Final Doom is the FINAL Doom level set... sort of... for awhile... (Doom 64 would come out a year later, while No Rest for the Living came out in 2010.)
Released in June 1996, a week before Quake. It consists of 2 level sets. Evilution is by a mapping group named Team TNT. It was originally going to be released for free before id bought it. Plutonia was made fully contracted by id by the Casali brothers, two members of TNT. Besides new levels, there's some new music and graphics, but no new enemies or monsters. I wonder what the story on id releasing these is. Just a final cash grab? Not a lot of background info available on the net.
Like Doom 2, Evilution is grouped into pseudo-episodes, the first of which uses the high tech style from Episode 1 and a few of the early Doom 2 maps.
System Control: 3/5 This is basically rearranged Entryway. I guess slightly better than the original?
Human BBQ: 2/5 I think this is the first use of "glass" (you can see through, but not shoot through) in an official Doom level. Other than that, a pretty mediocre level. The telefrag "puzzle" is way less fun/more convoluted than it should be.
Power Control: 3/5 You can make doors use one key from one side, and a different one from the other. I think there's a couple no key/key doors in Doom 1/2, but this is the first of the different key style. Fine, I guess?
Wormhole: 4/5 Decent, but not great, design. But the gimmick of playing the same level twice by teleporting into a second copy is neat. You can skip about 2/3 of the map easily, which isn't something I've seen since back during Doom 1. This means some of the biggest speedruns differences. ~12 seconds to run to the exit vs 4:50 to 100%. Usually 100%ing only increases the time be 2-4 times, not 24x.
"Hanger": 1/5 Pretty ballsy naming your level after the first Doom map. Pretty stupid to spell it wrong. Bad level either way. Not challenging, just annoying (yay, monster closets!) and weak "puzzles".
Open Season: 4/5 TNT can't really lock down a naming theme. Some of them are simple E1 style place names, while others are more evocative. Regardless, this is a strong map. "E1 but longer, faster, harder" is a popular theme for good reason. Those first 9 maps are the core of DooM that the whole community has played a million times, and they're great levels. But they're also short (or tight) and easy. This isn't a particularly tough level, but it's a bit more than the ol' Nuclear Plant and co. Starting the reactor (or whatever it's supposed to be) to open the final door is a neat mini-set piece, and closer to something out of Duke 3D or Dark Forces than Doom. This is a great way to end the "episode." Next time, Military Base. I'm curious to see, aesthetically, how different it is from this "tech lab" set.
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