Master Levels For Doom II

released on Jul 26, 2019

The version of Master Levels For Doom II found as a part of the Unity remaster of Doom II.


Reviews View More

Not really my thing to journal DLCs, but since this was a standalone release, I guess it can be considered a game on its own. Logging the 2019 version because the cover is cooler.
But there isn't really much to say about it, it's just more Doom II, but now made by fans, some levels are good, even better than some of the original game, but most of them are just confusing trash (pretty much like regular Doom II).
Probably the worst game of the franchise.

glad i completed these so i never have to bother with their tedious fuck-you level design ever again

I was enjoying this compilation up until level 6, then they started to get a bit... Silly, it's not as hard as some people say, but it does have very cryptic and confusing level designs for my liking, even by Doom II standards.

I stopped playing because I was simply not having fun. I have no plans to come back to these either; I'd rather just play Doom II again.

By the time the guys at Id were working on Quake, CD collections of WADs for Doom had become a cottage industry. Id wasn't too happy seeing WADs sold in stores because - despite saying the creation of WADs was ok in the Doom license agreement and giving the first chapter of the original Doom out for free - they didn't make no damn money off them. The aforementioned license issue would likely complicate any litigation taken against people selling WADs, so Id came up with a more creative solution: beat them at their own game.

Id contracted several designers to work on the Master Levels, a 21 mission WAD compilation released alongside Maximum Doom, which itself contained over a thousand pre-existing WADs of highly variable quality. Among these designers were Tim Willits, who would go on to enjoy a long career at Id and contribute work to the Quake series and Doom 3, Christen Klie, who would later work for LucasArts on games like Rogue Squadron, and the late John Anderson, better known as "Dr. Sleep," who after playing Master Levels has become my nemesis. The amount that each of Master Levels' six designers contributed is uneven, though Klie, Dr. Sleep, and Sverre André Kvernmo (known as Cranium) designed the most missions overall. All this to say that the level of quality is pretty god damn inconsistent, and some of my least favorite designers contributed the most to the project.

There is no proper level progression in Master Levels. Instead, you select which mission you want to play from an ordered list and are bounced back to the level select screen once the mission is complete. Because there is no standard level-to-level progression, you begin each mission with only the handgun, and certain designers apparently like to take advantage of this by placing spongy enemies directly in front of you so you're eating fireballs the second a mission begins. Others, the angels that they are, will drop you directly in front of a shotgun. The first mission, Attack by Tim Willits, is an easy enough entry point to the Master Levels, with a fairly low difficulty ceiling and an easily navigable environment to run through. The first five missions in general are deceptively fun, well-designed maps that makes it seem like the team Id assembled knew their way around Doom maybe not quite as much as Romero or Petersen but close enough as to be capable of creating something enjoyable.

It all craps the bed shortly after that, though. Any problem you might have had with Doom II is likely exacerbated here to an almost ridiculous extreme. Hey, do you like invisible walls and switches that open up panels to other switches that open panels to switches that open panels to switches? Well then play Master Levels, freak! You want BIG levels? Take a stroll in Manor.WAD, a map so huge it crashes some versions of the game! Is Doom your favorite puzzle game? You're gonna love spending a whole-ass hour in Dr. Sleep's missions trying to figure out what the hell you're even supposed to do, you dumb bastard! See: footage of me beating a Dr. Sleep level not realizing he designed the next one.

I don't want to be too vitriolic towards any particular designer, particularly because Master Levels appears to be where many of them got their start, but there's a number of missions that just feel like someone had their head up their own ass. [NAME EXPUNGED] starting a level where you have to shoot a locked door to open it, smelling he own farts. There are some ideas here about what you can do with Doom's limited toolset and how you can force the players to reconsider what they know about the game's core loop, but a lot of the execution is sloppy and almost necessitates playing with a guide open. There also seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding about enemy placement shared between the designers, and it is not uncommon to walk into rooms absolutely filled with damn near every enemy type in the game, all shooting you at once from every angle. Whether this was done in a misguided attempt to add challenge or to provide some variety while running through the steps of a convoluted puzzle, I don't know, and I mostly found it to all be so haphazard. There's one level where you have to enter and exit a central structure a few times, and each time you progress to the next "phase" of the mission more revenants spawn outside, but nothing about the terrain makes fighting them fun, and it just becomes a chore you have to get done before you can get back to the mission.

Like I said, a lot of Master Levels' best missions are front loaded. Things get shaky between missions 6-10, and 11-20 are a total shitshow. I'll cop to the fact that I did not, strictly speaking, finish two of the missions. Both times I was too low on ammo and health to endure the onslaught of arch-viles and mancubus' spammed around the exit, and since I had all the keys collected and saw everything else the level had to offer, I just decided I was done. Considering there is no level-to-level progression, there's little incentive to see a mission through if it's really just not jiving with you. It is an unfortunate positive that Master Levels allows you to play less of it.

I wanted to treat Master Levels as its own review, because while it may be packaged with Doom II, it does not progress that game's narrative nor does it serve as a follow-up episode in the same way Thy Flesh Consumed or Sigil do for the original game. Likewise, the unique conditions under which Master Levels was made further contribute towards the sense that it's really it's own thing. For those reasons, I don't think you should play this right after finishing Doom II. I had some problems with that game, but Master Levels suffers from some truly heinous design issues, and by treating it as a continuation you're only going to risk ruining your perception of Doom II.