The City of The Damned: Apocalypse
http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?file=levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/tcotd21me.zip
Single-map Blood-inspired GZDoom TC by famous Tormentor667.
I actually made several attempts to play through this TC in the past, however I never finished it until now. Since I went through something of a Blood-playing spree during the last two months or so (thanks in no small part to
Ninja Destroyer and his reviews of various fan-made Blood episodes), I decided to give one another try.
Anyway, while it consists of a single map, that map is quite large. You start on a foggy shore, with a path leading to a dark forest, through which you continue to titular city (which is mostly fun to explore, at first), with side paths leading to a church and a lone farmhouse.
Solid gothic horror atmosphere, story is told through various notes you'll find scattered through the map. They are fun enough to read, and are done in appropriate style. Also, they tend to contain hints towards solution of puzzles or location of keys, so you better pay attention to them if ya want to minimize aimless wandering. There will be quite a bit of it regardless, map is huge and there is ten or so keys and various items you'll have locate and collect before you're done.
Combat-wise, it can be rather hard, and author obviously aimed for survival horror style of resource starvation. Ammo is in relatively small supply, and for the most part you'll be stuck with pitchfork, revolver and a shotgun. While we're at it, weapon behavior is apparently mostly based on (infamous) ZBlood, so you really shouldn't expect a faithful re-creation of Blood arsenal. Flare gun is replaced with a revolver, tommy gun's secondary fire now consist of shooting multiple bullets in a straight line, pitchfork can be thrown at enemies (which also means that you can lose it, locally there is a couple of spare ones lying around)... Also, large chunk of standard Blood arsenal is simply missing. You'll encounter some of the classic (more or less modified) Blood baddies like cultists, spiders and zombies. Decent chunk of enemies consists of typical Realm667 bestiary, and some of those can be a bit annoying - like say modified revenant that insists on respawning after death.
Visuals are solid enough. Textures come almost exclusively from Blood, detailing is solid if often sparse. There is some 3D geometry here and there, and Tormentor's own fog effect is put to extensive use.
In the end, I'm not sure how I feel about this one.
Aimless backtracking in
definitely the biggest issue here. 'Tis also made even worse later on. Early on you'll notice these crypt-like underground rooms that are scattered around the map: these are so-called "moon shelters". At one point, shortly after you acquire the key that is necessary to open them, alarm will go off and you will have a minute or so to reach a nearest "shelter", after which screen goes black and map is filled some sort of invincible... things that slaughter anything they happen upon. After this, you'll hear sirens every 5-10 minutes or so, and you'll have to reach the nearest shelter as fast as you can. This adds some tension at first, but eventually it just makes thing even more tedious and annoying.
Screenshots:
