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.

Most games are lonely– DOOM is completely solitary– but Comatose finds new depths to that loneliness.

Touching onto one of the main gimmicks of the wad, all foes in Comatose are cloaked, like the spectres from the main game. The gloomy colour palette makes it so the illusory foes often blend into the environment to the point of near-complete invisibility. With the outside being where cacos or lost souls could fly over the rooftops and strike from a distance, indoors were preferable for being easier to manage visually.

It wasn’t long before I got in the habit of shooting at nothing, thinking an imp or demon could be lurking in the shadows or bushes. To further the ghostly nature of the map’s enemies, they don’t give off activation cries. When they see you, they are silent. They gurgle and have their death sounds, but that lack of war cry helps sell the idea that they are lingering entities.

The other big gimmick of the map is that the map is a big city. It’s large, detailed, and very gloomy. As I walked around this city, I got the feeling that this was a post-apocalyptic realm. It feels like all humans have been long dead. The spectres that roam this land aren’t even echoes of whoever once lived in this world. They might as well be the ghosts of the things that killed them.

Ultimately, this map is engrossing and atmospheric even if it lacks a climax. At least, I couldn’t find much of a note to bring it all together aside from a pyramid. There are Egyptian artifacts around the city– maybe that had something to do with it? There might not be an official answer but this wad was so mesmerizing that I can’t help but wonder...

It was something to be a DOOM fan in 2019 and have one of the original creators of the game come out with a pretty official fifth episode of the game. I played it, thought it was pretty cool, but then moved on. Being that I’ve yet to try Sigil II, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the first one and compare.

Sigil is quick to introduce its idiosyncrasies (like the eye switches) and bombard the player with tough hellish environments. It takes off from Thy Flesh Consumed with its focus on hostile environments including lots of narrow pathways along lava floors, splintering enemy encounters, and all-consuming darkness. Sigil’s version of hell, which features lots of glowing cracks in the ground and vistas surrounded by black void, is a progression from the infernal realms of the latter episodes of DOOM and Thy Flesh Consumed. The bespoke hellscapes of Sigil will stick with me.

The enemy encounters are tight and so is the level design. I don’t like DOOM #1 for its smaller enemy roster and lack of SSG, so these nine levels are about as much as I want from the earliest incarnation of the series.Sigil is a great episode-sized venture of DOOM.

When it comes to a weapon mod that strikes a balance between mixing things up and staying within the template of DOOM’s proper arsenal, nothing beats Final Doomer. From Doomguy to Whitemareguy, its weaponsets replace each of the vanilla weapon with another in a similar class. There are a handful of options to tweak global mod behaviours and some that deal with specific weaponsets, like how many C4s you can throw before detonating with Hellboundguy.

Instead of writing up multiple reviews for each class, I decided to pool all my thoughts to this one. Allow me to take it away…

Whitemareguy: This weaponset focuses on fire weapons and gradual damage. It feels weaker than it is. The initial damage is solid and the follow up damage enemies take from being burned adds up too, although I never felt it was a good idea to rely on residual damage. The shotguns have a downward arc that complicates vertical shooting. The chaingun replacement is the only hitscan weapon, which is annoying. The Firegrasp is a charge up rocket launcher that can be pretty satisfying in the right hands. The BFG replacement Sol’s Wrath carpets the player’s view with fire and it can melt enemies up close but far away most enemies will survive albeit with their flesh aflame. Maybe my least favourite weaponset in the mod.

“Overall, an excellent megawad” was what I wrote in my notes from six years ago. My opinion has changed drastically. While Whitemare 2 frequently shows off interesting and creative bits of mapping, I found myself, even more frequently, being frustrated. There were a few good levels, but often times I grew to dislike the level I was playing.

The bigger levels were what really crushed my spirit. They were often swamped with enemy encounters to the point it was exhausting. These levels could also be very confusing on where to go next. Many levels also required annoying platforming. Grievances were peppered in to this mapset. The levels with the big

Still… there’s a lot here that’s interesting. Map 13 uses a large maze to represent the player losing their sanity. It’s annoying, but stands out as thematic level design. The big city levels are great to look at, including Map 15– Floating World. They’re visually sharp even if the spectacle works against them in how big they are and how long it takes to get around.

I might have had a better time if I wasn’t playing with the Whitemareguy weaponset from Final Doomer but I think a lot of my issues would stick even if I played vanilla or chose a more conventional weapon mod. There are a couple levels here that should be extracted and enjoyed by the community as classics, though.

Epic is a snappy five-level wad. Unlike most wads, this one goes for set pieces and pizazz without drifting away from classic DOOM gameplay. Map 2, which is probably my least favourite level for how confusing it can be, has a great ending sequence where you are trekking through an underground river. Map 4 is a train level. Map 5, the finale, is a big open desert with an eye-catching tower in the center.

The challenge is pretty tight although I found myself starved for ammo in Map 2 and in Map 5, the final fights are a jump in difficulty. It was good to revisit this one, if for anything, that final level which holds up as a classic BIG Doom level.

Eriguns 1 is a great vanilla+ weapon hack. There aren’t any super big changes– just tweaks/enhancements that carry the spirit of DOOM. The new pistol replacement can be fired real fast if you click the fire button quicky enough. I think most of the other weapon changes are cosmetic although the SSG has single shot capability now.

