el armadillo2 wrote:I still want this to win a Cacowar.d
If the mockawards were still handed out, this would have a genuine chance to win, I think.
To elaborate, the very first thing you see when starting the mod is the titlepic, which looks like an album cover with Bill Gates' face pasted over it.
Every level starts out with you being locked in place as some (very) slow text explains the story and what you should do in each level. However, every level other than the sixth and second to last consist of you attempting to find an elevator (which glitches with a HOM) to go to the next level. During the levels, enemies will respawn every so often (I think its about every minute), along with some supplies. The enemies consist of the segway zombie (who seems to drive AWAY from you, for some reason), the headless kamikaze zombie (who also runs away from you), and a sabreclaw recolor; which does massive amounts of damage, runs very fast, and sucks up damage like a hellknight (either that or the weapons are so weak they might as well be popguns). The whole time, strife rebel soldiers spawn in to assist you. The problem is, they're so weak they can only be expected to kill the zombies (who are pretty much harmless anyways), while the sabreclaws massacre them. Additionally, they get in the way of your gunfire, so most of them die because of you.
The levels themselves are confusing messes of identical textures and even lighting. I got lost mostly due to how difficult it is to establish where you've been and where you haven't been. The sewer level is a real pain to navigate because, unlike the other levels, it seems to be intentionally designed as a maze. This level's also where another enemy, some kind of Revenant, gets introduced. It moves rather fast, and has an attack which blacks the screen out for about a minute, which may as well instantly kill you if there are enemies around. And its a bigger bullet sponge than the sabreclaw recolors.
Speaking of bullet sponges, I do think the enemies are so strong because of how weak weapons are.
You start with a pistol, a machine gun, and a shotgun. The pistol is alright, but it fires too slow to deal with the sabreclaws. The machine gun fires fast as hell, sounds silenced, jitters around like crazy when you walk, and lights up the room when you first select it. The shotgun is powerful, too powerful actually, it kills the cyberdemon stuck in the first level's wall in about eight shots. There are also grenades, but for some reason, they use five units of grenade ammo a shot. Besides, they're too weak to kill the sabreclaws, all they do is throw them up in the air.
There are some other weapons too: There are two sniper rifles, one which uses cells, the other uses bullets. Both do crap for damage and jiggle around the screen when fired. Both the Shadow Warrior uzi and shotgun appear (no need to applaud), the uzi sounds loud as fuck and does no damage, while the shotgun is actually a rather accurate recreation (aside from the fact that its spread is so great that most of the shots hit the floor). There's a pistol the game calls the "Magnum" which looks like it was (poorly) converted from another palette, sounds like a shotgun, fires very slowly, does little damage (see the trend?), and disappears halfway through the firing frame. Another gun whose pickup message is just a load of binary code fires three explosive projectiles which kills everything in range instantly (including yourself) and has a firing sound which lasts for more than a minute. But the pièce de résistance is the minigun, which continues to fire even after you've let go of the trigger (and after you've run out of ammo, meaning you can't deselect it, even though its not firing anything).
Sorry for the wall of text, but this thing is just beyond idiotic. Some people may think this is one of those intentionally bad wads, but I disagree. There's no hint of irony in this, whether is be the author's posts, to how bland the levels are, how annoyingly broken the guns are, to how the story (if you can even call it that) seems to be trying to be taken serious.