Hellbound for Doom 4

 

 

 

 

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Thanks to DoomPhreak for asking me to review this. Keep on mapping, my friend.

 

 

 

mY original doom/doom2 mAPS

 




 

 

How to get it.

Go into Steam and type Hellbound

OR

use map code 4978L4BJ

 

 

 

I've been trying to decide how to review this one for a couple of days now. Honestly, from a purely gameplay perspective it, well, wasn't good. The author played with all the logic stuff and figured out how to do a ton of different things - some of them pretty cool - some of them pretty useless - like choosing the right audio track to set a couple of creatures into motion. Not only was it a pain in the ass but it was also completely pointless, which alot of the stuff he did in here was. It really felt more like he was trying to figure out what COULD be done, as opposed to figuring out what could be done and putting it to good effect.

 

 

 

 Sure, there is some interesting stuff as far logic chains go but virtually all of it was unnecessary and the map was overloaded with it. There was even a timing "puzzle", if you want to call it that. It was absolutely unnecessary and truly, extremely easy. So, enough about that.... onto the gameplay.....

 

 

Gameplay was not good. There were one or two good battles in here and honestly, both of them were overdone.

 

 

 Most of the time I found myself wandering around, being led by the nose to the next goal, or mission, that needed to be completed to get me through this.

 

 

I was literally bored out of my gourd most of the time that I was playing this map. There was  a serious lack of enemies, which, honestly, didn't need to be. But the author used up all his resources on other stuff which didn't leave him any room to make the map interesting from a gameplay perspective. I absolutely LOATHE being led by the nose to complete a map and while there may be times when it is appropriate to assist the player with some well placed hints or even show him where he needs to go - this map literally told me exactly what needed to be done every step of the way. Boring.......

 

 

Also, along the lines of the gameplay aspect - there was WAY too much health/armor/ammo, etc... throughout the entire map and it kept respawning - unnecessarily - There simply were not enough battles going on - or difficult enough battles, to justify it.

I played this, as did my oldest son (a 30 year old gamer) and one thing that we both found incredibly annoying was the fact that all of the creatures would spontaneously transport somewhere else when you battled them - not one or two or even a few - ALL OF THEM. It was ridiculous. In the sections (there are only 2) where he really nails you with badasses (and tough ones) they do the same thing. Why? You already have a ton of badasses to fight and now you're trying to figure out where they just disappeared to. It might have been something that played out well in his head - you know - a kind of "this is cool" thing, but it was simply annoying.

 

 

Ok, so what about the actual look of the map? Well, I spent some serious time on my maps trying to use the tools available to me to make the stock rooms look and feel different. It's not difficult to do - most everything can be turned in virtually any direction to create a look or a feel that you want. There really wasn't any of that in this map with maybe the very exceptional use of the "window" placements. Other than that, he didn't really seem to put alot of effort into "atmosphere". As I said, he used up all his resources on other stuff that seemed like he was just testing out how to make things work without delving into how to make it interesting at the same time. So basically, it was a pretty stock Hell themed map with a "UAC" area but nothing truly interesting about it with the exception of an invisible "staircase" with fire showing the path through thin air.

 

 

That was actually kind of cool. He had to use a transporter trick to make it work and I'm a little jealous that I didn't think of that because I wanted to do something similar in one of my maps but using an invisible transporter to get past the invisible wall never occurred to me. Kudos.

 

 

So, where does that leave us?

I wouldn't download this map to play it unless you just want to find out what it is that he managed to do with the logic, which, honestly was pretty good - actually the best part of the whole thing (as you may have gathered by now). Then you can dive into Snapmap and reverse engineer all the stuff he pulled off and figure out HOW he did it. THAT would be the reason I would download this creation. It feels and plays like a n00b map but he took his time with the logic and that alone makes it worth the time to check it out. I'm certain that he'll make better maps in the future and I think mappers now could learn alot from some of the logic chains he put together.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

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