Whitemare 2 - Russian Doom Community

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I''ve cleared map 20, I actually rather liked it, although it is quite grueling. I ended up killing the majority of the monsters because it took me a while to figure out what to do, but somebody who knows exactly what they''re doing will probably never even see half of them.

Edit:

Map 20 -- Gloominarch''s Realm - 94% Kills / 100% Secrets
Right, what we have here is a big, nasty bossmap, although this is not evident from the start. The setting is a desolate, grimy necropolis, beneath which lies a huge stone vault housing the Gloominarch, a titanic, many-faced abomination from beyond the Pit, its noisome flesh weeping a lake of poisonous ichor. The whole goal of the map is to kill this towering aberration; which of course is far easier said than done, as the task quickly proves to be quite complicated and involved.

What Arsenikum and BigMemka have done is basically use several of the basic ideas of the classic Icon of Sin setup, and repurpose them into something quite a bit different from standard map 30 fare. The skinny: The Gloominarch has four major head-protusions arranged radially around its main trunk; each of these periodically opens its grotesquely equine maw and spits out either a pain elemental or a cacodemon (these come from a finite but very large supply). Each of these four orifices must be destroyed via an unhealthy diet of rockets down the gullet before the player can move on to the last phase of the battle (the mouths have Keen-things in them, of course). The problem is, the creature is so large that there''s no way to get a clear shot down its multifarious windpipes from the floor, or from many other vantages in the vault (even hitting it from unintended angles without mouselook would probably be difficult, though I didn''t actually try this); and so there''s little recourse but to run through a pair of very nasty gauntlets (the two portals on either side of the red skull altar) in order to finally reach each of four designated firing points, one for each head. And when I say ''gauntlets'', I mean it--these sections are quite lengthy and danger-laden in their own right, and of course all the while the Gloominarch is creating a veritable swarm of gasbags (which in turn tend to propagate massive clouds of lost souls) out in the main vault, not to mention the literal army of imps that endlessly crawls up out of the bowels of the earth at one point along one of the routes.

These side areas both feature some pretty staunch "Fuck you" moments in their own right; the left path has replenishing cyber-cages, and one of the paths to a firing point is arguably a mandatory secret. Heh, and the right path throws an apparently infinite number of imps at you (though they actually aren''t), which you eventually end running away from, only to find yourself in a genuine, bona fide, dark-as-hell, Shadowman-style corridor maze (think THAT section from ''New City of the Damned'' in Cheogsh II, those of you who have played it) that will kill you if you take certain paths (although these are signposted well enough that you have no excuse if it happens to you more than once), and eventually floods with powerful monsters, to boot. Seeing this, I couldn''t help but admire the absurdity, but again, this is probably a spiritbreaker for a lot of players. Even once you make it through all that and all four heads have been destroyed, the battle isn''t quite over--the player will at this point be able to climb onto the strange shrine to the luminous, blue crystal geode; awakening its mystical power (read: hitting another switch) will cause some of the stones in the area to grow, most notably two great stalagmites that eventually collide with the vault''s chamber, collapsing it and finally killing the Gloominarch. This takes time, though, and the Gloominarch will begin spitting out an infinite supply of random monstrosities, classic IoS style, to try to kill you before the ritual is complete.

The amount of spectacle here is quite something; the design of the Gloominarch itself and the sector-based SFX for the destruction of the four heads and the final stalagmite sequence put a smile on my face, and there''s no doubt that figuring out what needed to be done and then finally managing to do it (heh, yeah, I broke down and used a couple of saves, here) certainly engendered a satisfying feeling of accomplishment; it truly was an epic battle, not much more I can ask out of a boss battle using default DooM II building-blocks. That being said, I highly doubt most players will look upon it as fondly as I do, because the whole task really is very grueling, and certain design choices make the process more laborious than it really needs to be. It''s true that the opening, aboveground section of the map is probably the most visually attractive part, but in gameplay terms it seems extraneous to the map''s main idea/goal, especially given how long the Gloominarch ''fight'' actually takes. Similarly, I can accept the damage-floor covering the main chamber, but the movement-slowing flesh was just too much hassle for too little gain; I tend to agree with Mouldy that using this particular port feature is a bad idea nine times out of ten. Also of note is that some of the flesh-detailing around the geode altar can actually be climbed in order to reach the lower lip of the platform (normally a stair-ladder builds once all four outer heads are ruined); this represents a pretty serious red herring that will probably amount to a lot of wasted time and frustration for many players.

I don''t know, like I said I expect this will eventually annoy and alienate the vast majority of players, but just how over-the-top it is in a number of ways appeals to me personally, even though I can still see that it probably could''ve done with some more editing. It is an end-of-episode map that feels truly climactic, and is thematically interesting and varied in the play department (though invariably backbreaking). My worry here is that there''s no way the endgame maps are going to be able to compete with this in those regards, but I guess we''ll see.