Lawful Pacific
Educated
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2020
- Messages
- 54
-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs
- Thread starter AngryEddy
- Start date
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,265
A few quick WAD reviews:
Hellcore 2:
20 maps. 0/10 Absolute trash. I've been unimpressed with some wads before but this is the first time I've found something that is highly rated yet truly garbage through and through. Here's the first thing you do in the first level: kill a pinky with a pistol. That should get you used to how this wad works, underpowered weapons vs. HP sponge enemies. The map maker practically has a fetish for forcing players to fight barons of hell with the standard shotgun, you'll do that against 4 almost immediately (note: you have to find the secret shotgun or else you'll be doing it with your pistol and un-berserked fists). Then there's like 30 pinkies, and you'll be out of shotgun ammo and need to use the pistol and probably fists for this (I noclipped through them because fuck that). This goes on and on, across several maps. Maps are also way too big without much direction so you'll run around forever trying to find out what to do, and I'm pretty sure some are simply broken if you take the "wrong" path. Didn't try them all, just a selection of maps and every one of them disgusted me. Interestingly this is supposed to be Hellcore 1 but with 20 of the 32 maps "improved", it's hard to imagine how awful they must have been before.
50 Shades of Graytall:
16 maps. 9/10 rating. Wad started out as a meme to see if you could make good levels with only like 5 textures. Turns out the answer is... yes? A lot of these levels are actually excellent. This is not a joke wad when it comes to gameplay, a lot of very good authors put out a lot of very difficult, interesting maps. Around map 6 is where shit starts getting real, later ones can get fairly slaughter-y. Difficulty ranges from 5/10 to 9/10. For reference 10/10 is "I need to save almost every battle and reload several times, even when I think I have the best strategy for handling the room figured out.", while 5/10 is "I can comfortably beat this level first go without reloading".
Haste:
16 maps. 8/10 rating. Slaughter from the start (well past map 1). Most feel pretty good and aren't horribly long drawn out affairs that test your endurance. Difficulty averages between an 8/10 and 10/10. 8/10 = I can beat these fights 95% of the time with some practice. There's one section that seems virtually impossible to fight unless you get very lucky, should probably consider them 11/10 difficulty.
Valiant:
32 maps. 9/10 rating. Really well done wad. Has a lot of customized enemies and also buffs the pistol/chaingun. Which kind of goes to prove how awful they are, even the chaingun firing 50% faster and with 50% more ammo... sucks mostly against anything heavier than imps. You can see the enemy changes on the wiki, I like most of them (e.g. an imp that fires faster). Only ones I don't like are the super mancubi (mancubi are kind of already one of the most deadly things IMO, no buff needed) and the suicide bomber (kind of just annoying most of the time, they spawn in trap moments behind you and you die). If you want a difficult wad but one without significant slaughter moments that remains more adventure and exploration-focused, this is a good wad for you. Though don't play map 31. Or maybe you should, it's actually a pretty easy introduction to slaughtermaps, first time I've ever beaten a map like that with no saves on my first attempt after doing it once with saves. Difficulty: around 4/10 to 8/10, though more biased towards the top after the first few maps.
Hellcore 2:
20 maps. 0/10 Absolute trash. I've been unimpressed with some wads before but this is the first time I've found something that is highly rated yet truly garbage through and through. Here's the first thing you do in the first level: kill a pinky with a pistol. That should get you used to how this wad works, underpowered weapons vs. HP sponge enemies. The map maker practically has a fetish for forcing players to fight barons of hell with the standard shotgun, you'll do that against 4 almost immediately (note: you have to find the secret shotgun or else you'll be doing it with your pistol and un-berserked fists). Then there's like 30 pinkies, and you'll be out of shotgun ammo and need to use the pistol and probably fists for this (I noclipped through them because fuck that). This goes on and on, across several maps. Maps are also way too big without much direction so you'll run around forever trying to find out what to do, and I'm pretty sure some are simply broken if you take the "wrong" path. Didn't try them all, just a selection of maps and every one of them disgusted me. Interestingly this is supposed to be Hellcore 1 but with 20 of the 32 maps "improved", it's hard to imagine how awful they must have been before.
