Decided to register just to post my thoughts on this. I've lurked around these forums for years, playing the odd big release.
In truth, I just wrote
a big twitter thread about this and I figured I'd better articulate those thoughts somewhere that they'd be more useful.
Overall, I liked it. I thought the soundtrack was fantastic, I loved how effective it was at setting the mood, I loved all of the texture work, the new enemies, and I was kind of surprised at the story elements, given how those seem to kind of fall by the wayside, especially in Doom stuff. The dialog tree implementation was a little wonky (the cursor being bound to the arrow keys and not resetting its position to the top on each input) but I managed just fine.
Even though the campaign wasn't open like an RPG, I appreciate things like having little quests to complete or the necessity of gathering money so you can load up on items at the next town. Even if you're full up on health or whatever, there's still incentive to keep exploring.
Moving on to the cons, my first complaint is that basically every map is too dark. I suppose the counter argument here would be that I should turn up the brightness in GZDoom, but I use
F.lux, which takes control of my monitor's gamma and brightness. As I crank up the brightness in GZD, F.lux will just put it right back where it was, every single time. My solution was to put my monitor in to a special "Night Mode" which boosted the gamma just barely enough for me to see. Otherwise, a lot of this game was too dark to see anything.
I'm not a huge fan of the bike. It would be better if I still had mouselook while riding -- I think the "
Duke Nukem Forever 2013" mod does this with its motorcycle. There's actually a way to get on the bike and not have it disable mouselook for a moment (run at the bike and jump on without letting go of W), and it definitely felt a lot more natural steering like that. I also felt constantly confused that I had to get off with Spacebar and not the Use key. I kept expecting Spacebar would operate the brakes (something else DNF2013 does). Damage scaling is a bit aggressive, too; I grazed a wall at what seemed to be a fairly low speed and it ate half my health. Yet sometimes I can bash in to a wall head first and not take any damage. It's weird.
I found it very easy to get lost in these maps. There are a lot of switches you press and it's not clear what door they opened. And that's assuming you can find the switch. I did a lot of the old "run around in circles for 15 minutes trying to find something small that you missed" that plagued some older FPS games from the 90's. I was actually getting close to giving up on this game entirely once or twice. I understand that there are logistics as to why switches blend in to walls, or why they're so far from the doors they open, for the sake of realism or whatever, but getting lost is a drag and I got lost at least once in nearly every single map.
Last, and I hesitate to bring it up because it can be kind of a touchy subject... this mod is a little on the hard side. I don't think I'm terrible at video games; I beat most video games on normal difficulty and do just fine, there (including Doom and Doom 2 on "Hurt Me Plenty"). I ended up dropping this down to Easy and it still gave me a pretty stiff challenge. Not so much that I didn't finish the game, but the game developer in me quietly wonders if easy mode should actually be, like, easy? Food for thought, I guess.
Anyway, even though I wrote way more negatives than positives, I do think this is a really nice thing and the good outweighs the bad.
As for bugs, one time I died on the bike but I managed to dismount from it anyway and ended up falling through the floor and getting stuck in a state where I couldn't press the use key to reload my last save.
I also let the solar lamp run out and it wouldn't let me turn it off so I could let it recharge. Any time I'd switch to the lamp, it'd auto-switch to the next nearest weapon down the list. The only way I could use the lamp again was to find another lamp so it refilled back to 99 energy.
)
. There should be a switch directly opposite that triggers the fire. If you didn't you're past the point of no return. Sorry.
