I have 2 doom mod reviews for you guys today.... I am reviewing the Doom rpg mod "Death and Decay" and the weather mod "Doom Atmosfear".... Both of these mods require zandronum and for the best results with the first mod, you should download a zandronum 3.1 srable build... Not an alpha or a zandronum 3.0 release...
Death and Decay is an RPG mod for Zandronum... It features the usual things an rpg mod has, levelups, stats, perks (no skills this time), and some other RPG-Esque features... On top of that it has a ton of new guns for you to use, plus a lot of new enemies to fight....
The catch? This mod gives you a lot of guns but makes you pay money you earn by killing enemies to get most of the realy good ones... The guns are pricey, at 4500-5500 dollars per gun, and that means you have to specialize...
The levelup system is setup so that a menu controls how you allocate points to stats and perks and allows you to buy and sell... This menu is mouse driven and is quite clunky... You have to hover your mouse pointer EXACTLY over the stat to increase it and the same thing is true for perks.... To make things worse it doesn't pause the game... Which to me is fucking stupid.... So make sure to clear out the final room of a level before allocating stats/perks points! That's so enemies don't actually shoot you while updating your character...
To make things more interesting, enemies do tons of damage in this mod. This mod is HARD... It's a lot harder than doom rpg/rla which you can cheeze by putting tons of points into max health... It's harder than Nameless RPG lite/DRRPG due to the fact that that has the same thing in common with Doom RPG/RLA.... And due to this and one gamebreaking bug which I will get into later, you might want to play this with a bot mod and run a botmatch in zandronum....
The enemies seem well designed... A lot of them come from recognizible sources but there are a lot of original ones, including reskinned heretic/hexen enemies.. This makes sense, as the game has magical weapons in it that you can purchase... It has a lot of new enemies though and many of them are not from the realm667 beastiary and this makes it fresh.... Same thing is true for guns... it has a LOT of new guns and some of them are quite nice... The new shotgun is based on one from terminator : future shock and is quite well done... It also has an explosive shotgun, but that thing is a bitch to get... It has an auto shotgun but you have to purchase it.. You will need it later on, as levelups cause enemy choices and enemy difficulty to ramp up with you as they level scale with your level.. By the time you are at level 9 or so you will start to encounter very deadly foes and you will need better gun by then so make sure to purchase something powerful like an autoshotgun by then...
The one gamebreaking bug is what keeps this mod from being a great mod... Whenever you resurrect to make things easier after countlessly dying due to the insane enemy difficulty even on easy, you end up running into random crashes with "corrupt zlib stream" errors... I had no issues with this mod in a botmatch so this means you might want to try this in skirmish mode instead with spawn in place or in a coop game as it's meant to be played... I played it with tdbots and the universal compatibility patch for mods that mod has andd that seemed to not have issues so far, so keep that in mind.
The other Mod I am reviewing is called "Doom Atmosfear" and is a rain/wind/time of day mod for zandronum... This mod puts in those features and does so really well.. The rain effects are fantastic and you get hexen like thunder in doom... The wind effects are also really well done.. The day night cycle is quite nicely done... This mod is a good fit to play with the previous mod due to the lack of compatibility issues... I play both mods together and have no issues... Only issue is that you start at night time sometimes and it is dark as hell and the software mode flashlight sucks... Best to play in opengl, unlike me, who has a PC that opengl breaks with hardware lockups... I got around the first issue by typing "dt_sethour 7" in the console to fix that... I used that as a makeshift sleeping system.. The other issue is not something I can do much about...
Anyway, if you like multiplayer doom, check these mods out! I would like to see more playthroughs of the first mod done... On youtube, very little people are playing anything good with this mod... They are playing tiny 10 minute videos on one map, or badly done videos of them being slaughtered in harder mapssets.. This mod is not good for harder mapsets, wish someone would do a full COOP stream of doom 2 or obaddon/obsidian maps or something easy in to show off the whole mod being played like it's intended.. It would help me a lot, so please, if you play zandronum, consider my request..
