Doom Wad Club (SA): BTSX Episode 2

All this talk made me want to hop on the bandwagon and dig back into the latest version of BTSX Episode 2. I’m playing on UV difficulty with pistol starts, no saving and going for 100% completion because i’m familiar enough with the set. I’m also trying out the co-op monster placements via prboom’s -solo-net parameter for the first time. Solo coop play is something that’s recommended in the readme for a bit of an extra challenge, and it was pretty fun to play episode 1 that way. I’ll see how it goes, but it might make the really huge maps at the end of the set a bit too frustrating.

MAP01: Shadow Port

I enjoy punching so it didn’t bother me, but there’s a lot of punching to be had in this map. The chaingun spends most of the map exclusively being a tool for removing other hitscan bullies and perched snipers. That means every imp, revenant and knight is getting a smack. I was surprised at how late in the level I ended up finding the shotgun, only chancing upon one past the yellow key door, which is the half way point of the map. It remains a somewhat precious resouce and I ended up using it on stray cacodemons mainly.

I think the primary difference in this map when playing with co-op spawns is a few extra archviles. There’s an ambush with one while travelling down the 64 unit corriddor back into the complex from the ship, which I’m almost positive wasn’t there last time I played and there’s an extra vile added to the ambush in the red key area before the exit. This is where the plasma rifle secret really came to shine because trying to punch the viles while they’re resurrecting chaingunners isn’t fun.

Really there’s not much else to say about this one. It’s atypical of a map01 insofar as it’s a large sprawling complex which really emphasises exploration, is quite low density and it has that strict melee/tyson focus due to the ammo scarcity. It sets the tone nicely for the rest of the set - ammo is a resource to be carefully managed and the shadow port isn’t the last of the slow, methodical dungeons crawls.

MAP02: Underwater Explosions

You shoot the barrels, the barrels blow stuff up. Ammo is very tight in the first half of the map to force the player into using the barrels to blow the demons up. It’s sufficiently claustrophobic and densely packed with monsters to put the pressure on.

The only issue is how autoaim sometimes doesn’t want to play nice and the big beefy enemies decide to walk out of range of the barrels before you can blow them up and you end up having to punch them. A particularly egregious part for me was the little crescent area before the red key. There are a couple of mancs at the end surrounded by barrels, but they both decided to waddle out of range and I had to waste a lot of shotgun ammo trying to get rid of them.

Once you pick up the super shotgun it’s all rather straightforward. Ammo ceases to be a concern and the map starts to get into a nice flow. The blue key arena is really cool. The domino barrels ensure both viles end up low on health, but the distant vile is still a real threat if you don’t immediately pivot attention towards it, lest he raise a wall of pinkies in your path.

The final fight is neat, but a bit underwhelming. Again, autoaim can make targeting the perched viles more awkward than it needs to be, but you can just hide in the corner and spam the SSG at the very non-threatening smattering of enemies that spawn in on ground level while out of visual range. They really should have added a couple more revenants or a wandering vile or something. The little pillars in the center of the arena seem placed for something like that.

It’s a great little map though. Nice and punchy.

MAP03: Wings of Thorn

More close quarters combat and a nice densely packed layout. The red skull key wing looks really nice is a bit underwhelming. The sudden reveal of shotgun guys from the runic pillars is a good start to an encounter, but it feels like something more should have happened when the narrow walkway sank into the water. Instead you just have a rev and vile sniping at you from a window, totally ineffectually. Weird.

The yellow skull room on the other hand, is way cooler: A classic fork with a wall of revenants closing in from one corner of your tiny coffin with some mancs on pillars from behind adding some pressure to reposition and clear the room as fast as possible. Escape via the lifts isn’t unlikely, you’re going to have to fight on the maps terms.

There’s not much more to say about this map either. It’s an engaging, but unremarkable level. It’s tasteful in it layout and detailing but the monster placement is just… okay. The reveal of the revenants behind the dual-key door and vile is a fun bit of rocket spam. The three viles guarding the exit felt completely pointless. They can be escaped by holding back, can’t get down the stairs or do anything to actively harm the player. They’re just a writhing wall of meat to be chipped away with the shotgun and any remaining rockets.

MAP04: Dirty Water

This is another lengthy map. Start with the plasma rifle and it’s going to be your best friend for the duration. Plasma ammo is very plentiful so long as you don’t go picking up the big cells at 290 ammo. There’s a super shotgun which makes for a fine side arm and there’s also a rocket launcher, but it’s only accessible right at the end of the map and very easy to miss, as it’s in an alcove against a grey wall texture. The lack of any backpacks starts getting a little uncomfortable from this point in the set onwards, enforcing a certain amount of rationing in individual arenas with the penalty being a bit of backtracking.

The layout is very open and non-linear. I spent a lot of time trekking around in circles and slowly filling out the map before grabbing the two keys that gate the back third of the map. Once you have the keys, things become a bit more linear as you follow the figure eight lava-bordered path towards the exit.

Despite the open layout and length, there’s a lot of small-scale encounters and claustrophobic traps. The fake-out platforming to the mega armour that lowers you into a pit is wicked and there’s plenty of decent pins involving surprise revenants, mancs and awkward viles to stave off complacent play. The second half of the map with the walkways over the lava does a good job at forcing aggression by placing awkward revenants at the end of the corridors out of easy autoaim range. This pushes you into a few more complex fights on the back foot, forcing some clever improvisation.

It’s not all roses though, there’s a couple of pop-up viles - possibly just co-op placements - where there’s no cover and no potential distractions. These are annoying because it’s just a dice roll as to whether the plasma rifle gets them to flinch before getting blasted. There’s also a dark bit of the temple near the end with chaingunners behind bars and far out of autoaim range. The enemy placement here means it’s going to be virtually impossible not to be shredded and the bars mean plasma is ineffective. Combine that with the total lack of bullets available for the chaingun and the player’s only real recourse is to spam the SSG at them, which is inefficient and annoyingly unreliable.

Here’s my ultimate issue with this map: While the traps and individual encounters in the inside areas are cool, the combat in the open air sections is terribly dull. The outdoor spaces feel scaled far too large for the quantity of opposition you face. It feels empty and that made me feel that the map had dragged on longer than it really had. Even the two key arenas, a nice exercise in orchestrating in-fights, feels twice as large as it needs to be to actually pose any sort of significant challenge.

On balance, still quite a decent little adventure.

MAP05: Tower in the Fountain of Sparks I

A nice walk down the garden path, following the trail of health vials. The quality of the texture work, architecture and level of polish in these levels goes without saying.

MAP06: Useless Inventions

The obligatory e2m2 homage and crate-based platforming level for the set. I feel maybe this map would have been better placed in episode 1, but for some reason we have a little warehouse compound complete with alleyways and city streets amidst the overgrown ruins and temples. The start of the map inside the crate maze is pretty awkward; there’s lots of infinitely tall monsters to get snagged on if you start platforming before clearing the warehouse out properly. There’s a particularly rude archvile hidden in one corner and a lot of opportunities to run out of ammo early on, especially if you are foolish enough to find the switch that opens the path to secret red key door. As a result, I spent a lot of time punching the revenants and demons here.