50 Shades of Graytall:
16 maps. 9/10 rating. Wad started out as a meme to see if you could make good levels with only like 5 textures. Turns out the answer is... yes? A lot of these levels are actually excellent. This is not a joke wad when it comes to gameplay, a lot of very good authors put out a lot of very difficult, interesting maps. Around map 6 is where shit starts getting real, later ones can get fairly slaughter-y. Difficulty ranges from 5/10 to 9/10. For reference 10/10 is "I need to save almost every battle and reload several times, even when I think I have the best strategy for handling the room figured out.", while 5/10 is "I can comfortably beat this level first go without reloading".
Haste:
16 maps. 8/10 rating. Slaughter from the start (well past map 1). Most feel pretty good and aren't horribly long drawn out affairs that test your endurance. Difficulty averages between an 8/10 and 10/10. 8/10 = I can beat these fights 95% of the time with some practice. There's one section that seems virtually impossible to fight unless you get very lucky, should probably consider them 11/10 difficulty.
Valiant:
32 maps. 9/10 rating. Really well done wad. Has a lot of customized enemies and also buffs the pistol/chaingun. Which kind of goes to prove how awful they are, even the chaingun firing 50% faster and with 50% more ammo... sucks mostly against anything heavier than imps. You can see the enemy changes on the wiki, I like most of them (e.g. an imp that fires faster). Only ones I don't like are the super mancubi (mancubi are kind of already one of the most deadly things IMO, no buff needed) and the suicide bomber (kind of just annoying most of the time, they spawn in trap moments behind you and you die). If you want a difficult wad but one without significant slaughter moments that remains more adventure and exploration-focused, this is a good wad for you. Though don't play map 31. Or maybe you should, it's actually a pretty easy introduction to slaughtermaps, first time I've ever beaten a map like that with no saves on my first attempt after doing it once with saves. Difficulty: around 4/10 to 8/10, though more biased towards the top after the first few maps.
Last edited:
- Joined
- May 13, 2009
- Messages
- 28,578
Brutal Doom v22 Beta 3 is now available for download.
EDIT: Gave it a try, this mod is not moving in a good direction. Pistols, rifles and the chaingun now fire faster - and yet their total ammo counts were halved, meaning players will consistently have lower ammo available for them.
The mod claims to be going "back to its roots", yet introduces new sprites for most of the base items and weapons.
EDIT: Gave it a try, this mod is not moving in a good direction. Pistols, rifles and the chaingun now fire faster - and yet their total ammo counts were halved, meaning players will consistently have lower ammo available for them.
The mod claims to be going "back to its roots", yet introduces new sprites for most of the base items and weapons.
Last edited:
Lemming42
Arcane
Doom Delta + Doom The Way Id Did is rocking my fucking world. What a combo. Playing on UV as Lorelei Chen and it's great, pretty much what vanilla Doom's UV always should have been.
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,265
Finished Eviternity 2, and I have a lot to say because while it obviously has an incredible level of polish and effort, I found I really didn't like it as much as I expected.
Overall, my main benchmark for rating a WAD above a 6/10 is how many of the levels I want to replay when I load up the wad a second time and most of the levels in Eviternity 2 just don't hit that threshold, so I'm rating it 6/10, with a difficulty of 4/10 to 7/10. I will say that if this was released 10-20 years ago it'd be an easy 8/10, but I feel standards should be higher for a major 2024 wad with this many authors and all this custom content as opposed to stuff released in the early 2000s by one or two dudes making the whole mapset. It also hurts it a lot that fast monsters isn't a viable option (what I normally use for older and/or easier wads).
In general I found a lot of the levels overly long and not terribly eventful. The word I want to use to describe them is grindy, it feels like a fairly constant amount of fighting and enemies without much ebb or flow to it aside from a few final fights of levels. For that first 90% of levels its almost always a bit on the easy side without many memorable moments.
