hellish.wad

Doom is a great game overall, for one, it's quite fun to play, despite its age, and two, it can be modded by anyone with any basic understanding of computers, hellish.wad is no exception to this. The WAD in question was made by Reddit user memechild666 in a post saying that it was their first Doom WAD - welcome to Doom modding then!

First thing, the three levels already made public aren't very good. One of the first striking things that will hit the viewer is the seemly random wall textures, pretty much every room bar none have misaligned wall textures, not only that, but also have textures that just don't fit (like having the teleporter texture on the roof of some rooms), or that don't match the surrounding environment. A few misaligned textures would be fine, but most walls in this WAD are misaligned. Along with this, a number of doors that have keycards are hidden behind doors that have zero indication that anything are behind them, and the only way to find out if something is behind a wall is to either wall-hump like crazy, or to look at your automap (how fun).

hellish.wad public version 1 running on Crispy Doom version 5.1, with Doom II

Another issue of this WAD is the chosen monsters in the map. In the first level there are a large group of SS Nazis ("Mein Leben!"), making it look like it's a joke WAD. Instead of using SS Nazis, why not replace them with the zombiemen, or another former human? In the original Doom II, the SS Nazis were a secret for the player to find; they were only in two secret levels, and not in the normal maps.

While not as bad, the spider mastermind is overused, trivialising her - after all, she is the boss of the final episode of Doom, Inferno, and again of the final episode of The Ultimate Doom; Thy Flesh Consumed) - it makes it seem like the spider mastermind is just another monster, and not a force to be reckoned with.

On the theme of monsters, on MAP03, no joke, there is a monster that is out-of-bounds, meaning the only way to 100% the map is to use the NOCLIP cheat code. This is such a big fuck-up it's amazing. Did the author not check their own map? Did none of the play testers not spot this error?

Please keep in mind that this is not some sort of undiscovered unholy grail of bad Doom WADs, in fact, if it weren't for the badly lined wall textures, then this would be just a muh at best. For a first Doom WAD, it's okay - it has a lot of things that need fixing (mostly textures). There are far, far, far worse mods out there. It's certainly not the worse thing since sliced Hitler or anything.

One final thing before ending this review; the author, memechild666 (great name by the way), wrote on Reddit that they plan on making a 32-level megaWAD, hopefully this is a joke, otherwise the WAD will be a complete mess.

References I. my first wad - /r/Doom (links to the first public version, only two maps) https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/8nzxv9/my_first_wad/ II. my doom level hellish.wad - /r/floydgerman (links to the second public version, three maps) https://www.reddit.com/r/floydgerman/comments/8ob6b8/my_doom_level_hellishwad/ Written by Clive "James" Python, 22/10/18 ★