At this point, any attempt at theming the maps in Doom 2 pretty much falls apart. Maps 16 and 17 ("Suburbs" and "Tenements" NO THE!) round out the ones with cityish names.
Suburbs is the winner for getting the closest to looking like actual buildings Petersen claims two of the buildings are based on his and a family member's house. One has something recognizable as a garage, and another has a sweet library with a shoot-the-switches puzzle. Hope none of the books in there are worth anything. Unfortunately, it's also the start of a trend of iD seemingly running out of ideas and starting just drop giant teleports of monsters around levels. Grab the key, kill the couple dozen goons that teleport in, repeat, will become a major part of the last half of the game. Traps like this go all the way back to Episode 1, but the frequency really increases, while the creativity drops, in the upcoming levels.
Tenements is a functional, if forgettable Romero level. Slime everywhere, horde of Cacodemons, and some awkward platforming around both of them.
The Citadel's one distinguishing detail is inner teleporter room that mirrors the level's shape, and has the teleporters sort of match the quadrants they're in.
Gotcha rounds out this section. It opens with a somewhat promising gimmick (Cyberdemon vs Spider Mastermind fight) but feels kind of empty and under developed after that.
I've commented before how impressive it is that iD was able to turn Doom 2 around 10 months after the release of the first game. New gun, several new monsters, 32 new levels. It's starting to feel like a lot of these levels were last minute crunch, first pass, etc. Glancing ahead at the levels I have left, I don't think I even remember half of them, despite the fact that I beat them dozens of times over the years.
No comments:
Post a Comment