Quake 1 Mod Review : Execution (EXQ)

 It's not often you see gameplay mods for quake 1. Usually gameplay mods are for games that have insanely good features in their ports that allow for gameplay mods to be made, such as decorate scripting in zdoom. Without features like decorate, it's impossible to make a very good gameplay mod. Yet the author(s) of EXQ managed to do so.

Execution (which I will call exq from now on) is a randomizer mod for Quake 1. Yes that's right, Quake finally has a randomizer mod.  It's not the first technically, as the excellent mod Quake 1.5 had randomizer gameplay too, but it's the first one that is well balanced and doesn't require a monster sourceport like dark places. That means a lot for me, as I cannot even run opengl games anymore without breaking my system. And since my Randomizer mod  that I made was made was so unbalanced that it could not be beaten on easy, it doesn't count.

Execution has 2 difficulty settings. On easy no enemies but dogs get replaced by enemies, which makes it useless. Hard makes  every enemy get replaced by the hardest enemy it can possibly be replaced by in all instances, making it insanely hard (we're talking about hordes of mega enforcers in e1m1 here). That means medium is the only difficulty you should play in this, as it has the most fair replacers put in.

Throughout the game enemies will get replaced by new enemy types randomly.  Some are common, some are not. Each Enemy can be replaced by at least 2 new enemies.  Grunts get replaced by enforcers and fast moving grenade grunts, enforcers get replaced by mega enforcers from Zerstorer, Scrags get replaced by green scrags taken from Soul of Evil and super OP versions of them that shoot spike mines at you (!), Ogres get replaced by super OP cluster grenade shooting flaming ogres, Knights get replaced by very OP statue knights that require nails to kill and are totally impervious to shotguns, that makes this mod harder than normal quake by far.  You end up saving up a lot more nail ammo due to it. Death Knights get replaced by this super OP death knight varient that shoots nails at you. So far that's all I have seen in the mod. I have not seen the new fiend variant, or the new shambler yet. Nor have I seen the cyberdemon that shows up.

The mod has a very quirky weapon system. The default shotgun is replaced by an infinite ammo super shotgun, and the nailgun wastes no ammo until you upgrade it. I don't know how to find such upgrades but I assume picking up weapon pickups MIGHT trigger the upgrades, as picking up the Riot Controller (Super Shotgun Replacement) might gave me an upgrade before.  Once you get an upgrade for either one of these weapons it does more damage, but starts to waste ammo too. Other guns get upgrades as well. Many Guns are replaced with new ones in this mod. The supernailgun is gone and replaced with a plasma rifle that looks kind of like the thunderbolt. There ia a chaingun you can get when you pick up the nailgun that looks like the zerstorer one but fires less accurately and fires exploding rounds. The supershotgun can shoot explosive shells with an upgrade too.  The rocket launcher has an upgrade to turn into a multi rocket launcher, the grenade launcher has a cluster grenade upgrade, and there is a super bad looking "FAT" Lightning gun ripoff that shoots what looks like a big ball of light. I think that is supposed to be a BFG as it's fireballs death frame looks like a bfg hit from doom.  Besides that one gun the rest are fine.  I like how you can upgrade guns.

The one flaw this mod has is difficulty. It's balanced well but it's balanced like Complex Doom for Doom. It's hard as hell. Even on medium you will take TONS of damage.  It feels like complex doom done in quake. It's hard as hell and I had to use cheats to beat several maps because I could not handle the difficulty. If the easy skill would allow for enemy replacement, this mod would be better, but as it stands it needs to be improved a little in the balance department.

There are some bugs with this mod however. Gibbing enemies can sometimes prevent them from triggering death targets that must be triggered to progress, like the enforcer in that little room just beyond the gold key door in e2m1 that has a death target that opens the way to the silver key door.  In that map, I accidentally blew him up and the death target didn't fire right. Also in IKSPQ5 the death targets for at least one enforcer didn't fire right in the room that requires a group of grunts to be killed to progress to the exit teleporter.  That one however seems more like a map bug as it also happened in my Ill-fated randomizer mod too. That is a pretty serious bug and can leave levels broken bad. But besides that I could not find a bug with the mod at all. It's worth playing. Just make sure to use a fitzquake variant like MarkV or quakespasm to play this as winquake is not good enough, and dark places might run it but I can't test that now.

