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Yonatan Donner and Haggay Niv's Hell Revealed was about as hard a megawad could get back in 1997, but you never would believe so looking at the first few maps. Maps 1-8 and 10 are cordial and pleasant enough levels which aim to make you feel powerful and almighty, slaughtering many foes into claustrophia enducing layouts where you won't have much room to move. Hell Revealed likes its tight corridors and hallways and they will be a recurring motif until the very end of the level set. Starting with Map 11, Underground Base, HR finally reveals its hand. Prepare to fight off waves of beefy enemies like barons, mancubi, revenants, archviles and cyberdemons, all with very little supplies and weapons at your disposal. You have to be expected to have a good eye for secrets to even get the basic tools you need to do your job, at least when playing on Ultra Violence difficulty. Levels like Last Look at Eden (MAP13) and City in the Clouds (MAP14) almost play like puzzles, where you must figure out what the developer intends you to do. Fail to figure out the correct route? Have fun killing hordes of mid-tier monsters with just a shotgun and chaingun! Even then, following the correct path usually just gives you a super shotgun, which only slightly lessens the tedium factor. Throughout all of Hell Revealed, you will be constantly circle strafing in square or circular rooms, slowly shooting down hordes of beefy monsters with the SSG until several minutes later, everything is dead. This prospect gets even worse when level layouts are often devised to make infighting more difficult to happen than it should and the overbearing presence of Barons of Hell, which rule this WAD with an iron fist. Maps like The Path (MAP16), Hard Attack (MAP18) and Judgment Day (MAP20) commit to a grind-heavy mindset where battles are very slow, meticulous and painstakingly boring to win, which is the one factor that likely ages this WAD the worst. Hell Revealed is often criticized for its very crude looks, but I find it oddly charming and it has a strong visual identity. For better and for worse, you all remember the searing pink skies, Arachnophobia (MAP7)'s layout, where you fight spiders inside a giant spider, the heavily fortified areas and courtyard of Last Look at Eden, the circular ramparts of Gates to Hell (MAP15), the Doomcute flourishes of The Siege, where you start inside a cozy house that demons can't invade. It also has some stunning looking maps, like the future base of Ascending to the Stars (MAP23) and the experimental Afterlife (MAP26). It does make up for some of the more flat and brown maps like Chambers of War (MAP10) or Hard Attack (MAP18). The music of the WAD is taken straight from Rise of the Triad, but its soundtrack runs out around MAP20, where the rest of the journey must be undertook with the default Doom 2 music (with the exception of some ROTT reprisals at MAP27 and MAP29). While Hell Revealed mostly commits to grindy gameplay, the script does deviate a few times throughout the level set and these moments tend to be the most memorable. MAP9, Knockout, will give you a boxing tutorial where you will be expected to punch out over 200 imps, saving the shotgun and chaingun for emergencies and monsters you can't punch out. It sticks out in a weird way in the MAP 1-10 stretch, being the only big challenge in an easy lot of stages and its gameplay never gets replicated. Mostly Harmful (MAP32) hints toward the slaughter gameplay that would get perfected by the community years later and finally allows you to go nuts with the firepower, which is needed since an unreachable Icon of Sin will be spawning new monsters constantly, forcing you to stay on the move. This remains one of the better uses of the IoS in a WAD and the concept would be reprised much later in Ancient Aliens' MAP18. Everything Dies (MAP19) is an easy gimmick map to like: you get all weapons, ammo, health and armor at the very beginning, but nothing else after that. You need to stay resourceful and minimize risk to reach the end, but its encounters shy away from cheap gotcha! moments and are fun to plow through. Resistance is Futile (MAP22) is a great fast-paced slaughter map that gave birth to many imitators throughout the years and might be HR's single most influential moment. Post Mortem (MAP24) is half puzzle, half brutality incarnate: you will be cremated at the seems until you figure out where to carve a footstep through this Living End homage flooded with Hell's worst of the worst. The main difference between Post Mortem and maps like Last Look at Eden is that Post Mortem doesn't shy away from giving you supplies and ammo, you are given all the tools you need to reliably succeed and it's up to you to get them and methodically chip away at this hell cave scenario. Dead Progressive (MAP25) builds around Dead Simple and makes it a much more compelling compact level with tight and snappy combat. Afterlife (MAP26) features a dream world where you walk through space and find some distorted pockets which warp you to hostile arenas. Once you're past them, don't relax yet; archviles will resurrect ghost monsters that will keep hounding you until you can finally find the exit... So Hell Revealed can be great when it wants to, but it also can leave really bad impressions. The Descent (MAP31) is... an elevator descent that lasts way too long and can easily be cheesed by standing on the teleport marker. The rest of the level is so flat it could have been made in Wolfenstein 3D and features cyberdemon fights in tiny rooms, which always are a big gamble. Hard Attack offers some thrills with the teleporting cyberdemon duel, then wastes all of its goodwill on its fort rampart section which is packed with so many barons and revenants (and not remotely enough ammo to take them on). Judgment Day (MAP20) emphasizes the worst of HR's grindy gameplay mentality, making you fight so many heavies with just a shotgun and chaingun (the super shotgun is hidden away in a secret area). Ascending to the Stars (MAP23) is likely the cheapest map in the whole set, piling in ambushes where you either can't do anything to protect yourself (that elevator ride down in a chaingunner filled room is all based on luck) or the tedium required to power your way through them will make you want to tear your hair out (the penultimate archvile room is the worst the whole WAD has to offer, as backing away from the archviles will force you in a teleporter pad you will have to teleport through roughly 500 million times). Hell Revealed (MAP 30) is the worst Icon of Sin fight there could be and likely will ever exist. Featuring a quad-demon spawner, several archviles in the back, a cyberdemon patrolling the lift you need to ride and hordes of revenants on platforms, you'll be lucky to even be able to land rockets in the Icon's brain and not kill yourself trying to pull the trigger. Hell Revealed was a very inspirational megawad for its time and some of its lessons were put to good use by other contemporary mappers, especially for projects like Kama Sutra or Alien Vendetta. Thankfully, the lessons that were pulled from Hell Revealed had more to do about how maps like Resistance is Futile, Post Mortem and Mostly Harmful were great map concepts that needed to be revisited at all costs and less emphasis on "super shotgun kills baron good eventually yay". As a full project, it's very uneven. The first episode is mostly on the easy side and isn't favored by most Doom veterans, but later on, the grind and dedication required to beat some of these maps can drive people up to the wall. Hell Revealed has lots of value as a historical artifact but has too many sags throughout its running time to be equally enjoyed gameplay-wise. It's a difficult WAD, but its difficulty often stems from resource depravation and grindy encounters, which is a tough sale today.

No doubt, the outdoor area has a great environment. That's what sold me on this wad. But, unfortunately, the maps quickly devolve from a fun, "watch your step" type setup and into relentless, brutal, and tedious traps. And, to boot, there are Nazis (looks like it to me) on the Moon (wtf? this is Doom, not Wolfenstein 3D). 1/5 for a good outdoor environment. And this promising wad is going in my Recycle Bin—what a shame.