Very enjoyable quick map - played it through twice on UV. The taunt system took me surprisingly little time to get used to, and it gave a good chuckle a couple of times. "Ow my asshole" - such a typical Joel reaction to getting shot. Congrats on sourcing all that dialogue from him for his own voice clips. Must've been a little weird for him to hear his own voice in-game.
The map itself is very nicely and attentively detailed, and designed with custom textures and actors being applied liberally but tastefully. The coffee mugs, sandwiches and candy bars quite literally littered throughout the map are a really nice touch. As are the new tree sprites. Visually, it all looks very "luscious" and "quasi-realistic", which is very much my kind of thing when it comes to ZDoom mapping.
There is a
lot of very cool design featured in the outer areas of the map which aren't even reachable, like the parking lot - and this is commendable attention to detail, but a little puzzling. Can you even
get to the area with the car immediately behind the entrance door in the first room? That's something that deserves to be seen at the very start of the map, if you ask me. I particularly liked the flooded room with all the floating corpses in nukage, although I
completely missed it on my first playthrough. Cool bathrooms as well, probably amongst the most well-designed bathrooms I've seen in Doom. And I've seen a few.
Interactive too! Points there.
The gameplay is fairly standard and didn't really surprise me or keep me on my toes, perhaps apart from the fight in the gore-filled room. I managed to find both the normal ending and the secret ending, much to my own amazement. The ending sequence is hilariously done (unless you come from Norway I suppose), although the secret ending was a little underwhelming, probably because it's kind of random and in-jokey. Are there further endings? I'm not sure I believe I found
everything, heh - very unlike me to be that perceptive.
Now, one thing I wasn't so sure on was the cutscene(s). I think I was expecting something much more story-driven, possibly? But the story amounts to basically one exchange in that radio control room. The banter between Ian and Joel is fun and well voice-acted, but it just goes on for a bit too long, for what essentially amounts to "here's the key for the door in the immediate next room".
Allow me to pull two old adages out of my butt here and say: brevity is the soul of wit, and the best way to write dialogue is
don't. Joel talks in quick bursts, while Ian talks at length, and very slowly, about how the base operates and what the possessed soldiers have done to lock it down - and there's no way to skip it, so it's a mandatory wait to get the key off of him (unless you
]thaw and
]give bluecard). A hassle during repeat playthroughs, especially. The entire exchange probably could be cut after the introduction of Ian as a character, as that part of the conversation is actually kinda funny, and then after Joel says "no you're not [sorry]", Ian tells Joel to shut up, take the key and get on the rocket so he can nuke the demons from space. Punchy! A map like this that's short and has basically one objective (get on the rocket) doesn't need exposition.
Similarly: when Ian talks again during the cyberdemon battle, he's kind of drowned out by both the music and the sounds of the player fighting the cyber. Perhaps this dialogue could've been briefer, and happened a scant few seconds before the cyber even
appears, just to hit a few more potential humor points. I'm not trying to say your cutscene writing was especially bad, but I think there's a very fine way to do dialogue/cutscenes in a ZDoom map and I think this map
nearly does it. The sprites for Ian and Joel are very well done and surprisingly full of life. The scene in the control room might just need a "skip" button so you can have the key added to your inventory and from there head straight to the cyber fight.
Overall though, very cool stuff. Good luck with the contest! Certainly beats my entry in terms of how much new content is offered.
Some more minor points of critique: I found
a texture misalignment here and I noticed
this door has its left-hand track not lower-unpegged. There's also
a number of bubble actors in the nukage room that don't seem to ever die which can be seen through IDDT x2. Dunno if this could possibly lead to slowdown.
EDIT: You can fix the polyobject door bug quite easily by providing a little extra space behind it, and maybe to that room in general. Might involve you dragging most of the architecture in that start room down by 64 or so mapunits so you can make room, but it's doable.