Once clear of the warehouse, there’s a bit more room to manoeuvre and heavier weapons become available. There’s plenty of rockets to spam at the waves of arachnotrons and cacodemons that have taken over the streets. The enemy placement is pretty standard, if grindy stuff. Just a lot of meat to blast through and fellas in alcoves and on balconies for the most part without any particularly clever traps.

There’s a large optional route in this map that’s obscured behind the multitude of secrets. There’s a second yellow key door hidden away in the warehouse that leads to… another room filled with crates. This room is pretty much a 64-unit wide maze filled with revenants and perched chaingunners and it is honestly miserable to grind through cautiously. Eventually you’re rewarded with a red key, which opens an alternative route (found inside another secret) to the final arena and a plasma rifle.

The final room is quite cool at first, throwing you in a sealed pit with various hitscan enemies and a couple of mancs with some other high tier monsters and imps surrounding you on raised walkways. It’s chaotic enough to force the player to do some basic target prioritisation as they dance around the crate for cover. After climbing around to the upper walkway, a switch triggers the final wave which is three viles and a handful of revenants to repopulate the ground floor level. This part of the fight doesn’t really work too well. It’s awkward hit the viles below without rockets auto-aiming at your feet or some other monster walking in front of your shots, but there’s no strong incentive to actually sacrifice your safe position and jump down given how many monsters end up being resurrected down there.

All in all, probably the weakest map so far. It oscillates between being bland and annoying.

MAP07: Shrine to the Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots)

This map isn’t much to look at, but it’s really fun. It’s a non-stop series of ambushes and tight encounters that test the player’s ability to control the space around them. The start is quite rough with the masses of shotgun guys and then chaingunners next door with no available armour, but there’s a nice immediate berserk pack to recoup your losses. The encounter that’s just a three-way junction with revenants at one end, hell knights at the other and pinkies ready to cut off your potential escape down the side passage is the sort of intensely claustrophobic I’m really into. As is the outdoor ruins parkour zone with the blobs of revenants and mancs sniping from ledges and cacodemons floating around in the valley between them to block your stream of rockets.

The most interesting thing about the map is how there’s only one non-secret armour - two with coop placements enabled, but the second green is right at the very end of the map where it’s likely unnecessary - fittingly placed on an altar right at the midpoint of the level. This makes the early encounters with the liberal use of hitscanners and potentially huge damage revenant projectiles extremely lethal. To borrow a term from doomworld’s rd, this ‘prickly’ gameplay design can often times be fatiguing and lead to passive, cautious play lest the player suffer an unfortunate and frustrating instant death, but that’s not the case here. The map is short enough, clocking in at roughly 10-15 minutes to make death and retries a non-issue. If the green doesn’t provide enough protection for the more chaotic second leg of the run, there’s also a hidden blue hidden away before the final fight, too.

Speaking of the final fight, it’s a lot of fun. You’re immediately being chased around this temple structure by a wave of revenants and there’s a couple of viles who have the height advantage and can target you if you linger at any given side long enough. The switch reveals another wave of revenants and viles, this time with a couple teleporting in at ground level. It’s frantic rocket-centric fun.

Really engaging map. Short and punchy, the traps set the tempo of action, the player is never fully in control.

MAP08: A Blue Shadow

I think this map was significantly overhauled for version 1.0, because it was almost entirely unfamiliar to me and looking back at some old threads on doomworld, it was loathed by quite a few people back in 2014 for being dull (christ, I still can’t believe it took so long for 1.0 to come out). Well, it’s not so dull any more. The weakest part of the map is the start where there’s a grip of hell knights and some other trash enemies and only a single barrelled shotgun to take them out with. It’s a grind to clear them all up, but there’s an SSG almost immediately after that.

There’s a decently placed cyberdemon stomping around the yellow skull key room while you still aren’t fully geared up. There’s a blue door in the same place and the map gives out a lot of cell ammo, but no plasma rifle until much later on, which is a good contextual hint not to waste time trying to kill him yet because the space will be reused at a later point. Instead you have to clear the room out carefully, keeping him alive while trying to keep safe ducking in and out of caves and doing some light platforming.

Fights keep the pressure on by seeding some viles and pain elementals into the crowds and the blue room at the end that endlessly reconfigures itself is very monster closet and trap heavy in an endearing way.

Another pretty decent short map.

MAP09: Adverse Wind

The third in our chain of short maps, clocking in at under 10 minutes. This one is the shortest in the set besides a steeple of knives later on, but that’s barely a map in my opinion, it’s just a glorified single arena. Lots of SSG work, lots of teleporting ambushes which threaten to smother the player.

The spider mastermind on her raised platform is pretty cool, there’s a plasma rifle and lots of ammo sitting next to her, so there’s a strong incentive to be extremely aggressive and spam her down at point blank range. This is clearly accounted for, because once she dies it frees up space for a bunch of revenants to spawn in over her corpse, which is cute. What was slightly less cute was the co-op exclusive cyberdemon that followed after them. The arena around him is pretty tight so splash is a lethal threat. I instinctively backed off, over the bridge to the blue key side of the map, which was extremely foolish in hindsight. Once there, I realised there was no way to peek out without risking taking splash from the rockets and crossing back over the bridge to the cyberdemon and extra cell ammo was going to be really rough.

After dealing with a cyberdemon at near point-blank range, the final encounter outside is relatively tame by comparison. There’s a very nasty chaingunner hidden behind a dead tree, but plasma melts everything and by this point you’ll be expecting every monster wave teleporting in.

MAP10: Eureka Signs

A sprawling, but completely linear adventure map that has you looping back around on yourself a few times. Probably the best sense of place of the maps so far, starting out amidst the ruins at first, before delving deeper through the giant temple complex underground with its libraries and flooded sections. A huge amount of texture variety on display and it all just works perfectly. It’s like a good quake map insofar as you want to play just to see what you’ll find next, above and beyond any gameplay concerns.

Luckily, it plays pretty smoothly for the most part. There’s quite a high density of monsters, but it never feels like a grind. The start is a hot one, immediately spawning a wave of revenants behind the player to force them out into the open. Having to wait for the plasma to lower while exposed from multiple angles and finally pushing up the stairs to wipe out the first archvile. The map continues to push you around like this throughout.

There’s a strange fondness for releasing viles in pairs directly in front of the player over and over again. In some circumstance you can start back-pedalling immediately and play passively, luring them to a safer corner of the map to wipe them out, but more often than not this results in pretty nasty ammo pressure as they are seldom alone, and there’s always monsters to resurrect. This is where the lack of a backpack works to the maps favour. Denying the opportunity to horde a massive amount of cells and shells and distributing them like breadcrumbs provides a strong reason to play aggressively and constantly juggle between weapons. In some circumstances there’s no possibility running away, like the lava pit where the viles are released at the end of a hallway as some cacodemons are penning you in from either side. There’s no choice but to grasp the nettle, spamming rockets immediately and rushing toward them blindly.

The pillar jumping puzzle was quite annoying to set up. It feels like the first pillar lift isn’t going to stop and will crush you, which makes you want to hop off onto the second pillar immediately to avoid losing 25 minutes of progress, which messes up the timing for the final jump. The final right is pretty cruel too, it’s tricky to know where to run to avoid the viles, given how it appears you’re trapped in a narrow corridor, until it reveals you’re back outside and maybe the trio of pain elementals immediately afterwards was a little rude.

