23/10/2009 @09:47:08 ^10:39:08

Bloodlust

This large map pretty much mixes up every texture in the Doom 2 IWAD, but gets away with it due to using proper alignment and so forth. It is more or less in three parts. It's a bit corridor-y but once you're past the first couple of areas it turns nonlinear and you can get all three keys in whichever order you like. There's lots of dark corners, nooks and crannies, and secrets to explore. Once you have the keys you go up a huge lift into a huge, bright hallway that quickly turns into a massive slaughter.

For difficulty, the wad recommends HMP, which I think I managed to cope with. The first room was a bit dull but once I got into the nonlinear part it was fun to explore. The final part felt a bit tacked on and was a bit too much for me (the narrowness compared with the horde of monsters made it easy to get trapped and killed)

I'm also fairly certain you need to be able to jump and use mouselook to get the best out of this map. At least one of the secrets, along with some items in the hallway of slaughter, were, as far as I could tell, inaccessible without being able to jump.

Generic Techbase

Just a bunch of disjoint silver corridors and small to medium-sized rooms. Not bad, but lacklustre. Basically like something from 1995 or 1996. Not difficult either, the single archvile's location might surprise you but I had more trouble with the pain elemental and a cloud of homing revenant missiles in the area beyond the red door. I liked the outdoor secret but could have done without the backtrack to get to its teleporter.

Really the best thing about this map is its name, which is the kind of thing I'd name a level.

ReeKrank

An Doom 2 "episode" of 11 maps. Most are small, cramped and maze-like, and focus too much on having everything on a 64-wide grid. Bit too symmetrical as well, having to do the same thing several times. A few bugs with secrets, some obvious secret sectors not marked as secrets, other secret sectors having no referencing sidedefs. A couple of maps were more fun, map05 was a mini-arena that seemed more like a map07, and map07 was a nice castle-like thing with a pointless stair-building puzzle at the end, but this was mostly forgettable.