Doom 2: Back into Hell

Plus side, Covid gives me lots of time to play Doom. Minus, not the best posts. I was not having fun on some of these.

Nirvana: This is the point where Doom 2 level design gives up on coherent architecture and just teleports you everywhere.

The Catacombs: Two of the secrets are different ways of getting to the same room. Made of slime and chaingunners. Feels like a troll level.

Barrels O' Fun: My love of Petersen's gimmick levels is well established, but this one is fussy. If the barrels don't go off right, it turns into a pain. Further exacerbated by the fact that the map is mostly connected by teleporters, rather than paths. Run through a teleporter, and don't have the barrels go off right? Enjoy that Hell Knight coming through later. iD is really getting into the Pain Elementals at this point, and I'm not loving it. It basically just means pray and spray with the plasma rifle. I'm rarely short on the ammo, but it's annoying-stressful, not challenge-stressful.

The Chasm: Sandy Petersen does John Romero. Does a pretty good job.

Bloodfalls: Has an empty secret on the higher difficulties. You couldn't have given me a small plasma pack or something if the BFG was too much.

The Abandoned Mines: John Romero does John Romero. Also does a pretty good job.

Monster Condo: Has an actual art portrait on one of the walls. Neat. It's based on a texture from another game that's based on an ancient Greek carving. I think it looks like Ben Franklin. Teleporting you into the same room, but with monsters, is a choice, but I like that you get an automap first and can see the identical room. Has the only 30 second secret (like the ones in Sigil 2) in regular Doom/Doom 2.

The Spirit World: This is an underrated level. Not flashy, but just well put together.  Challenging, but not in a cheap way, multiple good uses of fake walls. Using Spectres in one of them is a neat touch.

The Living End: This is almost the same structure (going around the outside and teleport to the middle) iD would use for the Quake final boss. I remember my Dad's game used to crash on this level when we played coop.

The Icon of Sin: The first of iD's puzzle boss endings. I don't know how many times my dad and I tried to beat this thing as a kid. It's a pretty lame ending (it's like a primitive QTE) for Doom and doesn't fit at all. It looks cool as hell though.

I took a bunch of screenshots that I might come back and add? It's a pain in the butt. Doom 2 is definitely a worse level set than Doom 1, but it did give map makers a lot of fun toys to play with. I don't know that we'd still be killing the Doom 1 monsters 30 years later without the added variety from 2.