Screenshots:

Doom Mod Review : Quake Style Unbound

 When it comes to randomizer mods, I thought I had found all the good ones. It turned out I was wrong. Quake style is one of the big underrated ones and it spawned 2 more - quake style zx and quake style unbound. Quake style is interesting because it brought elements from quake games and wolfenstein games into doom.  Thankfully the wolf3d elements are limited to guns only, as killing tons of nazis in uac bases would be a tad out of place. But as you can see, the concept is cool.

Quake style unbound is the newest quake style randomizer mod of the bunch. It is actually by far the best, and it's so good, that I would call it the best randomizer mod ever. I thought infernal attack was that till I played 3 mods that blew IA out of the water, Hellstorm rebirth, Quake style zx and now this.

Like hellstorm rebirth before it, quake style unbound is a class based randomizer. Unlike hellstorm rebirth however, classes do not get weapons only they can use.  They start with different guns but that is about it. The mod has a lot of new guns, many of them are from other games, but not all. There are TONS, and I mean tons in this mod.  There is even an auto double barreled shotgun, a weapon only drla had before this.  A powerhouse of a weapon so good that if you get it you can cream slaughtermaps in seconds.

The weapons are all done well and many have altfires. A nice touch, like in the similar hellstorm rebirth mod.  The altfires I have not tested yet, but I know they exist.  Not all guns get them but a lot do.

Some of The new enemies are  ones from the beastiary, but unlike hellstorm rebirth you get tons of new ones on top of the beastiary ones. Many are actually from quake and quake 2, which is great. To see them you have to turn on the spawn quake monsters feature in options, but they are there and it makes this game great.

There are a whopping 15 playerclasses to choose from, including the quake guy, the doom guy, and many more. They all have new guns to start with and are really cool. I played the doom guy most but others exist. 

The quake 1 and 2 enemies feature makes this thing the best randomizer ever because fighting quake 1 enemies in doom is something that doesn't happen often and usually it's limited to massive AEOD style randomizers that borrow 90% of their content from other games.  This is different, they are there to make doom a little bit less doomy. Zombies are handled well, you need to gib them just like in quake to kill them. It's a nice feature.

What is not so nice however, is the one downside this mod has. The level completion screen. The thing gives you a very annoying ranking system that punishes you for not finding secrets or items. When you play randomly generated levels, finding secrets is really hard to do. Many are very well hidden. To punish you for finding them is stupid. In one map I got 80% kills but it didn't matter because I found 0% secrets and they gave me a D rank of minamalist. Like I was bad at the game or something. Let me tell you something, you don't have to go for 100% to be good at a game, it's stupid that this is in the mod! If this feature was not in the mod I would give it a 10, but as it is it's an 8.5 now. It makes no sense to punish people for not getting a perfect tally. It reminds me of the stupid score sucks BS in scoredoom and frankly should not be there. 

Anyway, if you don't mind that slight issue, I would say try out quake style unbound. It's definitely better than a lot of randomizer mods, maybe not the best but definitely a contender. Quake enemies in doom is a huge huge thing that I love.

Screenshots:

(the textures come from hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack)

Edit : I managed to cook up a little quake 1 themed texture replacer to play quake style unbound with - if you are a fan of quake 1 maps you will recognize the texture pack it uses (ikbase)

Download it here

 

here is a screenshot showing it off with randomly generated maps, make sure to generate a tech themed obaddon mapset, for it only replaces some tech textures

Doom Mod Review : Hellstorm rebirth

 I'm doing a mod review of a very good randomizer mod here.  Hellstorm rebirth (not to be confused with doom - the hellstorm), is a randomizer mod released by a guy on facebook. If you search for :"hellstorm doom mod" and find the facebook page "hellstorm: a  zdoom mod"  you can download the mod there.

