Reviews - dave_5430

Vladolf Putler, a psychopathic ruler of an evil empire, is disturbing the global peace again. He has to be stopped before more lives are lost. Are you up to the task? Obviously, any resemblance of the game and its characters to the real world events and people is purely coincidental.

Community is absolutely terrible, so if you like playing alone, go right ahead. But otherwise, I wouldn't chance it.

It's a shame the game is 'very unique' on the VR platform, as it's a community driven dungeon crawler/Hack&Slash; game.

It's a bit of a shame this means 70% of the enjoyment falls literally on if the community is thriving or not.

And in this case, it's not.
It's a looney bin with kids sprinkled in between.

Not a very good position to be in as a game dev, and without any additional age checks, and a boatload of ONLY paid for cosmetics, making it even more dangerous. Literally milking cash from children & their parents on a platform mostly dedicated to children, excluding the occasional 'whale' that floats by.

I've also noticed a fair share of, what I can only describe as, groomers floating around, which makes this EVEN scarier.

Yeah, I'd avoid this one unless you happen to have a community or group of friends of your own with VR and a passion for doing manual labour. Otherwise, I expect this one to blow up on some social justice forum trying to oust paedophiles within a decade or so.

A loosely connected map set that goes through a variation of gameplay styles and terrain themes.

Although the architecture is nice, and details can be seen strewn throughout the maps, it suffers greatly from lack of ammo and terrible directions early on.

The directions on what to do are simply unclear, and had me scratching my head stuck on the first level for 30 minutes, to the point I was questioning if maybe some key items were missing entirely. At some point, a red key is supposed to be picked up, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Even after noclipping through the entire level, for an extensive amount of time.

There's also an entire sewer section that seems to serve no purpose? Maybe the key was supposed to spawn here?

Edit:
It's hidden in a box at the end of the sewer, as I expected. This is telegraphed so poorly it took me seeing a walkthrough to get it.
Not really the best case of forward map design. Please, do respect the time of your players.

Normally I'm all for secret hunting, but I ran quite impatient after this.

From this point onward, all levels are prefaced with a written piece of briefing and some set dressing to explain the whereabouts of Duke. I like the idea of gearing up before a mission a lot more than just going in with the standard piece and boot. (Side note, I don't know if Magazine still gets used a lot like this, Depot or Warehouse probably fits better.)

The second level seems a return to form of the classic Atomic formula, running around a pretty self explanatory 'nevada' base.

It instantly feels at home in the ranks of Duke levels.

For the third level, I personally adore the snow effects. I don't see it too much in older games.

I would however appreciate if (map) developers would respect my intelligence and stop plastering invisible walls on areas that could instantly kill me. I enjoy walking off of ledges for no apparent reason other than seeing Duke go splash.
The elevators also seem to move incredibly slow, adding to the trope.

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You can also rpg the saucer for some 'funny hijinx'

All around a pretty good straight forward level (although it took me a double-take to realize the little palm pad PDAs on the floor could be interacted with.) The wave defense at the end also seemed a little random and slow. Not sure why, but the triggers seemed off and took forever to spawn new enemies. Again, the lack of ammo really hurts the game at this point.

The ending van section broke for me a few times, causing duke to blow up instantly. ̶N̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶.̶ It happens if you try to walk in any direction when the cutscene/flash takes place.

The map could easily be turned into a more horror like experience with better fitting music and slower pacing, but for a duke level, it is very solid.

The last map involves a ' western ' prison break. I didn't see that coming, but I liked the change of pace. The music is very jarring though.

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All in all, great designs and architecture, but mediocre execution, making for above average gameplay.

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Edit:

After downloading the eDuke version that was around when this came out, I can safely say that despite the architecture is still grand up till the end, the gameplay takes a massive drop down towards the end, just throwing random stuff and the kitchen sink at you without the gear to take care of it, so I dropped the rating down to 7/10. Maybe I just suck at Duke, but given the fact I used to playtest duke mods and other games, I think that's a pretty poor chance. Who knows.

Although seeing all of the map details correctly without sprites and sectors blowing up is pretty nice, especially seeing how the sprites/flats were used to construct objects, which I don't think I've personally seen before (perhaps in AMC?).

Despite the negative bits strewn in left and right be it with(out) my incompetence, I genuinely enjoyed this mapset, so I feel a 7/10 is fair.

An innovative way to use the Duke engine for puzzle solving.

Unfortunately, the limits of eDuke leave much to be desired, leading more to frustration due to AI patterns and game 'physics' logic breaking in patterns to really have enough fun outweighing the frustration of the 'broken controls' syndrome.

If this doesn't get MOTY for the next 41 years I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

From pristine new graphics, a well established setting, a mysterious storyline to a banging soundtrack. this 'mod' delivers on all fronts, and is still going strong with no signs of stopping!

Traverse the Wasteland of S.E. USA on your bike, visiting picturesque locations, chatting with the locals and haggling for the better deals on one end, and using your pyrotechnic expertise to blast your way through a variety of baddies on the other, humanoid and mutant alike, with a fine selection of firearms at your disposal, which can be upgraded no less! Points! Numbers! Looting and shooting!

Some limited replayability is provided by the sandbox-like nature of the environments, allowing you to pick your own approach to the situation and explore dialogue trees to your hearts content, with hub-style maps interconnecting safe havens to hot zones and vast territories for you to explore! From the deep dark of the subway network, through the barren wasteland of a former civilization, to the confines of an overgrown, diverse and green biosphere of uncontrolled nature gone wild.

