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Horseshoe is a mid-sized map that reminded me visually of the Starbase cluster of Doom 2's first episode, with a bit of Knee-Deep in the Dead mixed in. It could have used stronger lighting, but it's still comfy. Gameplay starts out as free-form area clearing with the weaker guns, but once you get the first key, it leans into traps and specific scenarios that require nimbleness. I found those scenarios fun. As a neutral observation, the difficulty on UV is a couple of notches higher than the description -- "[a] classic, oldschool Doom 2 map" -- might lead you to expect. 7/10. Actual Review (you've been warned...): This starts off deceptively: pop imps with the shotgun, cha-cha with the chaingun, pet a caco here, boop a hell knight there, you know the drill. Then after you get the first key, the danger levels spike out of nowhere, with cheeky traps stacked one after another. And we're just getting started. Enough cheeky. Now for buttcheeky. Lording over much of the rest of the map from here on out: a cyberdemon you first meet in a nukage chamber. Your task is unclear, your radsuit is wasting away. You don't have the ammo to kill it, so you don't engage. It hounds you anyway. It must not like your sense of fashion. Haven't you heard? Hooves and horns are in style. Where to go? Out of the corner of your visor, you spot a tiny door, stashed off to the side, in a very awkward spot. Careful to avoid the artillery trained on your ass, you dash to open the door and stumble into a network of dusty, pitch-black hallways. There, you flail for your life against denizens of the dark who are all too happy to give you the funny business, and pry open the next leg of your journey. Walls crumble and fall. Clarity is all you want. A flashlight is all you need. But wait, it's never that easy. "Hey bud, da fuck!?" you hear. The cybie is ever so eager to pounce on the opportunity to join up again. "I thought we were friends uwu!" Okay, "friends" -- just for now. In the next area, convincing it to kill a batch of loitering monsters is not so tough. It must be warming up to your outfit choices. Things are going swell. Things are gonna be fine. But friendships never last with such a glaring imbalance in clovenness. It's just not in the balance of it all. With no warning, you're given an ugly ballistic haircut as a rocket whizzes past your ear. Fuck, that took six months to grow! Now it's for real. If you can hold back your rage for a bit longer, you might lure cybie into the next-to-last area and put it to work against its encampment of pesky ledge snipers. You might use it to clear out the lingering barons, useless byproducts of a botched copy-pasta job in some UAC simulator, before settling your score once and for all against your woefully underqualified barber. You might find the key that unlocks the exit. Don't fail. To fail and to succumb is to admit that being dressed in the finest combat armor that money can buy is tactically inferior to lugging around an oversized rocket launcher in the nude. That time spent pawning extra computer area maps and chainsaws will be all for naught.

Urgh. My goodwill ran out with the other map. This is vintage August 1994; a large, mostly empty and barren base almost uniformly textured in silver. Plays a dreadful version of Barber's Adagio; given the inspiration I think the author meant to put in Khachaturian's Gayane Ballet Suite. Would take months and months of work to be acceptable for a January 2006 map.