Having nothing in common with the phenominal hellstorm mod I reviewed recently, or the unfinished Eric Oi/Eriance mod that was in development on doomworld in the 90's, this mod is actually a lot like Doomzone, a class  based mod that has a randomized enemy feature.  If you like randomizers and like class based gameplay where each class can use specific weapons only, this mod is for you.

Having three classes, the mod introduces combat against randomized demons.  Many of the demons come from the beastiary. A few are new however.  The three classes are the rifle guy, the shotgun guy, and the energy weapons guy. Each has a specialty, machineguns/rifles for the rifle guy, shotguns for the shotgun guy and energy weapons for the energy weapons guy. Not that this specification means a whole lot, as classes who don't have a specification for a certain kind of weapon can still sometimes use those weapons.

The combat is very fun, and lots of new demons fight you. Many are from the beastiary, but some are new. I saw some new ones but none of them are really  great, but the beastiary ones are fine. However, some very good ones are commented out in the spawn lists, and that is puzzling.

The weapons are great in this mod, minus 1 glaring issue which I will get to later. Each weapon has been modded a lot to add new sounds, an altfire, and more. There are weapons from many different sources, the beastiary, demon eclipse/eriguns, drla, etc.  Many have been altered to fire different projectiles however. Some have been tweaked to be less or more powerful. Many have altfires but not all.  Some are damn powerful. The default pistol rips demons to shreds in this mod with it's secondary fire which is shotgun strength.  That is nice and that will help make some maps so easy it's not funny. It could be a great mod for slaughtermaps but more testing is needed to see if that is the case.

One glaring issue remains. The game locks up the instant you try to select the redneck rampage ripsaw gun.  That cannot be fixed easily and to me the only way to really fix it is to unbind the 1 key so you don't accidentally select it. Since it's very hard to not collect it, I suggest doing this:

make a batch file to load the mod by doing this:

take the following text line and past it into a text file and save it as a txt file and rename it to a batch file (BAT) later

gzdoom -file   hellstormv6_001a.pk3 +unbind 1

always use that batch file to load the mod and be careful not to pick up the saw thrower!
It makes it so you can't use melee weapons but it's worth it!
Since weapons don't get autoselected when picked up this helps

Besides that there is no issues, I hope no more freezes happen when enemies fight eachother or such, or else this mod may be ruined

Screenshots:

(loaded with hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack and nameless rpg lite in the screenshot)

Doom Mod Review : Alandoguns

 Alandoguns is an ancient Doom Weapon Mod I found recently that I never played ever, for some strange reason.  It is a randomizer mod, one of the first randomizer mods, with tons of new guns, and some new enemies.

This mod has the reputation of being total shittiness in the community, due to that it has bad reviews up the wazzoo on idgames.But I don't think it's quite as bad as people are saying it is, sure, it rips from known sources, like the zdoom monster resource wad, other games, weapon mods by other people, etc, but to me compilation mods like this or infernal attack are fine.

I played a set of randomly generated maps in it and right away, I liked the guns. At first my favorite was the uzi, it did tons of damage for an uzi and even though it has a small clip size, it was fun to use. The weapons in this mod are the stars of the show, many many guns exist in this mod and they all have reloading built into them, which is amazing for it's time. They range from machineguns, chainguns, uzi's, shotguns of many kinds, including the riot gun from shadow warrior (not the new shadow warrior, the old one), an ice gun, and more. You will be swamped with guns in this mod, something lots of people don't like, but I don't mind it. I didn't mind infernal attacks 200 guns and I surely don't mind a mod that has tons of guns. 