This is a good example of how to make a long adventure map. Engaging without becoming a dull grind where enemies are just haphazardly placed in the player’s path without much thought. While there are traps and trickier encounters, there are no sudden spikes in difficulty or guess-right-or-die setups deep into the journey.

MAP11: Tower in the Fountain of Sparks II

Intermission map.

MAP12: Demons Are Real

The first of two contributions from Skillsaw, and it couldn’t be more of a Skillsaw map if he tried. It’s a linear track that crosses back over itself a few times through various key doors. Action is constant, by way of a constant drip feed of low-level monsters mixed in with the occasional heavy hitter. Skillsaw’s style lends to a dynamic and aggressive style of play that feels thrilling and dangerous, but it’s an illusion. There’s a constant drip feed of health and ammo to hoover up and always a vast amount of open space to operate in. I played extremely sloppily and took a large amount of avoidable damage, but never seemed to want for anything. That said, there’s nothing wrong with this style of mapping, it’s good to feel powerful and in control and if the illusion of danger makes for a fast and fluid style of play, it’s a worthy bit of theatre.

Unfortunately there’s nothing that particularly stands out about this map. Looking back on it as I write this, I can’t remember any encounters or interesting setups. Everything flows so nicely, but there’s nothing that drew my eye as a set piece or landmark. It reminds me of some of the episode 1 levels of valiant in how anonymous it all feels. After thinking for a moment I managed to remember the very final fight, which is quite cool in how it drops a sneaky vile on you while a mess of low tiers spawn in the middle of the tiny square chamber. Pretty effective because it made rockets risky to use despite being the preferable tool.

I may have sounded a bit negative in this write up but don’t misunderstand - Even a mediocre Skillsaw map is entertaining, and this one doesn’t outstay its welcome. Popcorn is still pleasant to eat, even if it isn’t necessarily filling.

MAP13: Nation Gone Dry

One hell of a hot start. The revenants and perched chaingunners from so many angles make it absolutely imperative to push forward, as far into the temple complex as possible. The shotgun just isn’t enough to deal with all the concurrent threats, especially when the vile shows up in their midst, forcing the player even deeper, into the arms of a group of arachnotrons, mancs and a super shotgun. Maps that start hot and kick the player around from place to place are a favourite of mine.

Unfortunately, the pressure dissipates when a foothold is established. The rest of the map mainly consists of dealing with small groups of higher tier enemies in pretty open surroundings. It’s another map where everything is scaled up to be befitting of the theming, but perhaps at the expense of how the thing plays.

The central gimmick of raising and lowering the water level is decent. It’s cool to return to the starting arena to find the snipers have now been set free by the rising tide and new areas to explore. The last third of the map leans heavily on viles as a pressure tool to get the player pushing forward, again, with mixed results. The big ring-shaped cistern where the viles tempt you to jump in lest they resurrect the knights, and later the flying swarms in the bottom of a now deep pit is pretty effective. The final arena somewhat less so. The viles perched on the walls overlooking the arena teleport onto the field if the player starts to climb the stairs, but there’s no real reason too. It’s safer just to let the monsters filter towards the entrance of the arena and create a natural chokepoint there. If that happens, when the viles teleport in they won’t have anything in their path to resurrect.

Quite good. Nothing spectacular.

MAP14: Shocker in Gloomtown

I was surprised to see a lukewarm reaction to this map, because for my money it’s one of the best in the set. It’s certainly the one that came to mind for me whenever anybody brought up episode 2 any time in the last five years. It’s also the first real bump up in difficulty in an otherwise extremely shallow difficulty curve.

This map is absolutely stuffed with monsters. Not a single inch is safe from the hordes and the first job is carving out a small zone of relative safety from which to push out from down one of the many paths. This is one of the first maps where I noticed a stark difference in the jump from UV to -solo-net. Cooperative mode augments the hitscanners at the start and massively increases the density, throwing some more cacodemons in the mix as well. The trend continues throughout the entire map, with even the final arena getting the tidal wave of zombiemen replaced by a more threatening mixture of imps, demons and shotgunners. Mercifully, there’s a couple of extra green armours on offer, and a spare soul sphere to compensate for the numbers, but the start in particular is still extremely rough.

Fighting for space and being bullied around by high tier enemies supported by walls of trash is the persistent combat motif throughout the entire map. The hitscan shooting gallery overlooking the watery pit, the long room guarded by a trio of mancubii in alcoves with some chaingunners and a sudden flood of low tier monsters from both directions to pincer the player - all of these are reliant on some very fast thinking and decisive moves to claim control over whatever corner that can be reached as to not get overwhelmed. The room with the crusher cages beyond the yellow key door goes further, covering almost every inch of floor space with something, repopulating the room with swarms of imps and demons repeatedly. Even secret BFG dumps no less than three viles on whoever manages to reach it.

Layout wise, the map embraces non-linearity in a way that’s extremely effective. In the most reductive sense, it’s just a series of hallways and staircases confusingly stitched together, but it generates a lot of dynamic encounters and fights that require control of multiple levels of space. There are three keys, but only the yellow key - or one of either the harder to find red or blue keys is strictly necessary to exit. The blue and red keys are both hidden away, though are visible in windows, giving a hint as to where the entrance could logically be found. These keys have a variety of useful functions. The red key opens a side passage into, or escape route out from the big yellow cage fight. The blue key can be used to teleport into the same room, and also reveals a couple of switches that crush the caged mancubii. This turned out to be a really horrible idea for me as the archviles found their way into those cages and managed to resurrect a large number of wall clipping, damage immune ghost monsters, wrecking a couple of demo attempts in the process. Not a problem in more advanced source ports or if you aren’t stupid like me and have intercepts overflow emulation turned off. Both keys are necessary to unlock the invaluable BFG, and both play a role in the final arena.

Speaking of the final arena, it’s a great concept but it’s a bit disappointing at how it can be short circuited with a BFG. The intended concept of having to cut through a literal wall of low tier enemies with the plasma rifle to avoid getting splattered by a cyberdemon rocket is great, but if you find both keys you can simply mash the BFG up in his face and end him in 3-4 shots, before anything else gets close. Ammo pressure would be the easiest way to fix this - like the evil and unkillable cyberdemon in rd’s ‘How To Train Your Pet Cyber’ - but Gloomtown is the very first map to have a backpack (yay), so it’s easy to go in stocked up with cells. The other simple methods like having an invisible box around some archviles with a tiny pixel wide gap for them to snipe from (Gateway to Shangri-La) or using hidden archviles to resurrect a monster endlessly (Plutonia) won’t work.

The two hidden keys factor continue their utility in this fight too, used to activate switches that make the fight easier, in principle, though only the red switch is really that useful. The red key lowers a couple of walls, blocking the sight lines of the cyberdemon and providing a safe spot to stand still and spam at the trash. The Blue key switch activates a crusher over the cyberdemon. It’s convenient and cuts out clean-up time, but the crusher alone is just too unreliable and slow to let you shift focus. The cyberdemon is always potentially able to get a rocket out between pain states. There’s also the issue of the switches having annoying little guards over them - requiring them to be pressed twice - which is awkward and the longer you fumble about with your back to a cyberdemon, the more dangerous it gets…

Quibbles aside, it’s an excellent map and it’s non-linear enough in a meaningful sense that everybody will have taken a different route to the exit on their first playthrough, each with its own sets of mercies and terrors. In my top three for this set, easily.

