a cloud of lethal gas if you linger too close. So far, these things are forgivable in my book. However, I can't stress enough how strenuous on the eyes this wad is. The pictures do not indicate it, since I'm not a fan of putting up pictures of a wad that are impossible to see, but there are tons of places where you are forced to fight huge firefights when you are essentially blind. The heavy red mist of the city map near the middle doesn't help at all, and by the time I got to the second to last level, where almost the entire level is shrouded in darkness, between that and the absolutely retardedly unfair monster placement I was ready to give up on any hope that the author had actually underwent any sort of playtesting of the levelset. Pass unless you're feeling masochistic.
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Lightning Deathmatch Skulltag Edition - Infurnus
Skulltag - Deathmatch - 1470 KB -
Playing through this mapset with bots gave me a definite feeling of deja-vu, and not in a good way. This mapset feels really similar, in concept, to SurgeDM, which I was also not a fan of. It seems like the author loves to copy and paste architecture all over the freaking place, leading to boring, symmetrical, arenas. In addition, though the detail level is high, the author seems to choose really "safe" texture sets in places, which makes some of the maps look even blander than their layouts suggest. However, there are a few neat maps in-between the vast amounts of filler, and the stolen Quake sounds mesh well and don't sound too blatant, and the music is really nice for the most part. If the author put these kinds of production values into better layouts overall, he might have awesome something on his hands here. As it stands now, though, it's a very ordinary, though polished, set of deathmatch maps. Worth a look, but given the polish I expected more.
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Mortal Kombat Doom - CyberHunter
Skulltag - Deathmatch - 14436 KB -
At sight of the name and the fourteen megabyte download, I was expecting something epic. What we have here instead is something that is essentially a crapshoot and not fun to play at all. You and your opponent spawn on a single line, which you can't seem to stray from. Your only weapons are your fists. That's it...you punch each other until you're dead. E for effort, but most definitely not worth the time it took to download.
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