The enemies however is where this mod starts to be not quite as good. Some are cool, like the new zombies, the rocket soldier, the new imps, the robots that replace arachnotrons, but a LOT of monsters in this mod come from Heretic and Hexen and other games like Duke3d. I simply don't think they fit at all, so that takes some points away. I managed to patch out the heretic/hexen enemies, and that made it much better, but a patched version simply cannot be released due to technical reasons now (me running out of space on pcloud).

For some reason the mod contains a lot of new textures and has some new maps in it, it's no big deal if you load randomly generated maps after the mod and use a high-def texture pack, but I would avoid playing the original doom 2 game in this for that reason. Map04 and map05 are totally replaced and they should not be.

I don't mind this mod, and if it weren't for one feature, I would probably call it decent to bad. But this  one feature saves it. Your max health can be upgraded! Pickups that look like heretic/hexen health vials/flasks are there, and they boost your max health at the same time as healing you. This makes this mod a great choice to play with super hard maps! This mod to me then is actually quite good, just not great.  It could have been much better if it didn't have heretic/hexen enemies in it, but besides that one issue and the map04-05 replacements  it's actually not that bad.



Screenshots:

(the textures from this screenshot are from the excellent hoover 1979 ultra hi-def texture pack)

Doom Mod Review : Doom - The Hellstorm

One thing doom really lacks is a good doom horror mod.  A mod that plays with any level and introduces horror gameplay into the game. While some people classify the original doom as horror, I don't.  The game has horror elements sure, but actual horror gameplay is not found in the original doom at all. What doom needed bad was a horror mod that introduces horror elements into the gameplay.

Well recently a doom mod entitled Doom - the hellstorm (which you can find by googling "doom hellstorm mod") was released on moddb.  This mod introduces horror elements into classic doom and does a pretty damn good job with it. After playing 2 levels that were obaddon generated with the mod, I definitely felt terror from the mod.

The first thing you will notice when playing the mod is how dark it is.  This thing is practically pitch black.  There is a flashlight, but it is not recommended to use it with obaddon maps due to the slowdown it creates.  To use the flashlight, you must unequip a gun like in doom 3 so it actually doesn't help that much.  This goes really well with the doom 3 texture replacer I found and released on the last review, the review of ultimate super doom 3.

The creepiness is brought out by the soundtrack, which is similar to the udv ambient soundtrack feature. That feature replaces the music with a quiet creepy droning in the background.  It makes the game way scarier. 

Healing is handled a lot differently than in normal doom mods. Picking up a healthkit does not automatically heal you in this mod.  You have to select the healthkit by hitting the 8 key on your keyboard and that will select it and allow you to heal, but when you heal you are totally defenseless, so choose wisely when you will try to heal yourself. It takes about 15 seconds to heal yourself from 50 health so be careful.  This adds to the horror elements.

Creepy apparitions will stalk you in this mod, not limited to an alma-like one and one from the movie scream.  Every once and awhile they show up. They don't make a noise when you see them, which would have made them scarier.  Strangely missing is youtube styled screamers in the mod, but that is a bit too scary maybe.

Adding to the horror elements are respawning monsters, throughout the levels, zombies will resurrect and demons will teleport in periodically, even in maps where they should not. It gives you a lot of tension while playing, which is great. It is also quite scary, as the chanting from doom 3 that happens when monsters teleport also is played in this mod when the same thing happens.

The mod has many guns, and all of them are original guns not found in other mods, which is a plus. They include 2 or 3 new pistols,  a magnum with a glowstick selected in the other hand to light things up, several shotguns, including the doom 3 one, the doom eternal supertshotgun with a built in grapple hook,  and an automatic one, a very good assault rifle, the plasma rifle, a chaingun, the rocket launcher and more.

The mod uses mostly beastiary enemies, and that is good and all, but the lack of doom eternal enemies kind of set it back a little bit. It isn't a huge issue but it could have made it way better if dread knights, doom hunters, marauders and carcasses were in this mod.  It actually lacks a lot of enemies from doom games besides doom 3 and 64 and custom doom ones. There are doom 3 alpha zombies, complete with their "you will not escape", "hell awaits you" screamed lines recorded by Trent Reznor, and doom 3, and doom 64 imps, but a few more from doom 2016 and eternal would have helped.

