This was a nice megawad to return to, with this playthrough being my third time around. The levels are snappy– they don’t usually take too long nor involve sloggy switch hunting.

The first act of the megawad has the player go through levels that feel like real places. There’s a sense of progression because the levels connect to each other. The second act takes some real Plutonia influence and this is where the wad changes gears. Many levels are open-ended and open hot with enemies immediately spotting you and attacking. There’s not really any safe spaces so you have to carve out a spot in the level to get a grip on the situation. I love that Doom level trope and this wad has it for most of the backhalf.

I played this megawad with a weapon mod that stomped down the difficulty like a pop can but I don’t think that impaired my judgment of this wad’s solid level design and brisk enemy encounters. The music was okay but aside from the “Congo” theme from map 13, none of it struck out to me. It didn’t take me out of the game, though, as it was pretty decent midi score.

Nobody Told Me About id is a solid gameplay mod for Doom. It takes the iconography of Doom and puts a Build-style layer on it. Weapons are faster and deadlier, movement is quicker, and you can store items to use them when you need. There’s an additional layer of gore with enemies being blown back with a shotgun blast or exploding into gibs when exploded.

It doesn’t do anything specific that hasn’t been done in other mods but it comes together well and the package comes together nicely. The speed of combat, the detail to the gore– it feels very good. This could become a new default mod for me.

Thomas van der Velden’s Revolution! is a curious beast. With its evocative level design, lower enemy counts, and surreal story, it goes for “it” in a way that most megawads don’t.

Early on, the level design often tries to evoke the architecture and structure of real places, but it will betray those ideas very bluntly to showcase alien-looking setpieces. There’s a lot of clever bits and moments in the level design, too. The level design loses points for the middle section of the megawad which reuses a lot of foundry ideas. There are some levels that invoke switch hunts, too, although that’s only a few of them.

There’s a story here and its a little more complicated than the plot of Doom 2. The levels also inform the story a lot more frequently than Doom 2 so when I get to Map 17 (The Miners) I have context for whom the miners are.

The enemy counts only get into the triple digits once. The lower enemy counts gives this megawad the reputation of being easy and… yeah. It’s easy compared to Plutonia but that doesn’t mean there are no good enemy encounters. It’s weird how infrequent cell pickups and energy weapon pickups are. The game usually has you use the shotguns, the chaingun and rocket launcher so not only is the enemy count restrained, so is your arsenal. I had to use my plasma rifle and BFG sparingly.

I played with the Nobody Told Me About id gameplay mod but what spurred this third playthrough of Revolution! was the MIDI pack released in 2016. The new music here is pretty much all good aside from one theme I found was pretty generic. I think I would have preferred more eerie themes compared to the mostly action-oriented songs on the midi pack but it’s still a great audio veneer on this megawad.

Overall, I think this is a special megawad that makes up for its flaws by just being unique and having a clear creative impulse. It’s also recommended to people who dislike how hard and long community-made Doom megawads can get.