Eviternity 1 was also a bit easy most of the time (though I think 1 was still harder than 2), but where in E1 I was able to use fast monsters to make things difficult its not really an option for E2. This is because they didn't program the monsters to properly adjust to fast monsters. In E1 this had a few problems with new monsters (nightmare pinkies weren't faster (which is kind of fine since they are already faster than base pinkies), and the asrtal cacodemons were kind of buggy and didn't attack much), but in E2 there are more new monsters that don't adjust and the old new monsters are used way, way more. Especially the astral cacodemons. There's also a LOT of hitscanners everywhere in this wad so fast monsters would probably be more annoying than anything. In fact it kind of feels like there's too much variety of monsters, sort of like an inverse-Plutonia thing where rather than focus on the hard stuff most encounters throw everything piecemeal at you and not much is done with level design to make these enemies difficult.
A few things I did appreciate: 1. A lot of the levels especially early on giving you that "hot start" where you gotta figure out a place to go that's safe without attracting new enemies. This is where the "constant enemies everywhere" actually works in the wad's favor, the problem is it doesn't work if you stretch it out for 20 mins. 2. The lack of a BFG for most levels, making the plasma gun a reliably useful part of your arsenal. In a huge amount of doom maps plasma ammo feels like it should be reserved for the BFG when you find it, but the number of levels I found a BFG on was countable on one hand. 3. Around half the levels do have a a good, decently tough fight, it's just that it often requires half an hour before you can see it.
Eviternity 1 was also a bit easy most of the time (though I think 1 was still harder than 2), but where in E1 I was able to use fast monsters to make things difficult its not really an option for E2. This is because they didn't program the monsters to properly adjust to fast monsters. In E1 this had a few problems with new monsters (nightmare pinkies weren't faster (which is kind of fine since they are already faster than base pinkies), and the asrtal cacodemons were kind of buggy and didn't attack much), but in E2 there are more new monsters that don't adjust and the old new monsters are used way, way more. Especially the astral cacodemons. There's also a LOT of hitscanners everywhere in this wad so fast monsters would probably be more annoying than anything. In fact it kind of feels like there's too much variety of monsters, sort of like an inverse-Plutonia thing where rather than focus on the hard stuff most encounters throw everything piecemeal at you and not much is done with level design to make these enemies difficult.
A few things I did appreciate: 1. A lot of the levels especially early on giving you that "hot start" where you gotta figure out a place to go that's safe without attracting new enemies. This is where the "constant enemies everywhere" actually works in the wad's favor, the problem is it doesn't work if you stretch it out for 20 mins. 2. The lack of a BFG for most levels, making the plasma gun a reliably useful part of your arsenal. In a huge amount of doom maps plasma ammo feels like it should be reserved for the BFG when you find it, but the number of levels I found a BFG on was countable on one hand. 3. Around half the levels do have a a good, decently tough fight, it's just that it often requires half an hour before you can see it.
Overall I like most of the new enemies.
The nightmare pinkies are back and are used really well, just a few in places where you want to use rockets but need to be careful to avoid blowing yourself up on them. Not a terribly complex enemy but it does its job in a way that normal pinkies can't, because if you doubled the amount of pinkies you'd crowd the fight and make it unmaneuverable.
Astral Cacodemons are also returning from E1 and are really just annoying and the one enemy type I don't terribly like. Unfortunatly they are also one of the most used. Their stupid movement is just unpredictable and messes up your planned movement in a way that usually ends up in you immediately dying to either a face rocket or their triple attack all hitting you at once. You can't really react to them on the fly, just have to immediately focus them down wherever you see them. It doesn't help when they start silently appearing from some hidden alcove and the level is dark and you just get screwed without foreknowledge. The fact that they fly also makes it quite hard to start infighting with them. Ditto for Nightmare cacodemons which are just worse.
Uber-barons of hell are also back, but lose their hitscan for a projectile. Much better than before. Still find it kind of annoying how quickly they fire, think it could be slowed down by a few frames. It's quite hard to play peekaboo with them in close quarters (esp dark) areas without catching a rocket to the face.
Green hell knights don't have much too them other than more damage. They infight a lot better than normal hell knights but have about the same HP I think so they go down fairly quickly. They also aren't used widely when they really should, they are pretty interesting and fair to fight when combined with other enemies.
Uber-spidertrons and Macubi (not sure on the correct name) are both kind of upgunned and uphealthed versions of the originals. They tend to be great fun to fight because they cause even more infighting and absolutely annihilate hordes of enemies while being strong enough to not die immediately to the counterattack. Even Cyberdemons go down quick to them. I feel they are a bit underused, would have liked to see more of them.
