Doom Review: Wad Roundup (19th June 2021)

Cydonia by Scotty and AD_79.

A set of 22 Plutonia maps. The objective was to directly channel the Casali brothers mapping style, so except short maps with a low number of enemies providing the maximum level of threat. There’s all the old favourites such as high tier monsters on pillars, mysterious respawning chaingunners, surprise bully archvile traps and visual references to all your favourite plutonia maps. It’s about as hard as you’d expect a Plutonia megawad to be, starting off at the level of the iwad and steadily ramping up in difficulty from there. With only 100-ish monsters per map, they’re the perfect length for a coffee break or any other short period of downtime. The secret map is a very unusual puzzle involving archviles and jumping, for those of you who like that sort of thing. If you don’t or can’t figure out what to do, there’s an easy way to leave so it doesn’t grind your playthrough to an abrupt end, which is something I wish more sets with ’experimental’ secret maps did. Looks nice and has a decent amount of variety too.

Atomic by cannonball.

Eight short maps by cannonball. If you played Return to Hadron or Sparta 2, you’ll know what to expect here: Open and flowing maps that push the player around in a constant quest for resources and respite from the attentions of roaming mid-tier monsters. Very chaotic encounters, liberal uses of hurtfloors and hitscan bullies to keep you on your toes. The pressure is unrelenting and there’s never quite enough health and ammo to be comfortable. Valuable items such as armour and weapons are dangled slightly out of reach and sometimes come at a price. Again, the number of monsters is limited to roughly 100 and maps shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to exit, if you can make it.