MAP15: The Theory of Broken Circles I really wasn’t looking forward to this map. It’s a gigantic map and I knew it’d take at me the best part of an hour to fully clear it out. The prospect of making a mistake, dying and starting again was not particularly welcoming. Thankfully, everything went well and I managed to clear everything within the hour, with a solid 15 minutes dedicated to finding the last couple of secrets and trying to figure out why some stragglers hadn’t teleported in.

When episode 2 was first released as a beta way back in 2014, this map really exemplified all of the negative aspects of the set: Overlong maps, bland encounter design where the player grinds through a set of haphazardly placed monsters, confusing layouts and bland samey areas. Together these factors shaped the experience into a formless void of tedium. To the credit of the team, the changes and tweaks to the 1.0 release have gone a long way to punching up the encounters in many of the maps I’ve played up to this point and giving the maps a stronger identity (map08 comes to mind as being profoundly boring in the first public release), but can the same be said of Broken Circles?

Not really, sadly. I can’t think of much that has been significantly altered from my previous experience. I still spent a solid 25 minutes wandering around the identical blood chasms and stone hallways without finding a key. The encounter design for most sections is still just reducible to small numbers of high tier enemies evenly spaced across on every ledge and in every corner to encourages their slow, methodical excision before progressing. Trying to play aggressively and ignoring enemies leads to getting sniped, monster blockages and ammo starvation. It’s obnoxious to turn a corner to find a set of rocky ledges filled with revenants or a cluster of mancubii blocking the next chokepoint almost identical to the ones you just spent 20 rockets killing. There’s just no flow: Encounter enemy, stop, remove threat, move forward to next sector, repeat.

The arenas for the specific keys are okay, but a bit undercooked. They all involve a trying to gain access to some sort of teleporter to the key plinth, protected by a gauntlet of teleporting enemies at close range with a vile or two thrown in for good measure. I liked the idea of the yellow key teleporter being guarded by those revenants on pillars that can’t be killed, but the player is immediately guided away from them to do the majority of the fighting in the surrounding canyon. It would have been far cooler if they were used as a pressure tool while trying to figure out how to shut them down. On the plus side, the trio of viles that teleport in directly behind you when you find said switch to deactivate them is probably the most brutal encounter in the entire map.

There are a couple of questionable design decisions I found while playing that stuck out to me. There’s a plasma gun on a platform in the west corner of the map, but the pillars you climb to get to it lower after being stepped on, never to be usable again. That’s fine – though a little cruel - because if you fall off there’s still redundant spawns for all the weapons. What isn’t cool is how it opens a closet at the top with a trio of revenants. If you are unprepared, the instinctive move is to jump down. Unfortunately, there’s a shootable switch behind them that opens one of the secrets and if you’ve jumped down it’s really, really hard to notice, let alone hit it, potentially locking you of 100% secrets permanently. It’s just about possible to shoot it with a random pellet from the SSG from below if you get lucky with the spread pattern, but I wasn’t impressed. Coop monster also aren’t particularly well integrated. There are a bunch of extra cyberdemons in the blood canyon. Most of them are positioned in awkward areas where they have poor sight lines and can’t do much damage due to the height variation, but the player isn’t able to safely get a clear shot on them either.

On the positive side, the way they handled the path to the secret map is unique and extremely cool. Once you find the inaccessible lift, tucked away behind a blood fall, there’s this big stone tablet depicting the map layout and some flashing green lights highlighting certain sectors. Going to those places and doing a bit of secret hunting yields a floor plate that raises a section of the path. The indicator lights turn off when you’ve found one of these, so it’s a really good way of pointing the player in the right direction and lessening the risk of burnout. I think this is new to 1.0, and hope more megawads do that sort of thing in future.

Don’t get me wrong, Broken Circles is a technical marvel - building such a vast map while keeping under vanilla limits is deeply impressive. While much of the map is so samey, it’s still very tastefully themed with some nice flourishes of detailing here and there. It’s also impressive how it manages to maintain the balance of ammo and weapon distribution given how remarkably non-linear and maze-like the layout is. It’s all just so very, very, very boring to grind through.

MAP31: Fireking Says No Cheating

Secret slots are the place for misfit maps that don’t fit in with the rest of a set. There’s an understanding, if not an expectation within the community for map 31 and 32 to provide something a little different - perhaps a guest map, something more experimental or in this case, a truly majestic slaughtermap. I have no clue how it was kept within vanilla limits (well, it runs in chocolate doom but will probably have issues with the sprite limit in the dos executable) because it feels like no compromises have been made at all. Designed in part by Joshy, creator of Resurgence and half of Speed of Doom, this map feels like a worthy continuation of his Poison Ivy series. It’s a huge map, aggressive as hell and probably the most fun I’ve had with any BTSX map.

Fireking doesn’t fuck around and starts with the hottest of hot starts. The map is pre-populated with vast hordes of enemies, is large in scale and very open. The cyberdemons in the starting room exist to bully you out into the unknown, a duo of archviles hot on your heels. All of the paths you can take are stuffed with monsters. The walls are alive with revenants and archviles, all with a wide line of sight that prevents any attempt at boltholing. Mercifully, Joshy has placed a couple of invulnerabilities within immediate reach, though these are the only two you’ll be seeing. They’re useful for scouting out the initial area and starting up the infight engine, or can be saved for specific encounters once you’ve died a few times and started figuring the map out.

The slaughter on offer in this initial area is of the zone of influence variety: The immediate objective is to gain a foothold in the map by collecting the BFG, clearing a bit of space, and then systematically pushing out to beat back the encroaching opposition. Unfortunately, the BFG is a trap and guarded by a ridiculous number of hidden archviles, so I found it’s good to keep one of the invulnerabilities for this specific purpose. Once you’re fully geared up, there are two keys to be collected to unlock the next phase of the map. One of these keys is guarded by a massive cluster of viles (see a pattern here?) and the other traps you in a box with a massive wave of hell knights.

Opening the door to the next area repopulates the map with more meat and some viles, so it’s a good excuse to clean up before continuing. If you kill the viles and revenants inside the walls, it makes the later part of the map where you get to fight though those upper walkways much easier. There’s plenty of rockets for that purpose, but it’s not strictly speaking necessary if it starts to feel boring.

The back half of the map consists of a series of more structured set piece battles. Aggression is enforced, not encouraged with tricks such as teleporting the player into a temporary box in the middle of the blue key arena or the drop down into a nasty pin beyond the blue door. Immediately pushing out into the unknown and careful BFG spam is necessary to avoid being penned into a corner and crushed. This big string of fights are all really decent and varied in their composition. Ammo isn’t scarce, but it’s not plentiful enough to allow the player to hold mouse1 blindly, which prevents the proceedings from becoming mindless.

My favourite of these is probably dropping into the lava lake behind the blue key door. You start in a cubby hole surrounded by demons on either side. Pushing them back and emerging out into the enclosed back corridor reveals a duo of cyberdemons, that serve to push the player out into the open air. From here, there’s a raised platform in the centre of the room, teeming with viles and revenants, a wall of perched arachnotrons on one side and the added complication of cacodemons and pain elementals drifting in from above. There are so many potential angles of attack that you’ve just got to pick an arbitrary threat and start clearing them one at a time, forced to change course or switch target at a second’s notice. It’s chaotic as hell and never shakes out the same way twice.

