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6 wads, 7 maps. Short and tough travel through early Malcolm Sailor's visions.

Cool wad, I'll give it 6/5

Did you like doom2.wad? This is like doom2.wad, only harder. In that respect, D2TWID succeeds quite handily. That said, I find the maps are good in pretty much inverse proportion to how "experimental" they are, "experimental" being a euphemism for "forget everything the community has learned since 1994 on what makes maps fun to play" or "relive Sandy Petersen's worst ideas". There are many great maps like 3, 6, 11, 13, 15, 18, 23, and 29 that have either fast, fluid combat, rewarding exploration, or both, interspersed with "experimental" maps like 5, 9, 10, 19, 24, and 28 that "experiment" with every possible way to annoy and frustrate the player--mandatory treks across damaging floors sans radsuit, health-tax teleports into crowds of enemies at close range, irritating teleport puzzles, heinous Pain Elemental spam encounters (the entire wad could be treated as a course in how not to use Pain Elementals), awkward platforming, hideous texture combinations. Overall this map has more highs than lows but the lows can get really, really low.

Demonfear is a vanilla Doom 2 megawad designed by Adam Windsor (Capellan). The wad is comprised of 6 episodes of 5/6 maps each. Each chapter was originally released individually between 1995 and 1999 and then compiled as a collection on 2000. I have beat this wad a couple of times on UV using Crispy Doom with the highly recommended Midi Pack made by P41R47. One of the most characteristic things about this map set is how fast it plays. Most levels have less than 50 monster, there is very little exploration and levels take very few minutes to complete. This gives an arcade feel to the wad that makes it great to play in small bursts. Beating the entirety of it will takes less than a couple of hours with some experience. Early levels are very simple and focus on Doom Cute designs such as houses, jails and gas stations. Later on the player will explore some tech bases and finally an small section of hell. As the wad progress you can see Windsor improvement as a mapper using more sophisticated designs while keeping the maps short and simple. The maps are never too challenging, but some of them can get you killed if you are not very careful, Capellan likes to put Archviles where you less expect them and the blocky nature of the maps can make them hard to dodge comfortably. The maps favors the use of hitscaners and occasionally they are teleported in another area of the arena while you are busy dealing with another group of enemies which can catch you unprepared. Demonfear can be great fun when you are in the mood for something fast and easy or when you just want to play some Doom without compromise to a long period of time. The short levels reminds me of some newer projects such as Deathless, Zone 300/400 or the Windsor own Doom404 which distill the Doom experience to its basic core. The lightness of it may put some players off if they expecting something meatier. If you are into a short and easy wad, if you like 90s map design or if you have a couple of hours to spare give this one a try. 4/5

shittiest wad ever that looks like made by 6 year old

IMO, this wad is a must try. The level is design is so beautiful, with a unique aesthetic and so much attention to detail. Great effort has been put for this. The first 5 maps are the core of the wad: (post-)Soviet industrial areas, underground facilities, a factory and a mining complex, all done in a very realistic style, and I love it. On the maps you'll find all sorts of cool stuff like Soviet propaganda posters, TVs, soda machines, various furniture and other neat things. But after map 5 the wad changes direction drastically, instead focusing on old/ancient architecture. Map 6 is a really nice mansion, map 7 is an antique temple... I've only made it to map 7, on ITYTD, because... As with most modern wads, the difficulty hates casual players. Well, not immediately of course, but it escalates pretty quickly, and by map 7 it becomes the true Modern Wad Experience (TM), with swarms of enemies, arch-viles on every step of the way, frequent cybers, combined with being put into traps where it's hard to dodge stuff coming at you. Everything the hardcore crowd needs! I should mention, even on early maps the enemy traps are often trollish. Be prepared for enemies to suddenly pop up all over you. I hope you have a plasma gun at hand! The music in this wad is... sometimes fitting, sometimes it doesn't fit so much that it becomes funny. And most of the tracks are MP3s that are compressed to like 64 kbps, which results in poor quality with a very audible artifacts. I found that even funnier... tho most people probably don't. Anyway, all in all, a very beautiful wad with a really cool stylistic, but later it gets difficult. Even if you're not a true hardcore doomer, I still recommend playing at least the first 5 maps, you won't regret it! One more thing: play on GZDoom (or GLBoom+). The text file says "engine needed: prboom-plus", but PrBoom+ or Eternity will work only for the first 6 maps, and you'll get segmentation fault on map 7 if you keep playing on them. Besides, the wad uses some features like hi-res images which work only on GZDoom, so play on it.