The new soldier-type enemy are a great addition. Basically feels like a fast monsters imp, since they have a very fast projectile that shoots often but is stil dodgeable. Only annoying part is that they drop... 1 armor packs. Cmon, give me chaingun ammo plz.
Veilimps are... interesting. Feels like a pretty low tier enemy that is also underused, they are barely better than imps but get introduced so much later than all the other enemies. You'd be forgiven for thinking they are some kind of uber-archvile when you first see them but no, they are pretty much just imps that go invisible when not attacking. I guess if they were used a lot they'd lead to issues with facerocketing yourself on invisible things though so maybe its good that they are used sparingly.
The Necromenace is definitely interesting with his ability to resurrect things all around him. The fatal weakness though is... the same gun that you use to kill him (plasma rifle) is also the best weapon for killing the resurrecting spirits, so you kind of just keep spraying and he dies? I think you only fight him 2, maybe 3 times. Would be way more interesting to be used in a bigger fight.
The new gun (penetrator? Cant recall name atm) is stupidly overpowered. Takes 25 bullets per shot but kills an archvile, or a lot of smaller enemies. I only found it in secret levels, but if you can get it in normal levels through secrets or aren't playing by pistol start rules and carry them over from secret levels then I can't imagine how the game doesn't becomes utterly trivialized by having it. Keep in mind that most of these levels never go so far as to give you a BFG, and this thing not only uses bullets, but does so exeedingly efficiently. Even Cyberdemons fall in like 4-5 shots.
One decision I found curious was that Lost Souls had their HP nerfed, by about half I think. They die reliably to a regular shotgun blast. As first I liked the wad for this (not that other wads haven't made the same change), but then as I played I found that none of the levels ever really used Lost Souls or Pain Elementals very much. This would have been a great excuse to make the Pain Elemental a fairly standard enemy but they just... didn't. And I'm not sure why.
The nightmare pinkies are back and are used really well, just a few in places where you want to use rockets but need to be careful to avoid blowing yourself up on them. Not a terribly complex enemy but it does its job in a way that normal pinkies can't, because if you doubled the amount of pinkies you'd crowd the fight and make it unmaneuverable.
Astral Cacodemons are also returning from E1 and are really just annoying and the one enemy type I don't terribly like. Unfortunatly they are also one of the most used. Their stupid movement is just unpredictable and messes up your planned movement in a way that usually ends up in you immediately dying to either a face rocket or their triple attack all hitting you at once. You can't really react to them on the fly, just have to immediately focus them down wherever you see them. It doesn't help when they start silently appearing from some hidden alcove and the level is dark and you just get screwed without foreknowledge. The fact that they fly also makes it quite hard to start infighting with them. Ditto for Nightmare cacodemons which are just worse.
Uber-barons of hell are also back, but lose their hitscan for a projectile. Much better than before. Still find it kind of annoying how quickly they fire, think it could be slowed down by a few frames. It's quite hard to play peekaboo with them in close quarters (esp dark) areas without catching a rocket to the face.
Green hell knights don't have much too them other than more damage. They infight a lot better than normal hell knights but have about the same HP I think so they go down fairly quickly. They also aren't used widely when they really should, they are pretty interesting and fair to fight when combined with other enemies.
Uber-spidertrons and Macubi (not sure on the correct name) are both kind of upgunned and uphealthed versions of the originals. They tend to be great fun to fight because they cause even more infighting and absolutely annihilate hordes of enemies while being strong enough to not die immediately to the counterattack. Even Cyberdemons go down quick to them. I feel they are a bit underused, would have liked to see more of them.
The new soldier-type enemy are a great addition. Basically feels like a fast monsters imp, since they have a very fast projectile that shoots often but is stil dodgeable. Only annoying part is that they drop... 1 armor packs. Cmon, give me chaingun ammo plz.
Veilimps are... interesting. Feels like a pretty low tier enemy that is also underused, they are barely better than imps but get introduced so much later than all the other enemies. You'd be forgiven for thinking they are some kind of uber-archvile when you first see them but no, they are pretty much just imps that go invisible when not attacking. I guess if they were used a lot they'd lead to issues with facerocketing yourself on invisible things though so maybe its good that they are used sparingly.