Play gets mixed up a bit in the back third of the map. There’s a hyper claustrophobic fight in the middle of a narrow bridge between a sea of imps and some seeded viles, which threatens to smother the player and chip their health away slowly. This leads to a cramped puzzle box of platforming and a succession of cruel traps. There’s surprise archviles in tight spaces and chaingunners raining down fire from above. It’s a substantial shift away from the fluid encounters previously, where there was always somewhere to run and space to dodge in, and tests a whole different set of combat skills.

The only let-down is the ending: Things unwind rather gently, rather than reaching a climax with a memorable set piece battle. Lucky for me, because this is the part of the map where I came closest to death, walking into two cyberdemon rockets in rapid succession in a situation where there were no other threats to contend with. Long play sessions lead to mental fatigue. Small mistakes 30 minutes into a map have a much larger psychological toll than the same error would in a shorter map that only takes 15 minutes to beat.

Pure fun. I love playing this map. It’s perfect for casual runs because it doesn’t rely on the more puzzle-like encounters you’d see in say, a Ribbiks map where there’s only one solution for survival. Instead you can go in with imperfect knowledge and just play as loosely as you like, always improvising and changing up tactics based on what’s going on around you.

Here’s my most recent playthrough on the latest version. After the blue door key, I had completely forgotten how most of the encounters work and it shows:

MAP16: Tower in the Fountain of Sparks III

I got lost here because there wasn’t the trail of health vials to follow and I kept getting distracted looking at the pretty scenery. Really nice walk, though.

MAP17: Steeple of Knives

Being frank, this is barely even a map. It’s a single combat arena, a concept, a scrap to be developed into something more, but for some obscure reason it was granted its own slot. There’s a circular arena with some pillars for cover and three needle-like protrusions which terminate in a switch and teleporter back to the centre of the room. For every switch you press, a wave of monsters spawn in. There’s also some rudimentary scripting to introduce additional monsters to the mix if more than one switch has been pressed.

I got lucky and managed to pick the archvile and plasma rifle switch at the start. Once the trio had been dealt with using all of the available plasma ammo and some additional chaingunning from cover, I went and pressed the other two switches to reveal everything else. With a total of 47 monsters, it’s not a particularly complicated affair, but there’s a bit of on-the-fly prioritisation needed as the pain elementals can potentially fill the room up with skulls, chaingunners shred through the green armour extremely quickly and the cyberdemon watches over the proceedings from the now-lowered centre of the room.

There’s more than enough cover to simply circle strafe around the arena keeping all the monsters corralled in the centre, even if the viles are released late. I found myself grabbing the blur sphere to mitigate the most significant threat of getting melted by the chaingunners and simply kept my distance from everything else as the cyberdemon did his thing. So long as you take pot shots at the pain elementals while circling to keep them under control – and if the viles are alive, be careful with your shots so they stay angry with the cyberdemon - the demons take care of themselves quite quickly. Wait behind cover for thirty seconds for the invisibility to wear off and then finish off the cyberdemon and any stragglers.

It’s not a bad encounter and the arena looks really pretty, but there’s not much else to it. It feels like a cut area from MAP26 or something. I suppose it’s a nice palate cleanser after three exhaustingly substantial maps and a nice introduction to the theming for the last stretch of maps.

MAP18: Optional Bases Opposed

The second Skillsaw map in the set and this one is far better than the last. It retains all of the characteristics of the last map and is typical of Skillsaw: Generous amounts of health and ammo, lots of low tier monsters to cut through and a flowing layout that leads the player around from objective to objective effortlessly.

As the name implies, this map isn’t linear. There are two paths off to the north and south that provide the yellow and red keys respectively and both loop back to the starting area. To the west is a pyramid containing the exit and a path with the blue key. Only the blue key and one of the remaining keys is necessary to enter the exit teleporter, but there is an optional bonus area for completionists who collect the yellow and red.

This map is far more interesting than the last because the fight setups embrace height variation. Unlike the relatively flat combat in Demons and Real, there are always monsters on multiple levels to engage with, like the revenants on the pillar in the yellow key wing or the snipers in the tower and overlooking the courtyard at the end of the blue path. Having fights that utilise the geometry in this way goes a long way to making each area distinct and somewhat more memorable.

A few of the traps are decent too. There’s a secret that telefrags a couple of viles that harass the player in the starting zone and then leads to a gated oasis with a soulsphere. Picking this up reveals two viles, which is a trick Skillsaw has pulled off in more than one previous release, but it’s always cute. There’s a gate that requires both the red and yellow key guarding a the BFG, which releases a number of revenants, a couple of vile and some mancubii acting as turrets upon collection. The weird layout of this room and way the revenants filter in from the exit door makes dodging tricky.

This BFG path is strange because there’s no real situation where the BFG is useful outside of it, so late into the map. The remaining path to the blue key is a series of encounters where enemies only attack from one direction and lends itself to rocket spam. I’m fine with secrets and map branches that exist for their own sake with no material reward, but I know it really winds some people up.

The final fight is another damp squib, which is something i’ve noticed a lot of in this playthrough: A spider mastermind and a handful of hell knights warping in outside the pyramid. There’s no pressure or need to fire a single shot, as they infight perfectly with minimal player intervention. Oh well.

It’s nice to play something so loose and fast paced - spamming rockets, eating endless small stimpacks and blindly running headlong into danger. Worth savouring because this is the last opportunity to do.

MAP19: Unbaited Vicar of Scorched Earth

The first of two solo contributions by Tarnsman and these maps do not fuck around with cooperative thing placement. The image above, , taken from the very first moment of the map, should give a good indication of what to expect here. Cooperative adds six cyberdemons to the map (a bold increase from zero), doubles the number of viles and gives out a plasma rifle in the starting area. The difference in experience is pretty substantial, though it’s nothing compared to the chaotic nightmare MAP24 turns into.

Lots of traversing damaging floors here, but thankfully there’s lots of radsuits for co-op out of necessity - I know they have to be rationed carefully for a regular UV playthrough. Combat is mainly rocket and plasma based for the first half of the map. If you avoid suicide by barrel and escape the clutches of the first cyberdemon, your reward is a drop down into an enclosed pit containing the blue key and yet another cyberdemon. This is a frantic encounter with archnotrons overlooking the fight from opposite sides and mancubii from the front.

The rest of the path forward is blocked by the occasional mancubus, arachnotrons and small clusters of imps. There’s a wave of cacodemons that spawn in and yet another cyberdemon to deal with in a very narrow pool of lava. Eventually it loops back to the start, revealing a vile and some revenants, the super shotgun and a path to the exit arena.

What’s most interesting to me about this map is how a substantial route and almost half of the monsters are gated behind a secret tile switch near the super shotgun. The reward for clearing this path is a BFG and megasphere, but the fight to get to the end is appropriately nasty. The BFG is in a cave surrounded by lava guarded by two cyberdemons and a handful of viles. The only safe way I could find to approach this area was to trick the cyberdemon into shooting at me while standing on a raised platform, so he would shoot the wall below me and slowly splash the viles to death before spamming plasma at his face. Picking up the BFG releases another four viles and a bunch of revenants and there’s absolutely no cover. The only real strategy is to back off out of the arena and take the viles out as they approach, ducking into cover if more than one targets you or the cyberdemon gets in the way. I wasn’t a fan of these encounters, it felt like the difficulty was in figuring out how to bypass the fight as opposed to taking part in it.

