Ashes is a Post-apocalypse themed total conversion for the GZDoom engine. It combines old school build style level design and Doom style action with a twist of Stalker and Fallout.
Melee is totally useless.
The best DOOM TC you ever play! Every FPS fan should play this. The big development studios should be ashamed by the garbage they but out, and should take a look at this beautiful, awesome and fun to play Doom TC. The passion and thought went into this! And the soundtrack! WOW! Absolutely lovely game. I hope Vostyok, ReformedJoe, Primeval and the other's who helped making this, are considering to continue their work, and maybe consider to sell their absolutely awesome work. This deserves to go on to GOG or Steam. Then Hedon can to it, you have do to it!! THANK YOU!!
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!
Best of the Best Total conversion of the planet ;)
This mod is HUGE. Bug free, killer original music, expert level design. A masterpiece.
incredible total conversion in everyway and works perfectly with the bolognese gore mod!
dropped Metro Exodus because I started playing this. now I don't wanna go back to Metro
I've played a lot of first person shooter games, a lot of Doom mods, this is among the most detailed that I've played.
Episode 1 alone is excellent, the pacing is beuatiful, the gunplay is very tense and with some extra mods such as the "bolognese mod" it can get really brutal which I personally really like.
Throughout the level design was excellent in the first episode pretty much in every level, there were some annoyances here and there, particularly one that had to do with a very strange jumping puzzle of sorts that took me a couple of tries and seemed to be completely arbitrary.
There were also some segments that were fairly story driven, mainly two hub areas that serve to provide you with some context, world building, and some cool supplies, upgrades and such, I appreciate these segments a bit, but sometimes I felt as if they wore out their welcome and hurt the pacing a bit.
There was also a level in which you mostly ride your bike through some really open spaces, this level in particular was quite fun but it also left me with a bit of a bitersweet feel to the whole thing, where I just appreciated the more focused "boots to the ground" type of experience.
9/10
The expansion "Dead man walking" has a really cool concept, the levels are sequential like in episode 1, it isn't a continuation to the story of the first episode, but it has a really cool premise, however, the game is a lot more difficult and feels much more poorly balanced difficulty wise than the first episode did, there just aren't as many ammo or health pickups, plus the level design pails in comparison as well.
The level design in the expansion had a very big issue when it remind me a lot to Jedi Outcast, in the sense that the level design hid a lot of the paths to progress in similarly doors right next to similar looking windows that you can't interact with for example.
I just felt as if the challenge in progressing through the levels here, had more to do with missing levers and small pathways, rather than with actually paying attention to the intuitive level design, just letting the complexity of the level guide you so to speak.
Similarly, the gunplay felt more frustrating than tense because of the lack of balancing in the resources and the fact that enemies kept getting spawned above me or behind me, something that was really annoying.
Even then though, most of these issues could be ironed out thanks to the settings present in Zdoom, and the support that Ashes has for other more "universal" mods.
8/10
Episode 2 is where I'm really torn. It falls -i feel-, in the same trap that a lot of sequels for a lot of art really do, and that is in the ambition.
Episode 2 is not a sequential progression, so to speak, instead it resorts to create a massive map divided in subsects, each with its own colored card and keys. The game is designed as such so that you, the player, has to backtrack to a lot of different locations in order to progress.
The issue with this is two things for me; first, the game looses the fantastic pacing from the first episode, doom and shooters in general are designed to progress, unless you're playing something like Metroid Prime (which isn't really a shooter) therefore here I felt as if I wasn't really progressing most of the times, worst of all, unless you're to enable the respawning monsters option in Zdoom, you'll have to walk around some pretty large areas with nothing to do other than to find the crevice or lever you missed. Which brings me to my second issue...
The level design is more akin to "Dead Man Walking" which means most of the challenge in traversing the levels has to do with hidden levers, hidden pathways, hidden ventilation shafts, etc. This can become really annoying when you miss just a tiny crevice just because you decided to mantain the pacing of a game/engine like the from Doom.
It's a shame though, because this episode adds some prety cool things, there's not that much monster variety, as a matter of fact; you're fighting most enemies from the last episode, but at least the dev added a wonderful feature in the form of a weapon upgrade bench system.
Ashes is clearly a game that borrows a lot from The Last of Us, it might not be clear to some, mainly because that's such a story driven and fairly different experience to any shooter, but the references are there. They're in the secrets of the game, they're in the tension of the combat, they're in heavy emphasis in dialog, work benches that upgrade your weapons, fungi that you can find scattered everywhere, etc.
This is a title that borrows a lot from post-apocalyptic films and games, which is pretty cool, however, because of the more ambitious and open nature of the second episode I feel as if the focus even in these aspects gets lost for the most part.
The levels are beautiful and breeming with detail but the design suffers quite a bit in comparison to the first episode and even to "Dead Man Walking", it's just not as intutitive nor as
Sensational mod, this excellent!