The Necromenace is definitely interesting with his ability to resurrect things all around him. The fatal weakness though is... the same gun that you use to kill him (plasma rifle) is also the best weapon for killing the resurrecting spirits, so you kind of just keep spraying and he dies? I think you only fight him 2, maybe 3 times. Would be way more interesting to be used in a bigger fight.
The new gun (penetrator? Cant recall name atm) is stupidly overpowered. Takes 25 bullets per shot but kills an archvile, or a lot of smaller enemies. I only found it in secret levels, but if you can get it in normal levels through secrets or aren't playing by pistol start rules and carry them over from secret levels then I can't imagine how the game doesn't becomes utterly trivialized by having it. Keep in mind that most of these levels never go so far as to give you a BFG, and this thing not only uses bullets, but does so exeedingly efficiently. Even Cyberdemons fall in like 4-5 shots.
One decision I found curious was that Lost Souls had their HP nerfed, by about half I think. They die reliably to a regular shotgun blast. As first I liked the wad for this (not that other wads haven't made the same change), but then as I played I found that none of the levels ever really used Lost Souls or Pain Elementals very much. This would have been a great excuse to make the Pain Elemental a fairly standard enemy but they just... didn't. And I'm not sure why.
Episode 1 is just too easy. I appreciate that it's "cool" that map 1 is a retread of one of the last levels of Eviternity 1 but its far too drawn out and boring. Still likethe overall environment theme, which is the last episode of Eviternity 1 but made dreary with dark and hellish skies and all.
Episode 2 I *LOVE* the theme of the outdoors levels, which give off an Aztec vibe. I'm almost tempted to replay map 7 just because of the visual aesthetic (also a pretty good final fight). The outdoors levels also tend to let you kind of go anywhere and do things in any order you want. The indoors levels, unfortunately, aren't that interesting visually and are way too dark. Map 6 is a bit annoying with ammo starvation.
Episode 3 I *LOVE* the outdoors theme again. Map 11 is "Titan", so I guess its supposed to be a semi-terraformed colony there. It's uniquely kind of alien but still very earthlike, and you can tell that it's not natural but a place intentionally built to be beautiful and for colonists to live in. Map 11 also has great gameplay right from the start, I love maps which give an interesting twist like this where you start off with just a rocket launcher and have to do a bunch of work to get your other weapons. Most maps in this wad would be way more palatable to replay if they started off with a banger rather than ending with it. Map 12 is another pretty good one, slightly less beautiful but lots of path options, not too long, and the final fight is a pretty cool spectacle. Map 13 is meh, a lot less beautiful and more dreary looking, nothing too interesting. Map 14 is way too long and has... puzzles. Puzzles that are cool to see that you can do in Doom but not at all interesting to actually complete, even if they only take a few minutes apiece. Map 15 is also a bit dreary and not too interesting aside from the introduction of the veilimp which is quite the letdown when you realize how easy they are to fight.
Episode 4 I'm kind of ambivalent about. It's got a sort of... medievel village theme? Not very interesting. A lot of long drawn out levels without a ton happening for most of your time. Map 20 introduces the green hell knights and has a pretty cool final battle that uses a lot of the new enemies, which is quite a rarity in this wad.
Episode 5 I'm heavily biased against because I really hate the snow theme. It just doesn't feel right for doom, with hellish enemies throwing fireball and all, and I don't like the snowy foggy distance effect thing either. Didn't like it in Eviternity 1 either and thought it was the low point of the whole wad. Most of these levels feel indistingiushable, just the continually overly long and drawn out levels with too much to fight through. Seriously if I gave you a screenshot of any random room from these levels you'd probably not be able to tell which one it was. Breaking the mold is map 24, which while the longest of them all contains several excellent fights that would not be out of place in a truly designed-for-difficulty mapset and a novel ending challenge. Map 25 is a boss map which is pretty simple once you understand the Necromenace.