There’s some really pretty set pieces in this secret area too. A trio of archviles spawn under A broken viaduct, with some nifty fake-3d effects and there’s a lone cyberdemon camping on a riverbank. A peaceful change in pace from all the lava and stone temples.

The sheer quantity of viles and cyberdemons, and the lack of anything beyond three green armours (One in the final fight you probably won’t notice) are the main factors in making this map a pain to beat. Apparently, there’s an unmarked secret that reveals a mega armour right by the lift at the very start of the map if you shoot a distant wall texture between a red and green torch, but I never found it in my playthrough. Irritatingly, A monster closet (sector 758) containing viles is broken in this version so 100% kills is impossible, but I am left wondering if they were supposed to be released before or after the BFG is acquired.

Kind of annoying, but only a fifteen minute map. Easy on the eyes and the damaging sector gimmick make it memorable at least.

MAP20: Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom

This map received a massive overhaul for the 1.0 release. The original was a massively dull crawl from A to B, progress being interrupted every other minute to grind away at some perched high tier monster or vile with plasma. It’s one of the longest maps in the game, clocking in at roughly 45 minutes of play and honestly this is the map along with map15 which soured me on the whole megawad back in 2014.

Either I’ve softened a lot in my outlook or things have improved a little since then. The map is now a non-linear hunt for three keys and a shorter trek to the exit. It sits between Eureka Signs than Broken Circles in its design, but leans far closer to the former. There’s a huge amount of variety aesthetically and the set pieces are memorable - from the weird wicker huts, to the nukage lake, the lava crushers and giant temple complex in the middle of map - so it feels like an actual adventure. In terms of flow, it’s still close to Broken Circles because the layout is incredibly confusing and meandering. It doesn’t help that the paths to the keys are very easy to overlook if you are unlucky. The yellow key is down one unmarked fork in the cave complex and you have to drop down from a platforming segment into the water to find the blue key.

Cells are still the primary currency in this map, but the new version does a pretty decent job of mixing the combat up with some traps and cute encounter ideas: The red key fight where it smothers the player with flying enemies while the arachnotrons snipe from a distance is nice. The temples are filled with rapid-fire traps that push you around mercilessly. The blue key room pulls the classic trick of revealing a giant wall of slowly closing-in nobles. The big central temple isn’t perfect, but it gets the player sprinting all over the place in an attempt to shut down all of the snipers. All of this is a welcome break from the ‘crawl forward, stop, shoot, repeat’ style that the old version and other weaker adventure-focused maps like Broken Circles fall into.

Cooperative doesn’t change much up as far as I could tell. It adds a trio of cyberdemons alone on a beach and some spider masterminds in the water surrounding the stone temple. On the one hand, the masterminds help fill the temple, but ultimately, they’re just a waste of time and ammo because they’re on a lower level than the player at all times, severely limiting their line of sight and how threatening they can be. The fundamental issue with that whole area is how massively over-scaled it is given the level of actual opposition faced. It’s just a lot and lots of arachnotrons, revenants and mancs sniping at the player from half a mile away, a few viles running about and some slow-moving clouds of cacodemons. It’s strange how there are two invulnerabilities to tackle it, when it’s one of the less threatening encounters in the map. The addition of a few spider masterminds doesn’t do much to change anything.

MAP21: Bulldog Skin

The start of this map is probably the highlight of the whole experience. There’s a fight around a ring with a couple of archviles on a pillar at one end and a bunch of different high tier monsters dotted around elsewhere. You’ve got to keep moving to prevent the arachnotrons from shedding you, but half of the ring is being locked down by viles so it’s important to get the timing on the blasts right and duck in cover.

There are two different keys that need collecting in any order. The yellow key route is pretty subdued: Cramped cave passages filled with monsters and a few instant teleport traps, but everything can be melted with the plasma before they can get an attack out. The blue path is more substantial. There’s a teleporting cyberdemon in the outer courtyard and a bunch of other high tier monsters guarding a switch, with some chaingunners and other trash at ground level. It’s best to not bother trying to fight everything in here and just go for the switch. The cyberdemon in particular is a trap to make you waste your cell ammo. In situations where there are awkward boss monsters or really awkward snipers like this, it’s best to assume there will be some easy to way to deal with them later, be it via telefrags, crushers or teleporting them away . Even if you end up being wrong, it’s better to go back and clean up once the rest of the map has been cleansed to avoid starvation situations.

There are a two cyberdemons that erratically teleport around in the next hall guarding a handful of cell packs and a mega armour. I really don’t like it when cyberdemons are used this way. The risk/reward is massively out of proportion as the position and destination of the teleporter linedefs is unclear and therefore the cyberdemon can easily warp point blank into your face and do over 200 damage. There’s absolutely no reason to fight them head on as it is, because you can simply climb the stairs to a ledge above them where you’re relatively safe, so long as you quickly melt the waiting mancs. There’s a switch that releases some more enemies on the ground floor and it’s best to let infighting take care of most of them, and then you can stand on the edge of the platform near the stairs where the cyberdemons can’t target you and unload plasma into their faces.

The final fight for the red exit key is almost interesting, but doesn’t work. Wall of revenants with a vile supporting them pop out of one wall and just outside the exit opposite, there’s the teleporting cyberdemon from the courtyard and a spider mastermind. As the spider mastermind invariably upsets the cyberdemon and most of the revenants, you can walk out the exit, back off around the corner and wait for the archvile to path around to you. Everything else dies in a storm of infighting. I can only assume the two boss monsters outside are supposed to make it difficult to escape and force a close quarters encounter, but the doorway is just too wide.

Being charitable, the map seems to work best when played like an extremely aggressive speedrun and maybe that’s the intention. The teleporting cyberdemon in the courtyard is a good indication that you aren’t supposed to bother fighting everything. As is the fact the blue key area works best if you press both the switches to get a massive infight going. The problem is, most players will use whatever tactics they can to survive - especially when fights involve very threatening enemies like cyberdemons - and if that means being extremely passive and playing lame, they’ll play lame. You need to force aggression by the carrot in the form of new toys and vital resources or the stick of lock ins and bullying tactics.

It’s another short map, playing patiently it’ll take fifteen minutes but going hell for leather it’ll take way under ten. It’s really good looking with the colour gradients in the cave walls and checkerboard floors and trim in the blue key area too. Perfectly mediocre as a complete package.

MAP22: Bite

A linear dungeon crawl in the most literal sense. This map is absolutely brutal and every fight is an ambush designed to suffocate the player. The yellow key trap right at the start of the map is the map in a microcosm: A baron is used to advance on the player in a tiny cone shaped arena, pushing their back right against the wall before it dies. Immediately afterward a switch is pressed to lower the lift out and this spawns four cacodemons to push in from the opposite end of the cone, where there’s even less space to dodge.

