Doom Review: Alfonzo's Mapping Contest for Tarnsman's 10th Anniversary

These are two very short reviews of the first and second place winning entrants of the Alfonzo Reminds Tarnsman That He Has Been Making Doom Maps for 10 Years Mapping Contest:

Alfonzo Throws Hands with the Purple People Eater by Breezeep

Interesting map, seems to use modified version of the mayhem 18 purple edition bestiary, which are pretty hit or miss. The grell (?) that shoots hell knight projectiles just a boring high damage cacodemon and the flying cyberdemon is a very slow, puny version of the scythe 2 afrit. A slow, weak enemy not befitting of its cool sprite, honestly.

Quite a relaxed experience. There are only two or three real traps in the entire map, the rest is just incidental combat and small clusters of high tier monsters as you explore. Quite sprawling and non-linear with a few dead ends/paths to redundant weapons. I missed the armour in the blood at the start of the map so I was near or around the 80 health one-hit-and-i’m-dead threshold until I collected the purple key, which made the combat a bit more intense than it otherwise would’ve been. It’s beautifully constructed but overall it’s a bit of a bland map. 20 minutes of passable, but unremarkable play.

What was really strange is how the game felt much more sluggish than normal. There’s something about the weapon reskins and their lower pitched sounds/changed up animations that makes everything feel very slow and deliberate. Maybe it was the valiant chaingun with the vanilla fire rate. The way the combat was designed, the focus on using the regular shotgun for half the map and the big open spaces probably didn’t help, but it felt like the game was running at 80% speed or something. No clue what that’s all about.

If you enjoyed that map, it’s well worth checking out the collection of speedmaps Breezep put out a couple of months ago. The maps are shorter and a much punchier - there’s more of a focus on interesting combat scenarios: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/120038

Alfonzo Tries to Prevent Donald Trump from Starting Third Impact by AD_79

I have to say it’s really excellent and for my money far better than Breezeeps entry in every way. It’s another big (25-30 minute long), linear adventure map, with a lot of interesting fight ideas and a secret path key and optional encounters to go with it. Pretty, well lit, lots of verticality and a pretty decent sense of place. It feels like you’re traversing a vaguely-logical space on a journey out of a techbase, across a dam and descending deep into the caverns below.

What sets it ahead of Breezeeps map for me is the much more engaging combat throughout. Start of the map is pretty rude with a large quantity of shotgun guys and chaingunners peppered about with no armour in sight. There seems to be a shotgun guy or chaingunner placed on a ledge or somewhere amidst the mob in most rooms to keep you on your toes and test your reactions and threat prioritisation. There’s a good mix of encounters with some nice open spaces with a variety of monsters where you’re free to approach the situation in whatever order you’d like, trapped items, lock-in set-piece fights and a few situations where monsters pressure you to rush forward into the arms even nastier monsters. There’s also a very surprising cyberdemon - see if you can guess when they’ll show up. In general, the difficulty of the fight ramps up linearly, introducing more complex and dense encounters as you fill out your arsenal. Outside of one optional secret area, there’s no real difficulty spikes.

The aforementioned secret area can be found at the midpoint of the map via a pretty well telegraphed teleporter hidden behind a waist high wall and it’s pretty cruel: There’s no immediate reward in the way of a powerup, instead there’s just a nasty lock in fight in a small cross-shaped arena with some mancs, imps and pain elementals where the primary ammo to hand is rockets. If you have no plasma to spare or let the pain elementals get out of hand, it can be lethal. Clearing this room lowers a wall revealing a handful of revenants, two archviles and your only reward - a red key. The real kick in the teeth is the teleport out, putting you in a corner behind two sleeping revenants. Juking past them and fleeing punishes you with pain elementals and chaingunners and by this point I had burned my armour was worn down right to the verge of death. It’s one of those secrets wheree the ammo and health rovided is just the bare minimum to make the fight possible. The red key only comes into play right at the end of the map and the only ‘reward’ it confers is some useless backpacks and another harsh ambush by four archviles. I know a lot of people don’t like secrets that punish the player with a trap or some bonus fights, but I vastly prefer them over a free weapon or powerup that ends up breaking the balance of the rest of the map - invulns or an early super shotgun being the main offenders. The journey more fun than the destination and all that.

Anyway it’s really fun, play it.