victoriaviper here yet again. After a significant hiatus, I'm back with a new DFC WAD review. This time, we have a rather unique map called...


Planisphere 2 (click to download)

Click here for screenshots

INFO: 1 map. Requires DOOM2.WAD. GZDoom recommended.

RATING: 2 out of 5

Planisphere 2 is a recreation of America's famous New York City. It's a really, really thorough recreation, with seemingly hundreds of buildings, streets and alleys painstakingly rebuilt in the Doom engine. I've never seen anything quite like it in Doom. It's pretty amazing to look across a river and see a cityscape on the horizon, and knowing it's not just background graphics: you can run over there and visit every single one of those buildings.

However, even if the map shines in terms of pure scale, to say it's a good-looking map perhaps isn't entirely true. It relies solely on stock Doom 2 textures, which aren't entirely convincing for making a realistic city recreation. Plus, many of the buildings are simply elongated cubes painted in single textures. Very few of the buildings can actually be entered either, making them little more than really big props, and leaving the game world feeling a bit flat and non-interactive. There's also no use of 3D floors or slopes, which really could've gone a long way to make the visuals more authentic.

The level author makes some other surprisingly amateurish mistakes too. There's lots of improperly unpegged door tracks (meaning the walls attached to doors slide up and down when the door moves). Oddly, skull keys are used as lights on top of many buildings and posts. You can even become permanently trapped in one spot if you don't have enough bullet/shell ammo to strike a shootable switch to free yourself. But perhaps most inexplicable of all, the author didn't bother to build map nodes, meaning you'll have reduced system performance and hit detection issues unless you manually run the map through a nodebuilder yourself. And this is kind of a major issue because this map is GIGANTIC and is almost guaranteed to slow down even the most powerful computers.

And even if you could ignore those issues, it's just not all that fun to play, even if it looks cool. Annoyingly, instead of giving you free reign to explore the city as you see fit, the level is a typical key hunt. Now you all know how difficult it can be to find keycards in complex Doom levels, so imagine how fun it is being tasked with searching all over New York for them. The city's at least divided up with barriers unlocked by said keys, narrowing down the search area somewhat, but it's still a pain scouring the many, many streets of the Big Apple for a handful of tiny trinkets.

You're not given much time to really look around either. Paradoxically, in an aggravating move that compels you to never actually stop and take in all the digitally-reproduced scenery of NYC, you are constantly harassed by cyberdemon snipers, stationed on an exceptionally high vantage point that allows them to target you virtually anywhere you are. The result is you constantly hurrying to the next location before another cyberdemon airstrike commences and reduces you to a pile of smoking barbecue.

Speaking of those cyberdemons, I have to warn that any players that are really sensitive about the 9/11 terror attacks should probably not play this level. That "exceptionally high vantage point" mentioned in the previous paragraph is one of the World Trade Center buildings. Strangely, the twin towers have been included in this recreation. In an especially tasteless move, the one tower eventually collapses into the ground, allowing you to finally fight the cyberdemons directly. You then teleport into one of the high floors of the other tower, and then have to leap out the window and drop to an area below to escape. I can't tell if this was supposed to be really dark humor or simply astounding ignorance on the part of the level designer, but I can imagine it would upset some players.

In the end, this WAD is merely a novelty -- an incredibly elaborate novelty, but one all the same. Aggravating gameplay and technical issues hold it back from being especially fun, but it sure is neat to behold. Still, if you're really intent on playing a hyper-realistic city level (and have a fairly powerful computer), play the classic Dawn of Reality instead. It looks better, sounds better, has better atmosphere and is at least marginally more fun to play than this.