If a trap isn’t designed to smother you outright, it’ll instead be pushing you deeper into the map, building pressure as you are forced to wake additional threats, which plateaus when you hit a dead end. A trio of archviles spawn behind the player in the sewer, triggering a mad dash through a gauntlet of imps and other low tier monsters and terminates in a cramped room with a rocket launcher and a waiting mancubus to split your attention. There’s another great trap immediately afterwards involving a lowering lift in a narrow corridor, revealing a handful of barons on the one side, pushing you down a short tunnel terminating in a small cul-de-sac filled with spectres, imps and a couple of hell knights.

This philosophy of space denial and smothering with high tier monsters is taken to even greater extremes with coop placements. Every fight has been bulked out, high tier enemies like viles and revenants are doubled up on and there’s one particularly nasty fight with a couple of viles bullying the player between cover around a handful of imps and revenants, where the warp-in cacodemons are replaced with a couple of pain elementals - the perfect enemy to unexpected block your path out the fire with a stream of lost souls.

The super shotgun is going to be your primary tool for the majority of the map, as a comparatively limited quantity of rockets are provided. Armour is also in very short supply, making rocket splash a persistent issue and the various pins far more lethal when something brushes against you. Bite is a grind for every inch of progress, but it’s never boring because given these resource limits, every individual enemy poses a significant threat and there’s minimal downtime playing clean-up.

I found the difficulty to be somewhat front-loaded. There’s a plasma rifle two thirds of the way into the map, which acts as an excellent emergency cutting tool and a secret-within-a-secret in the same room is generous in providing a mega armour. The final fight breaks style with the rest of the map and provides a spacious, open amphitheatre to outmanoeuvre a cyberdemon. I thought the penultimate fork - the door opening to reveal four archviles, guarded by a wall of teleporting cacodemons designed to block rocket spam against them and a closet of pain elementals being released from behind - would be virtually impossible given the total lack of cover, but there’s a blocking line to keep the viles penned in. Since the doorframe is set deep into the wall, they can be completely avoided by standing in either corner of the wall the door is set into.

One of the hardest maps in the set and it took me a couple of hours to figure out. Memorable in its encounters and theming. A top five contender.

MAP23: Tower in the Fountain of Sparks IV

I think there’s some sort of narrative with all these, but I’m not smart or attentive enough to figure it out. Pretty as ever and somewhat more complex in layout than the previous interludes. Approaching the burning complex is a suitably ominous warning for what’s about to come…

MAP24: Perhaps Now the Vultures

Tarsman’s second solo map is an abandoned complex filled with corpses and archviles. Archvile only gimmick maps tend to be polarising, but this one pulls it off nicely. The map is pre-populated by monster corpses using an elaborate contraption of crushers and teleporting explosive barrels which instantly kill everything when the player crosses a linedef at the start of the map. This same trick is used to great effect at the start of Sunlust’s epic MAP30.

How does the map play? It’s a rather brief trek to collect a key followed by some backtracking to a locked door repeated a couple of times. Each leg of the journey involves archviles lying in wait or warping behind the player in an ambush. They hunt in packs because lone archviles are no challenge. Back-pedalling is the preferred stategy if standing your ground fails, as running forward tends to multiple the number of active viles substantially. Sometimes things get complicated, as the viles can resurrect the monster corpses dotted around the map. This can be either a drain on ammo and make the encounters more chaotic, or a great boon if they decide to repeatedly resurrect a shotgunner. Ammo is tight and the spectre of running completely dry and having to start punching viles hangs over the player’s head at certain points.

So how does it play with coop spawns? On ultra-violence, the number of archviles increases from 25 to 47. To compensate, a plasma rifle is handed out right at the start, and the secret plasma rifle becomes a BFG, which is absolutely vital for the courtyard fight. Every ambush now contains extra viles to contend with, making timing movements and dodging exponentially more awkward. The initial fight starts with five active viles and it only gets worse from there. Weirdly, coop breaks the rules of the map by adding a lone cyberdemon to the courtyard. He feels sort of pointless, easily vanquished by two shots of the BFG, but you do have to blindly ride a lift down to get to him. The blind teleport back into the courtyard is absolutely obscene, with the number of viles increased from 5 to 12. Sure, you’re going to have the BFG instead of just a plasma rifle but it’s not exactly a great equaliser. I found the only way to survive this was to back into the corner against the lift and use the trim as cover, peeking out to get a shot off whenever it felt relatively safe.

This sort of map isn’t for everyone, but I really liked it. The gloom, rusty metalwork and soundtrack provide the ideal ambience for the oppressive, always on the back-foot style of combat and it looks particularly good with a software renderer. Here’s a demo of my playthrough:

MAP25: Unstable Journey

The longest, toughest and most interesting out of all of the adventure maps in BTSX. This map took me 77 minutes to max, taking into account I haven’t played through it in a few years so there was a lot of secret hunting and cautious play. If you’re familiar with Mechadon maps like anything from Counterattack or Vela Pax, Unstable Journey will be immediately recognisable as his style. It’s another non-linear affair with three keys to collect in any order. While the map is massive, it’s densely constructed, with a large degree of interconnectedness between each area, which slowly unfolds as the player progresses. Each room has some unique detailing and texture work and there’s colour coding on the doors and some walls that correspond to the nearest key that really helps orient the player, unlike the homogeneous spaces in MAP15. I think I ended up getting the yellow key first, then blue, grabbed the BFG and took the long path to red last, but I imagine that any route would work given the distribution of resources.

The combat is surprisingly decent, with a lot of variety in the encounter design and setups. There’s a lot of incidental combat with swarms of low tier monsters and the occasional pocket of high tier resistance or fliers waiting to spring out of closets, but there’s also a lot of nice set pieces to mix things up. The yellow key fight spawns waves of demons seeded with revenants in front of the player, and positions a closet that drip feeds chaingunners off to one side. This forces you to leave the empty space you control and push directly into the horde of demons to avoid being ventilated, which is pretty novel and hectic. The BFG arena is a nice throwback to the now out of vogue style of slaughter seen in Deus Vult, where you get a single invulnerability and have to clear out all of the viles and other high tier threats from the mass of teleporting monsters that flood the room before the timer runs out. The red key fight is particularly memorable, with two cyberdemons stomping around either side of a circular arena with a little hollow in the centre. Revenants and other enemies slowly start to teleport in, which can be utilised for infighting, but just when it looks like things are under control, five viles teleport in. It’s not a particularly hard encounter, but there’s something about the timing and brazenness of the viles that really threw me off. I was expecting it to keep drip-feeding enemies and maybe introduce the viles more slowly, but nope they just get dumped on you. Given how this fight was 59 minutes into my semi-blind run it got my heart racing, which is quite uncommon these days.

There are still some problems with the encounter design that slow things down. Too many times I’d walk into a room to be met with a group of high-level enemies, or a closet would open revealing a cluster of cacodemons and a pain elemental or two and the optimal strategy would be to backpedal into the previous room and camp the doorway with rockets or the super shotgun. There’s also a few areas where the combat becomes exceedingly slow and grindy: The canyon path to the red key has a particularly egregious junction where there are a large number of arachnotrons and mancs sniping from every direction. This area is also seeded with chaingunners, which further discourages aggressive play. There are ledges and hallways with chaingunners in several other rooms as well, which similarly kill the player’s flow instantly.

