While looking for doom mods, it is rare you find a very good Total Conversion mod that can replicate a game really well.. Mods like Serious Doom 0.9 and Dn3doom are examples of this. But most of the games you want to have total conversion mods based off of them don't have them... Well, at least until now.
Samsara was a mod a I skipped because a long time ago I played it and didn't like it because it didn't have enemies from the games it recreated... This mod I am reviewing today started as a mod for Samsara then became it's own standalone mod, crossing over 16 FPS game universes into one doom mod, enemies included, one liners included, weapons included and new enemies not found in the normal games included...
The following games are included in it's roster:
Doom
Duke3d
Shadow Warrior
Blood
Rott
Wolf3d
Corridor 7
Blake Stone
Half Life
Quake
Quake 2
In Persuit of Greed
Strife
Heretic
Hexen
Dark Forces
and many more.
Each has a player class based on the main character for the game. When you play as a character, enemies from that game become enemies you fight by default. But you can also set it up so enemies from all of these games randomly spawn, or set it up so enemies from only certain games spawn, under options ..
The enemies themselves are painstakingly recreated in decorate and many expansion pack enemies show up. Including Opposing force enemies, wanton destruction enemies, spear of destiny expansion enemies, quake 1 and 2 mission pack enemies, and more. Unfortunately there is one major issue with this mod but it's a minor one at least...
I had so much fun with this mod, that I deleted a lot of the total conversion mods off my computer that I had, in favor of this. Gone were the quake, descent, wolfenstein, heretic/hexen and duke3d mods. It is really good for saving disk space... I now can play any of the above games in doom WITHOUT needing to find a TC for it minus quake / quake 2 and half-life (due to opengl needed for them)...
One issue it has that irks me is that the enemies and weapons for quake 1, 2 and half-life are all 3d models instead of sprite rips. This makes it so I can't play these modes due to my system locking up with looping sounds whenever I try to load doom in Opengl, whiich is required, unfortunately. I tried finding a zdoom port that allows models in software but no luck... This is not a huge issue but still bothers me a bit...
Anyway, if you like the idea of crossing over universes of many FPS games this mod is for you. I did a mod like this for doom years ago called TUC but this mod is much better than it... It only has minor issues which are unique to my computer setup only and not flaws of the mod itself...
Screenshots: (textures are from my texture packs for the games)