A very good wad without any doubt. However, that this wad has places where there are textures of red stone blocks when normal stone blocks could have been used makes the person who made this wad look as if he were trying to be edgy, and not in a good way. In addition, the fact that writings have been put on the walls of certain areas as a joke, in a way, ruins the tone that this wad possesses. Not to mention that stupid of putting mini-cyberdemons that was completely retarded, again, taking into account what this wad looks like, in general. To finish, everything else is fine but the rest of the things I mentioned before subtract enough points from this wad, and it's a shame. In the end, this wad receives a 6 out of 10.

Didn't impress me much. The maps are short and mostly simple, you start and you finish - that's it. Most of the maps are simply arena fights with some tougher monsters. 29 is a bit of hectic and I will say that I don't like secrets that obviously require an arch-vile jump. Maybe OK to be speedran on UV-Fast, or UV-Respawn - it's quite challenging - but for a calm player like me, who enjoys playing tricks with monsters and finds more thrill dodging projectiles than fast-killing stuff, this wad was quite boring. I'd honestly rather play Eternal Doom than this. (If I have another 6 months to spend, of course.) Let's see if Zone 400 will be more thrilling. Yeah, I am seaching for maps with lots of fight puzzles, switch puzzles and moving around, that aren't as long as the ones in Eternal and Epic 2. Is there such a wad at all?

Look. I know that many people enjoyed playing this MegaWAD due to what it is, but for me, when compared to Icarus: Alien Vanguard, Daedalus: Alien Defense felt like a slap to the face. It does look good, but this is the only subject that I will have mostly positive things to talk about. The music isn't too bad but the restriction to like 6 or 7 tracks makes me sick of listening to it (not to mention how they are short for such maps IMO). While I don't mind hub-style gameplay, here, it kind of feels like it requires licking off every part of a map to find one item/terminal/switch to go further. The difficulty might feel easy (most of the time, on HMP) but artificially increasing it with stealth enemies and respawning enemies as more of a punishment for not knowing where to go sucks out my enjoyment tremendously. Not to mention how it feels unfinished with missing textures here and there, and how the end of Daedalus feels completely from a different WAD, with custom monsters and a new weapon that we don't use until MAP32. As I said, Daedalus might look good by the end of 2003, and it may have interesting moments but I don't think I'll touch this MegaWAD ever again. There are dozens of better WADs/maps than this one.

The Darkening episodes are an interesting look back at the turning point in the Doom community. Episode 1 represented a swan song for the classic era, while Episode 2 ushered in a brand new era of meticulously-detailed maps. Darkening E2 is certainly a huge step up from E1 in terms of visuals, and you'd be hard pressed to find a better-looking singleplayer map made prior to its release. However, this high detail comes at the price of the gameplay. It's obvious the team hit the wall with the vanilla engine, and the result are 12 extremely claustrophobic and tedious maps. The first 6 maps are a slog to play through, as the monster counts are low and the only challenge comes from the utter lack of health pickups. The episode picks up considerably in the 2nd half when maps are allowed to have greater opposition than just 3 Revenants, but the core loop never goes beyond the most basic, predictable ambushes and tedious switch hunts. Not helping matters is the soundtrack, which might just be the worst original MIDIs I've heard in any Doom WAD. There's a piano solo in the MAP09 track that's so horrible, I thought my MIDI player actually broke! The Darkening E2's importance in Doom modding history can't be overlooked, but there were far better levels in earlier WADs like "Icarus" and "Dystopia 3". In other words, Darkening E2 is exactly as good as you'd expect a product derivative of Quake II to be.

A bit of a cramped map, but there are many fun fights to see here. This is one of those maps w/ very little room to run around. You better be able to dodge revenant fireballs in close quarters if you are to have success here. This map isn't too difficult, but it is a fair challenge. I'd say it'd be a 6/10 on the difficulty scale today. There is some mean archvile placement in this map, too. A lot of fights involve hit and run tactics, as there isn't nearly enough room to circle-strafe in this map. Because one can't circle-strafe, the map is far more difficult. There is one absolutely great trap involving a dark corridor near the end of the map. I don't want to spoil it, as its quite a 'scary' section of the map. I recommend you play w/ a port that supports MAPINFO, as there is a message at the end of the WAD when you win. Great map from the early 2000s. Check it out!