I was a bit disappointed by the blue key fight as well, given the potential with the layout. The blue key is revealed at the bottom of a staircase and when collected the corridor starts to flood-fill with demons, as you run upstairs to the second level, that starts filling up with cacodemons and pain elementals, which ultimately push the player up another staircase to the third level where the switch that lowered the blue key is placed. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of the encounter and the solution is to spam rockets down at the cloud of meatballs as they ineffectually bump into each other. There should have been some sort of complication on the top floor, like a small number of revenants which puts a bit more pressure on the player and gives the cacos and pain elementals a chance to actually do something.

In terms of cooperative placement, the monster count is bumped up to 1188 from 817, adding some extra bodies to most herds of demons, but interestingly not adding any extra boss monsters. Each of the major powerup spawns has been tripled, so there’s a real excess of soulspheres and armour when flying solo. I ended up leaving most of them because it never seemed necessary or to be worth the extra minutes of playtime running back to a cache of leftovers in most areas, but it was nice to have the margin of error in such a massive map.

Despite the uneven combat in places, Unstable Journey is massively successful at what it tries to do. I never felt overwhelmingly bored, lost or confused with how to progress like I did with certain parts of MAP15 and MAP20. There’s probably too many epic maps in Episode 2 for its own good, but having one right at the end of the set seemed fitting and this one is easily the best of the lot. Great.

MAP26: Beneath a Festering Moon

The final map of episode 2 and it’s a very strange climax to our journey. Alien and menacing, it’s the one of the most visually arresting of all the maps up to this point. Before I start yammering on, it’s worth mentioning that this map has absolutely no changes in monster count in the jump to cooperative. According to the wiki, the only change in thing placement is a single extra box of shells and a couple of small shell pickups added somewhere. I guess I had an easier ride this time around than I have in the past, which is quite a nice treat after the run of nastily augmented levels from MAP19-24.

For the end of our journey, this map is relatively low on monsters and average in length. It takes place in and around several round towers surrounded by a nukage sea, and some winding cave tunnels that branch off from them. Perhaps one of them is the eponymous Tower in the Fountain of Sparks. Who knows? Most rooms have any hard angles rounded off and the corridors are narrow and winding. Spaces are incredibly cramped: the first internal area has a ceiling beam that’s so low you’ll probably bounce off it while trying to cross underneath, until a clever bit of scripting magically raises the ceiling in the room next door. There’s a large amount of height variation and half of the action seems to take place on winding staircases surrounded by pits of purple nukage. While it’s visually striking, staircases and such dense architecture don’t play to the strengths of the engine. You’ll find yourself rubber banding off walls and sliding down stairs while trying to dodge projectiles, bouncing into the nukage pits and generally struggling to get where you want to be. The real enemy in this final map isn’t the hordes of monsters, so much as the struggle against the awkward geometry.

Combat mainly comprises of dealing with small numbers of high tier enemies or hitscanners positioned on ledges and platforms above and below the player, with some flying enemies like cacodemons and pain elementals to gum up the works. Combat is strictly incidental outside of the finale - enemies are pre-positioned, waiting for the player to walk by. Seldom are they teleported about in ambushes. There’s lots of revenants in cubbyholes that can’t be seen until it’s too late and obnoxious chaingunners hide away in strangely positioned cages. One particularly rude encounter is the two viles behind a door at the bottom of a spiral staircase, when the most powerful weapon available is a single-barrelled shotgun.

There’s an awkward secret arena that’s easy, but incredibly obnoxious to clear out. It consists of a bunch of arachnotrons in the centre of a circular arena stocked with rockets and lots of cover, with spider masterminds patrolling a narrow outer walkway surrounded by a sea of extremely damaging nukage. In the nukage are these weird rectangular frames at odd angles, each of which is occupied by a lone revenant. There’s an invulnerability orb hidden somewhere to the south, but it’s impossible to do much useful with it given the high health of the masterminds and the fact the only two power weapons are the rocket launcher and super shotgun. I think I spent a good 10 minutes here, slowly chipping the masterminds to death with the SSG, forced to repeatedly duck back into cover the centre of the arena because of the revenant rockets that drifted in from odd angles. It’s also a nightmare to get autoaim to actually hit those revenants, and they have an annoying amount of mobility on their platforms, easily able to dodge multiple rockets. I could barely clear the bastards out before running out of ammo.

The final exit portal triggers an awkward trap where a handful of archviles spawn in at different positions in the arena, surrounding the player and remaining in targeting range, along with some awkward revenant snipers and other nasties. It’s a fight that’s quite difficult to handle safely with the resources to hand because of the sheer number of attack vectors. Luckily, there’s a little cave complex leading to an underground base off to one side. In this optional little complex, there’s a BFG at the bottom of a long staircase (with quite a menacing spawn trap of revenants, barons and viles attached), a soulsphere and a well camouflaged secret path to an invulnerability. It seems clear that the intention is for most players to explore this area before using the BFG and powerups to clear the area around the exit portal, but that’s not how it worked for me in practice. The portal draws the eye, so there’s a good chance the player will go for it and trigger the exit fight. While this fight is difficult, it’s going to be difficult enough to drive the player into the caves if the archvile on the cliff is eliminated quickly. All this is assuming the player notices the unremarkable entrance to the cave at all. It’s also a very unsatisfying invulnerability run because once the viles are dead, the primary opposition are a bunch of perched revenants with some sort of incredible immunity to autoaim. A very awkward final encounter to an awkward map.

Beneath a Festering Moon is a bit of an anti-climax in the way many final maps in a megawad end up being. After the grand adventure of map25, it really needed to have some sort of focused, combat centric hook, but instead it’s yet another 25-minute-long trek at a snail’s pace. Despite its flaws, at least it’s aesthetically interesting, with some really impresssive texture work and unique layouts that you are extremely unlikely to forget. There’s also, mercifully, no icon of sin battle, so you have to count your blessings.

MAP27: ???

White voids are unusual in games - painful on the eyes, but very mysterious. When I first got to this level while playing the first beta in 2014, I thought it was supposed to signify that Episode 2 was unfinished and didn’t have a true ending, or all of its intended maps in place. While Episode 1 was filled out after its initial release, version 1.0 of episode 2 hasn’t added any new maps, so I can only assume that we’ll just have to wait until Episode 3’s release in 2034 before we get anything new. I hope I’m still alive when it finally comes out.

I had way more fun going back to Episode 2 than I thought I would. There’s a lot of variety both aesthetically and in the encounter design across all the maps compared to the very samey episode 1 and the changes in the 1.0 release went a long way in accomplishing the latter. Playing with -solo-net was quite interesting. It was easier than I expected and it was possible to max every map from a pistol start, as the readme claimed. It is clear that wildly varying amounts of effort and thought went into coop placements depending on the individual map authors. Anything Tarnsman had a hand in seemed to have the most entertaining changes, but with some maps it just felt like the extra monsters and resources were just placed at random. It’s certainly more challenging in places, but I don’t think it has the degree of polish making it worthy of being a true “hidden Ultra-Violence+ skill”, as described in the readme. More of a fun remix than anything else.

My picks for top 5 maps:

1. MAP31: Fireking Says No Cheating
2. MAP14: Shocker in Gloomtown
3. MAP18: Optional Bases Opposed
4. MAP22: Bite
5. MAP25: Unstable Journey