The first level is the best for awhile in this episode length wad. It’s detailed and atmospheric and sets up a gripping DOOM adventure but I don’t think this wad sells its weirdness well enough after that. The first level is a creepy manor and then the second is a huge underground system of aquaducts and ruins the mysterious spell the first level conjured.

The gameplay is very good. The wad is mostly medium-sized levels but it earns the sprawling mega-maps that it has and despite the first half of the wad not selling it’s strangeness well enough, the backhalf gets trippy while treating the player to a series of escalating combat encounters. Not superhard encounters but challenging ones.

I’d recommend playing this wad because it’s not terribly long and a good downward trek into the unknowable underground.

The first level is the best for awhile in this episode length wad. It’s detailed and atmospheric and sets up a gripping DOOM adventure but I don’t think this wad sells its weirdness well enough after that. The first level is a creepy manor and then the second is a huge underground system of aquaducts and ruins the mysterious spell the first level conjured.

The gameplay is very good. The wad is mostly medium-sized levels but it earns the sprawling mega-maps that it has and despite the first half of the wad not selling it’s strangeness well enough, the backhalf gets trippy while treating the player to a series of escalating combat encounters. Not superhard encounters but challenging ones.

I’d recommend playing this wad because it’s not terribly long and a good downward trek into the unknowable underground.

Take this review with a grain of salt because many things about this megawad are not to my taste but here we go:

This is another megawad where the uniform level design works against it, much like Back to Saturn X. The levels are generally good, but they mix together in my memory. Most maps follow the same cellular makeup and many take place on some kind of cloud structure, so only levels with some kind of specific geographical gimmick standout like the multi-floor sortie Citadela I.

The lack of bespoke level concepts is what caused me to eventually grow bored of this mapset. Towards the end, I turned down the difficulty and cruised to the campaign’s conclusion. There’s interesting stuff in here but it’s in-between large sections of indistinct (but solid) mapping.

And the mapset is solid. The enemy counts are pretty low for each level– few going over 100 enemies– but the maps make good use out of those enemies with intense combat encounters. The battles in this game are deadly, and not just because of the megawad’s custom monsters like the plasma imps. I can’t decide if the new monsters are good or bad because they were very frustrating, but they add a lot of trickiness to the adversarial roster anyway.

I liked the music a lot. It’s very atmospheric and the wad’s MP3 format makes it sound more bespoke for the format. The music was probably my favourite aspect of the set so even if I come off of this mapset eager to put this wad away, I got something out of it.

I haven’t kept up with Brutal Doom too much in the last six or seven years so I don’t know how far Project Brutality deviates from its source mod. I will say that it was a surprise to play through a megawad with this latest PB update (e501bf7) and have enemies start upgrading 9 maps into the campaign. I don’t remember that kind of progression from the last time I played this mod.

It gets fierce quickly, and only on an easier megawad was I able to finish the standard campaign with 4 tiers but it’s quite the ride because as enemies evolve and get trickier and more powerful, so does your arsenal. The gun upgrades are cool even if there’s a few rapid-fire hitscan weapons whose functionality overlaps. I like the autoshotgun the most, especially after the reload upgrade.

Even without the upgrades and progression, this wad is great from the start because of that Brutal Doom carnage. Yeah, it’s a disturbingly violent experience but it’s also quite visceral in a way that most games aren’t. Gruesome, but satisfying. I do think it leans into the joy of violence too much for my comfort, especially with Doomguy’s quips. “Ahhh, chainsaw! The great communicator!” Shut up.

I turned off taunts but occasionally Doomguy would still talk and I hated it. For a video game as brutal as this, I don’t want a lick of any of that fist-pumping machismo. Tonally, I prefer something like Hotline Miami that isn’t making light of something so disturbing. On a positive audio note, the extra roars and mumbles from the enemies– they’re intimidating.

Overall, though: this is a pretty great DOOM mod. It feels incredibly gratifying to play, the carnage is intense, the progression system keeps things fresh, and there are plenty of options to customize your experience.

If you like monotonous environments and confusing switch hunts, you’re in good hands with Icarus: Alien Vanguard. I don’t know how many levels take place Icarus starship but it feels like two-thirds of the mapset on the ship’s silvery interiors. Even when the campaign heads into gothic or hellish biomes, the texture use is still very boring.

On a handful of levels I ended up noclipping my way to various keys or the exit because trying to figure out progression was too hard to grok. I’m sure if I took my time I would have been able to figure out how to get the yellow key in Map 8, but I didn’t want to spend too much time playing this wad so I skipped that whole trial. Same goes for finding the secret exits on Maps 15 and 31.

This is definitely a megawad from 1996 because– god– sometimes figuring what to do involving combing entire maps for a switch or trigger. Exploring levels isn’t a lot of fun either. The map design goes for believable/lived-in spaces but combined with the sparse details and unintuitive layouts, the naturalness of the environments work against it.

This gets me thinking: is this what other people feel when they play TNT Evilution? A lot of my problems I have with Icarus are problems people have with TNT, although I don’t remember being so confused and frustrated in all my times playing the team’s most famous megawad, though.

I played with Project Brutality which made this campaign zesty enough for me to want it to see it through. I can’t imagine finishing this vanilla, though. What good can I say about this one? I guess the level design and functionality could be worse. The music’s decent. Enemy placement is good and even on UV, is pretty tame. I think for the most part, it’s not surprise that this early megawad (which was featured on Doomworld’s 100 Top WADs of All Time) has mostly been forgotten.