[User added a rating.]
4a0a18dfb514443bfe46b6e90c7512c5f7ccd6fef5c69a68fb975d6f33b8d633
overall_rating
4.333333333333333
45
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
Very nice set of levels. The only issue I had was with Markie’s level… it kept blowing up on me, saying something about an explosion (curiously enough). But this is a great level set, not a bad one in the bunch.
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
Top-notch jam of at least half-a-dozen superbly designed, long-winded levels.
PoolboyQ’s ‘Dies Irae’ is my favourite, thanks to its smoothly flowing, elegant design coupled with challenging encounters. JCR’s ‘Primordial’, Ionous’ ‘The Great Sea Wept’ and Markie’s ‘Grim Gallows’ are also spot-on offerings, delivering the goods both on the visual and the gameplay departments. (5/5)
I noted DoomPope’s, Greenwood’s, Grome’s, Juz’s, Lunaran’s, RadiatorYang’s and Shades’ maps as well - theirs too, are a notch above the rest. (4/5)
Nevertheless, this is a worthy and lengthy pack that is well worth the time.
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
I enjoyed Demesne of Sorrows (ctsj_shades) but without ever really feeling I was in a real place. Much too often, it arbtrarily cut off backwards progression, so that it felt more like a sequence of set-pieces. Still, it was fun quadding all those shamblers near the end — even if the actual end, after that, was rather terribly anticlimactic.
Once More, With Feeling (ctsj_radiatoryang) was interestingly different from most levels, and I enjoyed the feeling of being out in the sunshine. (Living in England, in November, in lockdown, there is precious little of that to be had in real life!) The progression is rather too reliant on mass spawns, I think, because it’s always more satisfying to discover monsters than to have them just appear. But fighting hordes on those slopes is fun, so fair enough. Re-running the level after it’s repopulated was nice, and justifies the title (which I assume if lifted from the stellar Buffy episode of the same name).
No New Ideas (ctsj_quasiotter) is not my cup of tea at all. I can’t understand poetry at the best of times. I am glad that people are doing strange and experimental things with Quake, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the individual things! 
[User added a rating.]
Dies Irae (ctsj_poolboyq) is my favourite map of this set so far, with a good long progression through many different areas and some pleasing verticality. It loses a point or two for me, though, because it’s another map that is too fond of pushing the player through it in a single direction, preventing backtracking. The bunfight at the end — two waves of monsters with a quad for each — was a satisfying conclusion.
There are some balance issues with Sandworn Fortress (ctsj_pinchy) which are first spoiled my enjoyment, but which somehow I ended up appreciating. The level starts out desperately low on ammo and health, with careful use of grenades a must, and the need to provoke infighting. I admit I gave up in disgust on my first attempt, but I am glad I persevered: coming through this ammo bottleneck was deeply satisfying.
Unfortunately, one that is done, the rest of the map is rather anticlimactic — a relatively easy over-provisioned trudge through a watery maze. Still, the first half is memorable.
Utopia (ctsj_newhouse) is another oddly unsatisfying map, being a sequence of almost entirely disconnected set-piece horde combats with no linking narrative and no sense of exploration or discovery. While I enjoyed each individual part of this map, I found the whole to be much less than the sum of the parts.
Grim Gallows (ctsj_markie) is by far my favourite of these maps so far — perhaps not so much because it’s objectively the best, as because it best fits my favoured play style of careful exploration and progressive discovery. I loved the way it finished, too: the gold-key door leading not directly to the exit, but the a repopulating of the explored areas with hard monsters but also with plenty of quads — a really satisfying way to conclude.
I can’t quite make sense of the title Quad is a Four-Letter Word (ctsj_lunaran), as I didn’t find a single quad anywhere in the level — I have to assume there’s a quad in at least one of the two secrets I missed. But that’s OK: this is fine level and a brilliant example of how you can do a lot with a little. It’s really four very similar circular arenas stacked on top of each other with an elevator in the middle, but carefully constructed to offer a lot of different combats and plenty of tactical options. A gem of minimalism.