victoriaviper once more, yet again wasting your precious time with more WAD reviews. After the surprising disappointment I experienced from playing Planisphere 2 (read the review here!), I was hungry for some superior city maps. I first turned to...


City Assault (click to download)

Click here for screenshot

INFO: 1 map. DOOM2.WAD required. GZDoom/Zandorum required.

RATING: 3 out of 5

Created by the designer of the famous Brutal Doom mod, this level sees you fighting through devastated city streets, as well as climbing into cramped apartments. The detail here is pretty impressive, with fire and smoke effects and abandoned cars and rubble strewn all about. Duke Nukem 3D graphics are applied liberally to good effect, resulting in a convincing urban environment.

The gameplay is a bit dodgy however. If you proceed as normal, most of the map is fairly intense, with limited supplies to keep you going, forcing you to proceed cautiously and use the environment as cover. A bit of simple platforming as you leap across 3D-floor fire escapes livens up things as well, and there's even a few parts where you can fight alongside AI marines (not that they're much help). Still, even if you really take your time, you're looking at probably twenty minutes of gameplay at most, and it's a very linear affair.

Well, it's linear if you don't sequence break. You can actually shear off a large chunk of play time by exploiting a design flaw in the map. This also lets you reach the map's big secrets earlier as well, but whether you reach these secrets early or at their normal time, they offer you such powerful supplies that they nullify all of the map's threats. There's even a section right at the very start of the level where you can leap over a barrier and get stuck permanently, leaving me to believe this map needed a bit more testing and balancing.

I genuinely had fun playing this. If anything, I was upset that it was over so fast -- it left me wanting more. But it is over too fast, making this level more of a pretty-looking snack than a main course.

Also, I wish you could actually climb the ladders! :)



This next WAD isn't exclusively a city-themed one, but it does have some urban areas. Let's try...


Remain 3 (click to download)

Click here for screenshots

INFO: 13 maps. DOOM2.WAD required. GZDoom recommended.

RATING: 3 out of 5

Remain 3 is a 13-map partial megawad (Not-so-megawad? Superwad?) that attempts to mix modern GZDoom features with classic Doom gameplay. Jumping and crouching are gone, freelook is not required and scripts are not used, just like the Doom of old. Instead, GZDoom's features are used to pump up the graphics and add new enemies.

Most of the new enemies (many of which you've probably seen in other WADs by now) aren't massively different from their classic counterparts -- some of them have merely had cosmetic alterations but otherwise act the same -- but they offer something a little new to keep you on your toes, with a few modified behaviors and attacks to make them marginally more dangerous.

On the graphical front, dynamic lights, 3D floors, deep water and other assorted effects along with some well-chosen custom textures add depth and immersion to the maps. Architecture offers up some very impressive views and cool, realistic, well-realized structures. But the maps are constructed in broad strokes: the scenes are nice to look at when viewed on the large scale, standing far away and taking it all in, but there's vast empty spaces inside them, and blocky, underdetailed rooms and hallways connecting them, resulting in bland stretches while waiting for the next neat-looking 3D bridge or building to show up on the horizon.

In terms of level design, my feelings are thoroughly mixed. Maps 1-6 are original and offer a nice variety of locales, including a requisite techbase, a foggy village, a cave system with a research lab built into it, and my personal favorite, a giant bridge over a lake, complete with a little zombie-manned pirate boat, both of which can be approached directly, or you can swim around in the water and pick off the bad guys from below.

Then inexplicably, the level author decided to start recreating Doom 2 levels instead, beginning in Map07 with the fifty-billionth remake of Dead Simple that I've played in my life. (Doom mappers, I beg you: come up with some new Map07 ideas!) Maps 8 & 9 are remakes of Doom 2 levels (Tricks and Traps and the Pit specifically) that even more blatantly reference the original levels than Map07 did, and while they're superior to the originals in several ways, you've done all this before, and these levels really don't fit with the rest of the package.

The Doom 2 recreations continue after that, but they mercifully become much more abstract, with Map10's Refueling Base being a cool-looking desert military compound. These abstract homages reach their zenith with the Meat Factory, a level dripping with creepy atmosphere (and blood!) that plays with conveyor belts in some interesting ways and just looks good. This map alone is almost the whole reason to play this WAD and really should've been the finale, as the dull fights and meandering mazes of the final level leaves the whole experience dragging to a close.

This is a fairly easy set of maps too, so if you want some meaty combat to sink your teeth into, look elsewhere. That's not to say there aren't some big battles, but they're uncommon, and aside from a few cheap tricks (the ending of Map04 being the most annoying), you won't end up face-down very often at all. There are occasionally some head-scratching puzzles that can make everything come to a grinding halt (I was stuck on Map02 for probably a good thirty minutes), but they're not very common either.

So if you want a fairly casual, painless set of maps with immersive atmosphere and bouts of inspired design, this one's for you. But the low difficulty, recycled maps and some weak design elements keep me from loving it.