There are a couple new weapons that come from the Extended mode. One drops from the spidermon and the other from the cyberdemon. The spiderdemon drops the GATLING gun. It has some windup but it’s more powerful than the chaingun (or the assault rifle that replaces the chaingun in this mod). It chews up ammo quicker though. The dual rocket launcher that drops from the cyberdemon fires two rockets at once so it can be a very dangerous weapon if used improperly but when I’m swimming in rockets, I prefer the extra fire rate. There’s also the auto-shotgun but I don’t know how to get one of those without cheating.

Eriguns 2 is a very different beast. This version of the mod switches the arsenal of DOOM 2 with a hellish dark fantasy set of weapons. This new set works pretty well with the vanilla DOOM template even if there’s some awkwardness with one kind of weapon– like let’s say the chaingun– is replaced with the Mauler, which is essentially the SSG of Eriguns 2.

The pistol replacement– your initial weapon– uses magma charges, which is the cells replacement of the wad. Depending on the mapset, there’s a chance that you can run out of ammo with the weapons you got. Additionally, only a handful of weapons with gunfire that can travel through “windows”. The nailgun (the chaingun replacement) is stopped by walls that hitscan weapons could pass through in vanilla DOOM, which was annoying.

The weapons are clever, though. One of the SSG replacements shoots mines on enemies and surfaces and you use the alt-fire to detonate them. The Soulcaster (the rocket launcher replacement) fires a laser shot that can be charged for more damage and if it hits an enemy and kills them, that enemy will release a ghostly explosion that can damage others nearby and if any of those enemies are killed by it, they release an explosion, too! The weapons here are very cool and tricky.

I think most DOOMers have forgotten about both Ergiuns mods but the first one is a great vanilla+ mod while the second is a great twist on the normal weaponset that deserves to mentioned in the same sentence as Final Doomer. I won’t be forgetting these mods anytime soon.

Remnant is an exploration of an impressive medieval complex amidst a beautiful, verdant land. The level is large and getting around can be a little confusing but the venues are distinct and expressive. I love the contrast of the orderly man-made buildings with the naturalistic wilderness that the hellish fortress is built around. The level is detail without being too busy.

The setpieces are beautiful, and that's not just thanks to the wad using the OTEX resource pack that Eviternity was built from. The grassy hues are subdued but enchanting. There's a regality to both architecture and nature as well. It's a pretty wad!

The combat encounters are usually pretty good and thoughtful. Sometimes the game throws a scrambled assortment of enemies at you that usually break down into a festival of infighting, but mostly the combat is tough (very tough on UV) and inspires the player to strategize and use caution.

I had tried this one before and fell off and had even forgotten that I had played this one but I came back to this one on a whim and turns out this is a pretty special single-level wad!

Equinox is one of the most celebrated wads of the early era of DOOM mapping. Its environments are detailed and while I was playing I came across a large valley with lava pooled at the bottom and a wall in the tech facility blown open and I realized there was a story to this place and that’s not a feeling I get often with DOOM wads.

Furthermore, the wad makes use of recurring environments including a teleportation station that serves as an intermission level between the main episodes. There’s a connective essence between levels that makes this wad feel like a campaign instead of a collection of maps.

I liked the early parts of the wad where you are making due with a pistol and shotgun and mowing down dozens of infantry and imps. Even with using a gameplay mod, it was challenging but snappy. This is the rare wad that doesn’t shower the player with ammo. Even with the mod, I had to break out the chainsaw a few times to keep some shells in my satchel for when I needed them. Rooms are stuffed with enemies which is pretty inelegant but it provides ample opportunities for infighting. In fact, that seems to be the point. On Map 9, I let 100 enemies tear each other apart while I ran off to other parts of the level.

The last map is very notable for it’s overwhelming number of enemies. It got to a point where I assumed you were supposed to strategize around not killing a lot of them and that’s when I realized that the map was made by BPRD, creator of the Mucus Flow and by god did that make a lot of sense!

As for the levels visually, I don’t like that silvery moonbase aesthetic and found the corpses peppered everywhere to be a bad design choice. I didn’t like the look of this wad. It’s special, though. I don’t know if it’s a mega-recommend but it’s a slight recommend for it’s unique design choices and overall cohesiveness.

It should be known that Supercharge was meant to be a resource pack firstly and a gameplay mod secondly. That said, as a gameplay mod it's pretty solid. Also the new graphics might misdirect players, it's a rather vanilla experience.

There are more things tweaked in this mod than there are things changed drastically. Weapons are giving faster firing speeds and some add in reload systems, but function the same. The player is at "diagonal" speed at all times.

One of the big changes is the instant weapon switching speed. There's apparently tricks you can do to chain shots together using the quick weapon changing speed but I was never able to pull it off and I don't get the impression that it does much anyway.

The mod changes enemy graphics too but if someone told me that the enemies' behaviour and attacks were mostly unchanged, I'd believe them. There's a lot of switched-up sound effects too that I don't like but maybe I need to get used to them.

Overall, I could come back to this wad if I wanted something that was mostly true to classic Doom but enough of a change if I needed something fresh.

Miasma is a mammoth of a single level wad. The limey towers of the level are intricate and its complex is detailed with there being several interconnected corridors with windows and paths between them to make the place feel alive. There was a moment where I was walking down a corridor and I didn't realize that knights were tossing in fireballs behind me.

There's a non-linear nature to the map, too. There are plenty of optional areas and I would recommend tracking down a BFG before tackling the final tower. I didn't so that part was really hard for me, even with the Supercharge mod.

I've played this wad a few times but this is the first time I finished it. It's probably in my top 10 for recommended single-level wads. Get lost in its neon structures and blistering fights.