If you like monotonous environments and confusing switch hunts, you’re in good hands with Icarus: Alien Vanguard. I don’t know how many levels take place Icarus starship but it feels like two-thirds of the mapset on the ship’s silvery interiors. Even when the campaign heads into gothic or hellish biomes, the texture use is still very boring.
On a handful of levels I ended up noclipping my way to various keys or the exit because trying to figure out progression was too hard to grok. I’m sure if I took my time I would have been able to figure out how to get the yellow key in Map 8, but I didn’t want to spend too much time playing this wad so I skipped that whole trial. Same goes for finding the secret exits on Maps 15 and 31.
This is definitely a megawad from 1996 because– god– sometimes figuring what to do involving combing entire maps for a switch or trigger. Exploring levels isn’t a lot of fun either. The map design goes for believable/lived-in spaces but combined with the sparse details and unintuitive layouts, the naturalness of the environments work against it.
This gets me thinking: is this what other people feel when they play TNT Evilution? A lot of my problems I have with Icarus are problems people have with TNT, although I don’t remember being so confused and frustrated in all my times playing the team’s most famous megawad, though.
I played with Project Brutality which made this campaign zesty enough for me to want it to see it through. I can’t imagine finishing this vanilla, though. What good can I say about this one? I guess the level design and functionality could be worse. The music’s decent. Enemy placement is good and even on UV, is pretty tame. I think for the most part, it’s not surprise that this early megawad (which was featured on Doomworld’s 100 Top WADs of All Time) has mostly been forgotten.
On a handful of levels I ended up noclipping my way to various keys or the exit because trying to figure out progression was too hard to grok. I’m sure if I took my time I would have been able to figure out how to get the yellow key in Map 8, but I didn’t want to spend too much time playing this wad so I skipped that whole trial. Same goes for finding the secret exits on Maps 15 and 31.
This is definitely a megawad from 1996 because– god– sometimes figuring what to do involving combing entire maps for a switch or trigger. Exploring levels isn’t a lot of fun either. The map design goes for believable/lived-in spaces but combined with the sparse details and unintuitive layouts, the naturalness of the environments work against it.
This gets me thinking: is this what other people feel when they play TNT Evilution? A lot of my problems I have with Icarus are problems people have with TNT, although I don’t remember being so confused and frustrated in all my times playing the team’s most famous megawad, though.
I played with Project Brutality which made this campaign zesty enough for me to want it to see it through. I can’t imagine finishing this vanilla, though. What good can I say about this one? I guess the level design and functionality could be worse. The music’s decent. Enemy placement is good and even on UV, is pretty tame. I think for the most part, it’s not surprise that this early megawad (which was featured on Doomworld’s 100 Top WADs of All Time) has mostly been forgotten.
Currently imagining a universe where id Software chose this for Final Doom instead of TNT Evilution, and Doom players to this day regard "that one level with the Pain Elementals and the chained-up bucket of KFC" as the hardest official level to pistol-start.