Master Levels for Doom II

 


Doom 2 Master Levels is an official addon just a year after Doom 2. It is a map pack endorsed and signed off on by ID, although no one at ID actually created any of the maps. It is merely a collection of various fan made levels, and they do not even run consecutively as a campaign, but you get a exclusive DOS menu program to select through the levels in alphabetical order.

As the name suggests, these are maps that are intended to challenge you and for people who have beaten all the previous doom content. The maps selected here vary by a few various different authors, names like Christen Klie, Jim Flynn, Dr Sleep, and more famous people such as a few maps by Tim Willits, among others.

The maps are ordered alphabetically in the menu, so thats the way I played through them.
The maps on offer here vary from standard fare military bases that you'd find in the original games, maps like Attack.wad and Nessus.wad, & Catwalk.wad, many of these levels are just average romps through familiar looking bases and outdoors sections, and a fair bit of them aren't even all that challenging or interesting, especially a good hanful of the maps just come across as amateur with the texture work and lighting. But they are okay to play through.

Really, Master Levels falls short as an addon, simply because many of the levels are either just average, amateur but playable, medicore, or down-right awful. Take a level such as Mephisto.wad, its just an absolute onslaught of clusterfuck enemies spawning all around you in an outdoors section, while its kind of fun to dodge the Revenant rockets, the level expects you to do all sorts of gimmicks to progress. Once you get past the initial outside area, youre inside this arena where enemies keep spawning all around you and you have to survive the assault and then walls open up where you can get keys to go back outside and try to climb up the tower to shoot rockets in the Head on the wall like the ending of Doom 2. But the whole thing is thrown together in a frustrating and clunky way that its just no fun at all, with bullshit spawns all around you, and its makes no intuitive sense how youre supposed to progress it.

Take another map like Manor.wad, while it looks cool, its this fortress and outdoors area, the layout is so unintuitive with mandatory keys being hidden behind walls, 'platforming' sections, hidden switches, hidden triggers, it makes it no fun to play after a certain point. Many of the maps are like this.

You have the more gimmicky novelty maps such as the infamous TEETH.wad. (The express elevator to hell). This is a giant elevator that bounches you up and down, that has 8 different floors you can jump off at. Each floor needs to be unlocked by exploring the previous one. But this level is just a nightmare to get through, in a bad way. For one thing its nauseating constantly riding up and down this elevator, and another there are enemy spawns constantly, even spawning behind you randomly, it really is just a trial and error bullshit map where you have to memorize enemy placements, theres no way you'll do it first attempt. Theres so many stupid sections, like one part where you have to ride a pillar up, only to be surrounded by demons at the top and you get shot WHILE youre moving upwards, theres basically nothing you can do to avoid damage. I did like the jump scare at the end of the level, you go to hit the exit and an archvile appears and its a fake exit and you frantically run around hitting switches to open the real exit -- sure the map has  bloodpumping sections and does provide a real challenge, but it doesn't make up for the multiple annoying design choices.

Theres only really a few maps I thought were great. Black Castle.wad is this gigantic castle where you climb up and up, with stunning medieval architecture and texture work, with a great variety in monster encounters and unique sections, and multiple epic arena battles with exciting use of enemy placements like the room with the arch-vile spawns, but you can go through a teleporter and get a God mode to deal with them. And then later on theres a space stary sky section that is like another survival arena that slowly spawns waves of like every monster in the game, including Spider Mastermind and eventually the Cyberdemon, then you get a key and go all the way back down to the beginning of the castle, with new enemies spawning as you go down, to reach the final exit. The only weird part with this map is that at the final exit you jump into a pool of lava and you need a Red key that is easily missed to unlock the red exit door...but if you happen to die in the pit, it makes you succeed the level anyway. Odd choice.

Other levels I thought were great are Paradox.wad, This is a more typical indoors/outdoors base but just done very well and very fair and intense challenge and usage of monsters, with no bullshit key placements, everything makes sense. The only thing is the texture work is a bit dull.

Another map I thought was great is Minos.wad, this is like a demonic spooky castle with great lighting and lots of dark areas with good texture work and interesting architecture. A good challenge for sure, but its fair and ammo and pickups are sparse but well placed.

But sadly all the rest of the maps are mostly a mixture of trash , due to awful key placements like behind fucking invisible platforms (I'm looking at you, Vesperas.wad, that was stupid), or due to stupid gimmicky levels with mandatory hidden walls to progress or having to randomly shoot certain walls to open a passage, or just being really amateur looking and not too exciting. It's also weird how its just a map pack of random maps slammed together with no coherence or consistency in pacing or a ramping difficulty campaign. Id much rather a solid pieced together campaign than just random maps ID happened to approve of. Seems more like a cashgrab kinda affair than a real solid product.

I even wrote down individual ratings for every map, and if you average them out with a calculator, it turns out to be 6/10 overall. Not good.

attack 6/10
black castle 9/10
blood sea 7/10
canyon 6/10
catwalk 5/10
the combine 5/10
fistula 5/10
garrison 4/10
geryon 8/10
manor 4/10
mephisto 3/10
minos 8/10
nessus 7/10
paradox 8/10
substance 6/10
subterra 4/10
teeth 5/10
bad dream 4/10
ttrap 6/10
vesperas  5/10
virgil 7/10

So I'll take that 6/10, and then coupled with additional gripes and annoyances I'm just gonna say its a pretty medicore map pack with a few gems but mostly shit maps or meh maps.

5/10