If you thing it's impossible to make something good only from 10 sectors, then you should check this wad. Some maps are quite simple and lack of quality but there are also really impressive maps for such restrictions. My favorites are 6, 20, 22, 26, and 27.

Weird and frantic are the two words that best describe this gem. Made by the same mad genius that gave us Beyond Reality, this wad lets you dual wield BFGs, puts you through 6 massive and trippy levels filled with such enemies as Freiza imps, four armed Hell Knights and rocket propelled Revenants and lets you loose. Probably the most fun I've ever had playing a wad, I recommend this to anyone who's up for a challenging arcadey adventure. I would have given this 5 stars if it weren't for the last two levels though. The levels are a bit demanding, but the last two become so hard I could only beat them with godmode on, and even then there are so many enemies it becomes a slough to progress, but maybe that's just me being a scrub. Try it for yourself and see.

One of the best all-around WADs, Valiant has a little of everything for everyone. While not as aesthetically accomplished as Ancient Aliens, Valiant is still a pretty WAD to look at, with every episode revolving around certain themes and some individual maps striking a great level of detail and scale (MAP 6, Engineering Disaster, is one of the best city levels ever devised). Gameplay also has its own unique flavor thanks to the Dehacked wizardry going through. On the arsenal side of things, you have a pistol that shoots much faster and... the super chaingun, which is one of the most satisfying weapons ever made. It fires twice as fast than the regular chaingun and is the perfect room clearer to mow down hitscanner hordes, imps, demons and even solitary strong baddies since it stunlocks monsters so effortlessly (archviles can still zap you through a super chaingun barrage so use at your own risk). You even get a bigger bullet ammo capacity to encourage you to use it leisurely. To compensate for these new toys, the monster roster also get new additions and overhauls of their own, like the super imps which fires faster projectiles at a faster pace or the super demon, which bites much faster and discourages berserkers or chainsaw wielders (personally not a fan of him). There also are new enemies like the floating arachnorb, the fearsome pyro knight or the super mancubus, whose volleys of fireballs are so much harder to dodge and commands your immediate attention. There are other new monsters to discover, but half the fun is finding them out. The gameplay of Valiant is its true star, as skillsaw is the master of tuning the perfect battles. They never outlast their welcome, never grind you down spitefully while never being pushovers. Many fights like to start things out by driving you in a panic with either the well placed archvile or monster hordes that will catch you off guard, but careful play can very quickly defuse the situation and make the encounter manageable. Special mention goes to MAP 15 to illustrate this point: the hitscanner ambush coupled with this one particular unique monster makes this one of the most memorable fights in the set. Monster count tend to be on the high side, but gameplay never devolves in slaughter, with a possible exception in MAP 31, which also deserves a mention for its wicked cyber aesthetic pulled straight from System Shock. Valiant's 5 episodes all have something to offer to the player. Episodes 1 and 3 shine with their takes on the tech base formula, Episode 2 takes the action outdoors and show skillsaw's ability to make nice nature settings, Episode 4 features a very orangey hell setting and Episode 5 closes out the WAD with a moon journey. Episode 1 sets the table nicely, introduces the first few Dehacked tricks of its repertoire and closes with MAP 7: The Mancubian Candidate, which is the most unique Dead Simple replacement ever devised. You are warned to not kill the mancubus, and for a good reason: a herd of archviles will burn you down to the ground should he die. Can you deal with the masses of enemies around you, avoid the mancubus and make sure other enemies do not kill him first? Episode 4 looks good and ominous, but to me it was the lesser episode of the pack. MAPS 22-23 are a little too similar design-wise, featuring a central hub and 3 paths that lead to the three keys you need to leave the level and MAP 24: None More Merciless, features the most tame fights of the whole WAD, putting more emphasis on its hell cathedral motif and visuals. While these are the low points of the WAD, these levels are only very good instead of being excellent. The Dehacked stuff might not be everyone's cup of tea, but only the new pinky replacement bothered me because it seems only there to make the chainsaw and Berserk lesser options in combat. If you really want a 100% traditional Doom WAD, you can always download the Vaccinated Edition, which removes all of the enemy and weapon mods, but I feel that these additions are what makes Valiant distinct and unique in the first place. Skillsaw has a good knack for making his changes to the Doom formula still feel like Doom and the combat is almost always electrifying without feeling overdone and labored. The great music by Stuart Rynn, Jimmy and others make the package even more complete. While I prefer Ancient Aliens as a whole, this comes really damn close to matching it in greatness.