Play it for yourself, pretend it's your favourite 90's date, (I'd suggest '96) and see why I seriously don't understand how this isn't a $20 episodic game yet!

The OST is amazing and the best thing about this mod. Hands down. Just play through it with the music turned on.

The mapping is also phenomenal, but some maps seem to jump back and forth in the progression of their respective games quite a bit, and I sort of fail to see the overlap between some of the maps mixed and matched. I do understand that is a bit hard of a task for a game with mapping as 'abstract' as Doom, though. And regardless of that, the melting of the two styles seemed to work pretty well for the most part. It's a unique twist on what the doom universe (and blood universe) could look like in a gothic techno-hell version.

As a stickler and someone who has played both games for over a decade in total, some missing details did kind of stand out (interactive objects, breakable windows, missing sections and textures, and probably some more minor stuff that most people probably won't notice.) One could always chalk most of that up to the limitations of the engine, but when compared to what other work is on display here, it almost seems like nothing is impossible in GZDoom. It's simply a sight to behold, with grand panoramic sky boxes and creative uses of architecture, atmospheric designs, chock-full of nostalgia from both games with memorable key moments of both games crammed into 8 fairly long running maps, and definitely most probably not exactly well translated to text by me, a non-native speaker. You have to see it to believe it for yourself!

Unfortunately, there are a few places where events would outright break if certain parameters were done out of order (e1m7 homage scare room not working for some reason, couldn't get to the engine room in the train section, and other minor gripes), or simply due to new entities being introduced (rolling heads locking up closing doors, which break later scripted events and prompted a restart, for example).

I do feel the later maps seem to have a distinct lack of ammunition and other pickups on the higher difficulties, which really kneecaps players whom are up for a challenge. And at least one of the end bosses seems like a bit of an unfair cop-out. Some of the mobs also seem to miss a 'fire death' or 'extreme death' animation, and simply 'disappear' on death, which with bosses can cause the game to softlock.

Aside from those problems,I hardly ran into any other technical difficulties trying out different skill levels, and the overall look and feel was stellar, consistent and well paced.

As for the enemy roster; It's alright, with both games being represented and implemented in random ways left and right, mixing and matching mobs together that seem to go fairly well. My complaints here is that some of the mobs tend to feel a bit same-y, lacking variations in attack patterns, or unique traits. Some sound effects seem off, too, which I've noticed in a lot of Blood fan projects before, although at the time of writing I can't exactly remember what it was that I noticed.

The weapon roster is pretty much the weapons from blood and doom for their respective protagonist, give or take a few additions to bridge some gaps, one being a single action revolver and a single barrel break action for Caleb, and the Doom guy getting fitted with handgrenades, a flamethrower, a freeze ray and a tesla rifle. Most of these being recycled material from other doom mods and beta assets. Being able to use Guns Akimbo as the doom marine was a nice touch, but I can't help but feel like it's terribly slow in comparison to Caleb's. (Btw, doomguy has 4 hands on the supershotgun, which I thought was kind of funny.)

I can't help but feel some of these feel a little out of place, be it animation style or just feel in general, as if some had more time in the oven then others. One big example is the proximity mines, which seem to just go off at random, unreliable as all hell. The dynamite also doesn't feel as good as it does in Blood, but I imagine that's terrible hard to emulate. I also feel the revolver and single barrel shotgun are immediately useless after the first map, as by then you will already have the flare gun, double barrel and tommygun.

The Blood arsenal also makes the Doom arsenal look painfully outdated and boring, and a little bit of creativity could have gone a long way, here.
Although I imagine that goes against the scope of the mod itself.

Now take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm a born pessimist, and hard to please. Yet I will say that this is one of the better crossover TCs I've seen roll out for Doom or Build Engine games for quite some time, and definitely worthy of its high praise.

It also looks like it took quite a long time to produce (2019 at the very least), and is a labor of love (which it shows very well), so I'm not going to stand here and spout a bunch of negativity about it. If you are into Doom, or Blood, this mod definitely deserves your attention, as soon as you can.

Don't forget to drop a rating after you're done playing!

I didn't realize we had to write reviews nowadays to justify a 10/10 rating.

The only thing that could make this more perfect than the original Blood itself would be if it also had 6 episodes and all episodes were of equal quality as the first episodes released so far.

This is a must play. Not even for people that enjoy Blood, but just horror shooters in general.

The innovative ways the maps have been woven into eachother, the narrative, all of the little references and subtle nods to pop culture over the past is astonishing, (almost) literally anywhere you look is telling its own story, somehow.

There's not even level design of this quality in some higher end modern games released in the past 10 years.

Just do yourself a favor and play it whenever you can.

Overall map designs are pretty good, above average even comparing to the original Blood levels. There is a distinct lack of ambiance in some sections (snow/rain/thunder effects etc.) but the environments make up for that.

Recommend tweaking the ending, seems to fall a little flat after all the build up. Just a straight up Dr. Wily Boss Rush with lacking map design in comparison to the bombast and extreme displays of the preceding levels, that is.

Would also like to ask if you could re-tool the helium-caleb voice lines. I think if you boost the bass levels, lower pitch but maintain caddance you could have it sound very authentic.

Works fine on Fresh Supply.

Not sure why it needs the new tiles, which renders it incompatible with custom gameplay mods (in the future), and am wondering if there's a workaround to this somewhere.

Good stuff eitherway.