Episode 6 I like the overall look of but it's WAY TOO FUCKING DARK. I feel like these maps are designed to be played with a gamma level of like 1.3-1.4, not 1.0. Map 26 is an interesting "puzzle" map, but its doom-related puzzles rather than arbitrary stolen from outside sources puzzles like map 14. Individually they are interesting but collectively they take just too much time to get through. The final fight is set up to be an epic battle vs. a thousand enemies but the room is just too big, you can strafe around them too well, and the overpowered new enemies clear everything too quickly. It's more of just a bullet hell spectacle than a real challenge. Rest of the levels continue the formula of being a bit overly long and not challenging outside of some final battles.
Final boss is really cool, one of the few times I've thought that an FPS boss battle was actually well designed. Only downside is that unlike Eviternity 1 there's no awesome monster menagerie to fight along with it and watch the boss murder legions of trash.
Secret levels are a mixed bag, 1 per episode. 31 isn't that interesting except that its one of the few indoors maps that I think looks pretty good. 32 isn't hard but the final fight has a cool gimmick (you can choose when to electrify the ground and kill everything... which obviously makes it way too easy, I didn't even need to do it a second time). 33 is a speed running gimmick I couldn't finish. 34 has the one good use of veilimps in the wad with 2 archviles behind a horde of them and I was out of rocket ammo. Map 35 has a really, really cool gimmick wasted on a pathetically easy level. Map 36 is the epitome of a way too long level that with a bunch of fights that are way too easy once you have a basic understanding of how they work, though it gets props for a sort of inverse of the Sunlust map 29's archvile carosel which is a novel idea.
Episode 2 I *LOVE* the theme of the outdoors levels, which give off an Aztec vibe. I'm almost tempted to replay map 7 just because of the visual aesthetic (also a pretty good final fight). The outdoors levels also tend to let you kind of go anywhere and do things in any order you want. The indoors levels, unfortunately, aren't that interesting visually and are way too dark. Map 6 is a bit annoying with ammo starvation.
Episode 3 I *LOVE* the outdoors theme again. Map 11 is "Titan", so I guess its supposed to be a semi-terraformed colony there. It's uniquely kind of alien but still very earthlike, and you can tell that it's not natural but a place intentionally built to be beautiful and for colonists to live in. Map 11 also has great gameplay right from the start, I love maps which give an interesting twist like this where you start off with just a rocket launcher and have to do a bunch of work to get your other weapons. Most maps in this wad would be way more palatable to replay if they started off with a banger rather than ending with it. Map 12 is another pretty good one, slightly less beautiful but lots of path options, not too long, and the final fight is a pretty cool spectacle. Map 13 is meh, a lot less beautiful and more dreary looking, nothing too interesting. Map 14 is way too long and has... puzzles. Puzzles that are cool to see that you can do in Doom but not at all interesting to actually complete, even if they only take a few minutes apiece. Map 15 is also a bit dreary and not too interesting aside from the introduction of the veilimp which is quite the letdown when you realize how easy they are to fight.
Episode 4 I'm kind of ambivalent about. It's got a sort of... medievel village theme? Not very interesting. A lot of long drawn out levels without a ton happening for most of your time. Map 20 introduces the green hell knights and has a pretty cool final battle that uses a lot of the new enemies, which is quite a rarity in this wad.
Episode 5 I'm heavily biased against because I really hate the snow theme. It just doesn't feel right for doom, with hellish enemies throwing fireball and all, and I don't like the snowy foggy distance effect thing either. Didn't like it in Eviternity 1 either and thought it was the low point of the whole wad. Most of these levels feel indistingiushable, just the continually overly long and drawn out levels with too much to fight through. Seriously if I gave you a screenshot of any random room from these levels you'd probably not be able to tell which one it was. Breaking the mold is map 24, which while the longest of them all contains several excellent fights that would not be out of place in a truly designed-for-difficulty mapset and a novel ending challenge. Map 25 is a boss map which is pretty simple once you understand the Necromenace.
Episode 6 I like the overall look of but it's WAY TOO FUCKING DARK. I feel like these maps are designed to be played with a gamma level of like 1.3-1.4, not 1.0. Map 26 is an interesting "puzzle" map, but its doom-related puzzles rather than arbitrary stolen from outside sources puzzles like map 14. Individually they are interesting but collectively they take just too much time to get through. The final fight is set up to be an epic battle vs. a thousand enemies but the room is just too big, you can strafe around them too well, and the overpowered new enemies clear everything too quickly. It's more of just a bullet hell spectacle than a real challenge. Rest of the levels continue the formula of being a bit overly long and not challenging outside of some final battles.