Another issue is the menu, it is TERRIBLE! You cannot see what menu item is selected at all, and have to use mouse driven menu controls, when keyboard ones are far easier to use but won't work in the mod.  It kind of sucks. At first it made me annoyed. Besides that and the lack of doom eternal enemies, this thing is actually pretty good though. If you want a good doom horror mod, you really cannot go wrong with hellstorm.


Screenshots:
(textures from the screenshot come from a doom 3 texture replacer I found on youtube, they do not come with the mod)

Doom Mod Review : Ultimate Super Doom 3

Ultimate Super Doom 3 is one of the best total conversion gameplay mods ever made for classic doom.  It faithfully recreates the mechanics, enemies, guns and feel of Doom 3 perfectly.  Now a lot of people don't like doom 3 much, but I don't mind it, especially considering all newer doom games have stupid jumping crap thrown in.

I found this mod a long time ago searching for a doom 3 gameplay mod for zdoom. I was working on something similar but far worse.  This mod is amazing. It imports all of the enemies from doom 3 into doom/doom 2 and does the same thing with guns. Even better, it takes the stuff from the doom 3 expansion, resurrection of evil and imports them too. Being a huge fan of ROE I loved this. I got to fight bruisers and vulgars again.  And the quality of the work is quite insane considering all the sprite ripping he had to do to get the mod working right, as the mod uses sprite rips, not models to draw the new graphics.

It's one of the best mods but to really enjoy it you will need some other mods. I recommend Ultimate Doom visor for it's outdoor damage effects and darker lighting settings. I also recommend this texture replacer I found on youtube that replaces all doom 1 and 2 textures with doom 3 ones.  I also recommend some kind of ambient music pack as well. To find this mod search for it on google and click the link to moddb and download the file in files named volume 4.5

Overall this is fun as all hell.

Screenshots:

(This screenshots was taken using an obaddon map and retexturing it with the above texture replacer, the mod itself doesn't have new textures)

 

 

 

 

Doom mod review : Doom EXP

 Doom EXP or Doom Eternal EXP as it's sometimes called, is an awesome gameplay mod for classic doom made by OfficerD82.  It started as a mod where you could level up as you killed enemies and would get rewards for your levelups. But it soon morphed away from that.

Doom EXP is one of the 2 major mods for zdoom that takes features from Doom Eternal and ports them to doom 2.  Thankfully it's a gameplay mod only, so there are no pre-requisites of the mod requiring you to play specific levels to see it's features, which strips out any stupid platforming sections from gameplay (a feature that ruined doom eternal).

As you levelup, you get XP and power nodes. Your power nodes are used for buying upgrades and so is your XP. Some upgrades require power nodes, others require XP, others require both. You can upgrade your guns with altfires, get a grappling hook attached to your shotgun, install a shoulder cannon on doom guy, get the crucible.and more. You get to glory kill enemies as they stagger just like doom 2016 and eternal, and you get to finish off enemies with the doom blade from doom eternal, a nice touch.

All these feratures were set up in a way to make it obvious that this is a classic doom mod at heart. You won't see sprite rips of stuff from doom eternal for instance, it's like this was made to import ideas from doom eternal into classic doom. Besides the doom blade, the sprites for the other features are totally original.  

Joining this impressive list of features are new enemies. There are several new enemies, mostly coming from the beastiary this time. But as of doom exp 2.3 there is one doom eternal enemy in the mod, the marauder. which behaves just like he did in doom eternal. This will make this mod damn challenging to some people, as marauders were the most difficult non boss enemy in that game. A lot of upgrades may be required to be purchased first before you run into this and survive!

I like this mod, it has a lot of features from doom eternal, and since my pile of crap PC can't play doom eternal, this mod will. have to do.

Screenshots:

(textures come from dark textures, a high res texture pack)