Judge wrote:JohnnyTheWolf wrote:Another, smaller gripe I have with the mod is that the undead super soldiers looks more like afro-wearing black men who literally turn into shit when killed. It took me a while to realise what they were supposed to be.
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They're not undead, they are literally made from "waste." Areyep was who made the sprites for Spear Resurrection and Spear of Destiny: End of Destiny back in 2001-2004.
Personally I think clones are still kinda problematic and I don't like seeing them, but anyway...
This is actually a remarkably authentic-feeling Wolfenstein experience. You can actually play it like Wolfenstein and use Wolfenstein tactics; it's not just a hacked-up hitscan-heavy Doom PWAD. Even the movement physics are more Wolfenstein-like, though not quite the same. Though the levels are kind of small and simplistic from the ones I've played so far (map01-map07), they are well-paced and the encounter design shows that you know how Wolfenstein gameplay works. I appreciate that all the secrets are marked in some way because wall-humping in Doom is much less convenient than in Wolfenstein because you have to mash the spacebar repeatedly instead of just holding it down. Some quibbles I have:
* The lack of a status bar makes the weapon sprites look really odd, because the vanishing point for the sprites is far below the center of the screen.
* Why no score? The score gave treasure meaning, and gave the player an incentive to explore the level fully instead of just blitz through it.
* B.J. seems considerably slower than in Wolf3D, which makes dodging into cover in the nick of time considerably more difficult.
* The clones/mutants' increased speed makes them incredibly annoying to fight and exacerbate the problem of mutants draining the player's ammo supply quickly by inducing the player to hose down areas to suppress mutants--now you'll try it and all your shots will miss!
* The SS now appear to have an attack pattern similar to Hans Grosse in the original game, which makes them disproportionately lethal and in later levels the sheer number of them strongly discourages any sort of aggressive tactics.
* The Waffen-SS feels kind of pointless to me--"an SS that's a bigger bullet sponge" isn't really a hole in the Wolf3D enemy roster that needs filling.
* All the player weapons do too little damage and the Nazis' health has apparently been reduced to compensate (but not equally, so the balance among the enemies feels a little off).
* The rifle is too unreliable in its damage output to be a useful alternative to the machine gun, and feels like a punishment for when you run out of machine gun ammo. Consider making it do a fixed amount of damage (like the rifles in my ECWolf mods, or the railgun from Quake II) and give it a beefier firing sound and a sound for working the bolt. The BOOM-click-clack rhythm is what makes the Doom SSG so great and I feel it's also essential to a good bolt-action rifle.
* Level 6 is a really unfun slog that amplifies all the most annoying qualities of the clones. I'd suggest replacing it with a new map.
Anyway, I'm enjoying this and I hope you make more Wolf3D-style projects in the future.