Final boss is really cool, one of the few times I've thought that an FPS boss battle was actually well designed. Only downside is that unlike Eviternity 1 there's no awesome monster menagerie to fight along with it and watch the boss murder legions of trash.
Secret levels are a mixed bag, 1 per episode. 31 isn't that interesting except that its one of the few indoors maps that I think looks pretty good. 32 isn't hard but the final fight has a cool gimmick (you can choose when to electrify the ground and kill everything... which obviously makes it way too easy, I didn't even need to do it a second time). 33 is a speed running gimmick I couldn't finish. 34 has the one good use of veilimps in the wad with 2 archviles behind a horde of them and I was out of rocket ammo. Map 35 has a really, really cool gimmick wasted on a pathetically easy level. Map 36 is the epitome of a way too long level that with a bunch of fights that are way too easy once you have a basic understanding of how they work, though it gets props for a sort of inverse of the Sunlust map 29's archvile carosel which is a novel idea.
Overall, my main benchmark for rating a WAD above a 6/10 is how many of the levels I want to replay when I load up the wad a second time and most of the levels in Eviternity 2 just don't hit that threshold, so I'm rating it 6/10, with a difficulty of 4/10 to 7/10. I will say that if this was released 10-20 years ago it'd be an easy 8/10, but I feel standards should be higher for a major 2024 wad with this many authors and all this custom content as opposed to stuff released in the early 2000s by one or two dudes making the whole mapset. It also hurts it a lot that fast monsters isn't a viable option (what I normally use for older and/or easier wads).
Last edited:
KeighnMcDeath
RPG Codex Boomer
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2016
- Messages
- 15,447
I was watching a few mods on the modified Icon of sin. Good lord the stuff mod makers make possible. What can't DOOM do?
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,265
Yeah, at least for me. There's a good 8ish levels I can remember very well that I expect I'll enjoy replaying for a long time
Lawful Pacific
Educated
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2020
- Messages
- 54
Fags took gore nest arena encounter to PWAD LOL.
Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,871,366
A third episode of Phobos is out for Doom3
https://www.moddb.com/mods/phobos/downloads/phobos-episode-3-v30
Almost like a clockwork, every two years new one shows up
https://www.moddb.com/mods/phobos/downloads/phobos-episode-3-v30
Almost like a clockwork, every two years new one shows up
Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,871,366
Ashes Hard Reset trailer dropping June 10th
Denim Destroyer
Learned
Doom: The Golden Souls 2 
A sequel to 2014's Doom: The Golden Souls, this Super Mario Bros. themed partial conversion running in the GZDoom source port family is much larger in scope than its predecessor. Doom: The Golden Souls 2 abandons the castle based hub found in the first mod and instead has an overworld inspired by Super Mario World for the player to fight through. Playing this mod for any amount of time will show how much creativity and passion the developer put into this work. When you are not spotting references to your favorite FPS games or Nintendo properties, you will spent many hours hopping around blasting demons away back to whatever hole they crawled out of. Unfortunately, while this mod is an overall improvement over the original it is still crippled by the one aspect which harmed the first mod. Doom enemies cannot adequately respond to a player who has three dimensional movement. As it is Doom, enemies can hardly react to being out-strafed by the player let alone being jumped over. The only solution would be to design levels with minimal platforming or with limited vertical movement both of which defeat the point of having a platformer themed mod. There is no viable solution to this problem.
A sequel to 2014's Doom: The Golden Souls, this Super Mario Bros. themed partial conversion running in the GZDoom source port family is much larger in scope than its predecessor. Doom: The Golden Souls 2 abandons the castle based hub found in the first mod and instead has an overworld inspired by Super Mario World for the player to fight through. Playing this mod for any amount of time will show how much creativity and passion the developer put into this work. When you are not spotting references to your favorite FPS games or Nintendo properties, you will spent many hours hopping around blasting demons away back to whatever hole they crawled out of. Unfortunately, while this mod is an overall improvement over the original it is still crippled by the one aspect which harmed the first mod. Doom enemies cannot adequately respond to a player who has three dimensional movement. As it is Doom, enemies can hardly react to being out-strafed by the player let alone being jumped over. The only solution would be to design levels with minimal platforming or with limited vertical movement both of which defeat the point of having a platformer themed mod. There is no viable solution to this problem.
Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 15,265
Semi-finished Crate Expectations
35 maps, 6/10. The readme describes it pretty well, its a random grab bag of funny/gimmick maps. It's kind of half and half between pure meme that you pretty much walk through and maps that are both tough and interesting while having a very odd design to the map itself. A few maps I just wasn't able to finish, I guess I didn't "get" what I needed to do. Every map is totally different so just skip a map if you've tried it a few times and aren't really liking it.
35 maps, 6/10. The readme describes it pretty well, its a random grab bag of funny/gimmick maps. It's kind of half and half between pure meme that you pretty much walk through and maps that are both tough and interesting while having a very odd design to the map itself. A few maps I just wasn't able to finish, I guess I didn't "get" what I needed to do. Every map is totally different so just skip a map if you've tried it a few times and aren't really liking it.
Now would you look at that. Smashing two things I like together, eh? I'm okay with that.
Finally, the Ultima 8 modding engine we were all waiting for!
Strig
Scholar
It seems there's been some drama on the ZDoom forums and Vostyok gathered his toys and left the sandbox. The thread was locked and moved to "Abandoned/Dead Projects", which is rather hilarious given their consistency and delivery time. Does anyone know what was that about?
Sjukob
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2015
- Messages
- 2,093
Year old tranny drama.
Seems like plenty of modders decided they were having none of that and moved to the other sites, like moddb, itch etc, hence why their topic were locked.
Dayyālu
Arcane
You're a year+ late. I don't exactly remember the details, but it was the usual Internet troon stuff with some ZDoom member (a spaniard with the Marisa nick or something) revealed to be a pedo or something and the ZDoom moderators going to insane lengths to protect the guy from every accusation. The forums kinda collapsed on themselves and a lot of people (Vostyok included) packed up and left. Doomworld isn't in a much better shape nowadays (the amount of schizoposters is... worrisome).
The Doom mod community was always creative, but the increased toxicity and the gradual schizo alphabet infiltration made for extremely weird situations. I still remember when the Demonsteele guy had to abandon his mods because people were harassing and sending him vile sexual stuff for ??? reasons.
Weirdoes.
Alex
Arcane
Now would you look at that. Smashing two things I like together, eh? I'm okay with that.
Finally, the Ultima 8 modding engine we were all waiting for!
I for one would gladly pay the price of a new game for an Ultima 8 mod of doom that allowed you to switch between first person and isometric and that fixed the game's story and restored content.
lightbane
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2008
- Messages
- 10,561
Troons are always insane lunatics, and worse are their friends. Links for the drama? Because it sounds worse than usual, which is saying something.
For what's worth, it seems the project is still alive.
NecroLord
Dumbfuck!
- Joined
- Sep 6, 2022
- Messages
- 14,917
All of these game communities nowadays are filled with troons and other degenerates, so this doesn't surprise me at all.
Damn, I remember Doomworld was an alright place to hang out?
Sjukob
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2015
- Messages
- 2,093
The trailer was whatever, although I'm excited to play it.
I'll wait for some time until they drop hotfixes and stuff, it appears that every release these days needs at least a couple of weeks after it's release to become fully playable.
Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,871,366
yeah like Chronicles of Myrthana - still waiting for that special edition with bounties and whatnot...
Dayyālu
Arcane
I'm a bit underwhelmed by the voice actor, but it's all fan made so I can't complain. The addition of Fallout-like "talking faces" and small little details like the light taped on the gun look... interesting. I hope the supposedly chaotic development hasn't harmed the quality, Afterglow was one of the few games in the last decade that legit caused me childish wonder.
I'll wait for the initial bugfixes.... but this is a really welcome piece of news.
Sjukob
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2015
- Messages
- 2,093
Why are you equalizing hotfixes with an expansion pack?
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.