GarrettChan

UV continuous with saves

Port: DSDA-Doom v0.10.0 -complevel 4

Total IGT: 16:16:52

Personal Difficulty Evaluation: 3.4 (3.1 = Hell Revealed, 4.0 = Stardate 20X6)

Personal Rating: 4.9 (out of 10)

Didn't cross the 1000-minute run time mark, which is sad and happy to me at the same time :P

Personally, the difficulty of the fights is not the reason I rated this so low. The difficult fights are one of the best parts of the WAD and it does give the player quite some uncomfortable situations and it requires the players to sort these situations out with some thoughts in mind, rather than taking care everything from a foothold slowly.

The problematic designs are mainly come from the structure of the levels, and a lot of these designs can totally be used as counter examples for future mappers. Also, the problem is expanded due to the length of the maps and many of the maps last around 40 minutes IGT to finish it, you'll probably miss something or forget something in the process to make it more tedious and frustrating.

1. Hiding essential switches in obscure places. While playing this WAD, you have to search the back side of the pillars or sometimes a red switch is coped into a red brick wall etc. for actual progress. Though I'm not saying switches should be seen in one glance, but it's annoying that you later realize you didn't look at a particular place and missed a switch.

2. What a switch does is not obvious and you need to search been-to-places to see what's new. This itself is not very big of a deal when it occasionally happens, but it happens a lot of the time throughout the WAD, and due to the length and size of the maps, backtracking to many places you've been to, that's a not very interesting way to do things.

3. Using colored strips to match colored blockage instead of requiring the actual key. If you didn't know what I'm talking about, this is an example: there's a switch with Red Keycard strips next to it, which means it lowers the bars with Red Keycard strips on it, but it doesn't actually require the Red Keycard to activate this switch. If you really wanted to do this, use other texture or implement custom texture to do it and keep it consistent. Inside this WAD, there's no consistency when this will happen, sometimes it could be Skull Key strips, and sometimes it could be Keycard strips. This goes against the first instinct of many Doom players, or you can just say this is not speaking the "Doom language" properly. This is by far the biggest problem I have with these maps. I'm not against novel designs, but the designs shouldn't be completely out of the framework of some normal standards.

Other than these, there are a few homage maps to Plutonia and TNT, and those homage designs are pretty good and I liked them. My favorite map is, obviously, Map16: Rehab, and we definitely need more sequels to TNT Map22: Habitat, unironically :P

UV pistol starts without saves

Port: DSDA-Doom v0.10.0 -complevel 9

Total IGT: 1:35:53

Personal Difficulty Evaluation: 0.9 (1 = Plutonia)

Personal Rating: 7.6 (out of 10)

Died quite a few times on Map11 because it's how it's designed. Then later I skipped a lot of things to save time, so the total IGT should be expected longer. Other maps, maybe just died once or twice.

It's kind of weird that I personally feel MTrop's shorter maps are pretty great, but as I also played some MTrop's longer maps recently... I don't like the longer ones. Coffee Break is a set of shorter maps from MTrop and the whole gameplay is pretty classic and great. My personal favorite map is the last map. It's pretty intense.

UV continuous without saves

Port: GLBoom+ 2.5.1.5 -complevel 2

Total IGT: 0:27.19

Personal Difficulty Evaluation: 0.9 (1 = Plutonia)

Personal Rating: 7.4 (out of 10)

Died twice, on Map01 and Map08.

Pretty fun short mapset. Have some interesting traps to surprise the player. I played this against some of my friends in a 20 min race, and later I finished it by my own. I like it because everything is stock, but it's not very outstanding because everything is stock too.

No saving, UV, continuous (but I pretty much died at least once every single map, so like pistol start 1.5)

Port: GLBoom+ 2.5.1.4 -complevel 4

Total IGT: 0:36:38

Personal Difficulty Evaluation: 0.9 (1 = Plutonia, 2 = Ancient Aliens)

Personal Rating: 6.9 (Round up to like 4 stars)

A short mapset with Plutonia aesthetic and design. All maps contain less than 100 kills, but the traps are actually pretty nasty. I would say the difficulty is above average of Plutonia, with not too much resource to work around.

The most deadly parts are Arch-vile traps. Most of these traps have the player surrounded by many directions, so maybe you need to pick between hitting by Arch-vile and hitting by something else. Even though some of them you can quickly escape to the previous room, mostly it's a long way, so it's not very easy to perform.

The gaps for the player to jump are a little bit to wide in my opinion. There's one jump on Map04, I have to use SR50 to make it. Probably you can make it with SR40, but it is pretty precise. Also, there's a trap on Map04 that the floor doesn't correctly raise and you can drop down there and stuck. With these, 0.1 is subtracted from the rating.

As a jokewad, this is not bad.

Very interesting idea to represent 32 maps of the D2 in a small area. It's nice to check out this under-1-hour experience. Some of the later maps used Voodoo Doll tricks to alter the gameplay a little bit for a refresh. It's sad that I can't give a 4 because gameplay doesn't really exist in the WAD.

What can I say...

It's a combination of small maps because of the time limit of the project, but the map quality is fairly high, and it's very enjoyable to playthrough all these maps except I don't get the idea of Map11. Also, it fits the theme very well with a lot of graveyards, underground caverns and most importantly, Revenants.

This mapset can totally fix your hate towards Revenants, can it?