Oh hey, I missed my review window last week.
Anyway, I been Playin' a lotta doom this week. I guess I can review that... But surely you guys already know what Doom is! Let's spice it up with a mod for Doom II instead. Mods are always popular, right?
Reelism is a project that's been in development for quite some time. As I understand it, development continued for about 4 or 5 years before ending at some point in 2016 with the latest build, 3.1, which is what I'll be playing for you and linking at the end.
So, what is Reelism anyway? some kinda gross hyper realistic modernization of Doom?
Nah, that'd be really stupid.
Reelism is a 1-6 player wave survival shooter, in which players run around large, custom made deathmatch maps to collect randomly spawning weapons and powerups while fighting hordes of enemies, with the ultimate goal of getting a higher score than other players after the game ends.
It's all about going on a sick killstreak, basically.
In the standard game mode, 3 slot reels spin to decide which enemy class you fight, which weapons and ammo types spawn, and which random bonus effect happens. For example, players might end up fighting cowboys with shotguns in zero gravity, or shooting grenade launchers at skeletons while the floors are icey.
Every 60 secounds a new round will start, ending the bonus effect instantly and spinning the 3 slots again. After 5 rounds, the player or players do battle with a boss, selected at random from a pool of 13 formidable foes. They range from El Cybredemon: the lazily reskinned boss of Doom, to Pope Dog: The goodest of doggos.
Best way to get some practice in is this boss rush mode. No slots, just you, guns, and enemies.
Not that you'd usually make it that far. This mod is pretty damn hard in single player, and the RNG can really fuck you over sometimes. A few of my least favorite reel options are as follows:
Doom 64: This one lowers the draw distance to about a meter in front of you.
Dogged: This one spawns 3 Wolfenstein dogs where it would normally spawn 1 of any other enemy. It's hell.
Crapshoot: Yeah, hows broken, barely functional guns sound?
The Jerk: If you roll this one, you get stalked by an imortal, 1hit kill turbo pinky for the whole round. Oh boy!
Other than those 4, I really don't have any big complaints about the reels. Everything feels pretty balanced and fun, even if some of these reels make it a fucking nightmare to play on some of the included maps. In particular, the maps that give me the most trouble are Planet Eioneus, Reel Stadium, and Abridged. In that order.
Planet Eioneus is just a bad map in general, it's this itty bitty platform floating in space with no cover, and enemies just spawn all over it. I don't know how anyone is expected to play this map. I have the same problem with Reel Stadium. While it's a little bigger and there are no pitfalls to drop into, the map is tiny, and you just never get a second to catch your breath.
Unless you roll Quad Tank, I guess.
Abridged on the other hand, is a semi-ok map. the bridge is long enough and there are enough cover points to keep yourself from getting instantly maimed, but the big problem I have with this map is the traffic. While you're running and gunning back and forth across the street, cars will occasionally drive through at a hundred miles an hour, absolutely shredding anyone in their path, including bosses!
While I have my gripes with the map design on more or less every level, those were the only big ones I had a problem with. On the reverse side of the coin, my favorite map is probably Grid Based Combat. Dank russian meme decorations aside, this map is actully really well thought out and fun for this kind of game mode. Small and simple, but with a lot of escape options, you rarely feel trapped in this map.
Here's some gameplay footage of the level, totally without permission from the uploader, sorry about that.
I think that about covers everything. It's a good wad, you should tottally check it out if you know how to mod Doom 2. and even if you don't, it's super simple, drag and drop, all handled by an external program. I'll link ya to some files and such so you can try it at home!
How to use GZDoom (And Zandronum, they work the same way as in the video)
Modern Doom engine: Needed to load Doom and Doom 2 mods.
https://zdoom.org/downloads Offline, can load most Doom mods.
https://zandronum.com/download Online, needed for some special mods.
Doom 2: the actual game! You need to find and copy the WAD file from the Steam folder.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2300/DOOM_II/
Reelism 3.1: Once you have GZDoom or Zandronum, just drag the .WAD file onto the .EXE to launch it!
http://thekinsie.com/reelism/