Mudman

 

Mudman | MUDMAN.WAD

eater29

Slaughtermaps are a genre unto their own in the boomer shooter scene. Most strongly associated with Doom (though maps have been made for other games,) they’re consistently popular with a sizeable portion of the community yet frequently misunderstood. We can probably trace the origins of the concept to The Plutonia Experiment’s super-secret map, though there are some earlier precursors as well. The basic idea revolves around large crowds of monsters, usually trash mobs, that must be managed, with heavy use of the upper-tier weapons like the BFG9000 to clear out a bunch of enemies in a short time, and enough ammo to keep your big guns fed. It’s a simple concept, but one that was clearly appealing to Doomworld member eater29, whose first release was the fantastic Mudman.

Mudman was built on a simple premise: to take advantage of Boom’s friction properties. As such, most of the level is covered in sticky, sucking mud and slime, brown and green; the brown stuff slows you down, the green stuff slows you down even more. What’s striking about the map is that it’s almost entirely a single open space, save for a network of caves to the west and the underground temple to the north. While most of it isn’t actually traversible by the myriad fliers that occupy the map, there are spots where they aren’t blocked by linedefs from just invading the area you’re in. Most of the level is beautifully naturalistic, with eater29 making heavy use of circular sectors to create a more natural-looking, half-rotted, swampy space with ruins and dead trees. And lots of monsters. Lots and lots of monsters — 1444 on normal difficulty!

The usual disclaimer: I played through this map using GMOTA 1.5.2, using Lord Blaz, as well as the Equippable Torch mod, and the Retro FX Dither shader. I didn’t set the sector light mode to “dark” because there wasn’t terribly any point.

Mudman starts off quietly enough, with you sitting in the stump of a dead tree. If you’re not running the map in the MBF21 compatibility level, you won’t be able to progress, and it took me a bit to figure out how to make GZDoom use that complevel as there doesn’t seem to be a way to select it in the options despite the source port supporting it. Either way, once you get the map started, right away it becomes clear that this won’t be easy. Hordes of cacodemons will make your life hell as you trudge through the muck; ducking into the small cave nearby only puts you in the path of imps and other baddies, but if you can clear them you’ll have a relatively safe place to deal with the cacos coming in from all sides. The core of the map is a large open space that thankfully is relatively sedate on normal; there are three switches, each requiring a key to unlock. You should already have one when you get here, but there’s two more to grab, each at the end of two paths on either side of this area.

The west side is shorter, and generally easier with a few sharp spikes: it’s a more mountainous area eventually leading you into a cave network. Here, monsters enter the playable space via vine-covered tunnels; the first few encounters aren’t too troublesome, but there are three incredibly nasty moments to be dealt with here, the first two being done in any order: one in which hordes of imps and revenants come at you in a confined space, one where arch-viles preside over a dark cavern with little safe cover all the while more enemies pour in, and the finale, a medium-sized open space where a bunch of hell knights and cybies come in to take out their frustrations on you.

The east side in contrast is longer, linear, and with a more consistent difficulty curve. It’ll take you through a series of muddy ruins and the fragmented remains of an enormous dead tree, before culminating in a large fight with multiple cyberdemons, cacos, and other assholes in a big open space. (I got lucky and got kicked back out of the arena and used the opportunity to let them fight it out while I took care of the errant caco.)

Once you have all three keys, you can tackle the map’s finale, but there’s an optional thing you can do first, if you’re brave: in a secret area in the western cave, you can press a triple-locked switch that reveals a shootable switch on the other side of the cave. Shooting it will reveal a tunnel leading to the secret bonus arena. In here is the BFG, and you’ll need it for the hordes of hell knights, cacos, cyberdemons and God knows what else. It’s a desperate crush of monster flesh against you and you’ll likely use up most of the ammo and megaspheres laying around.

The finale is a lot more straightforward; if anything, with the BFG it’s the easiest part of the map. A cyberdemon squad in the antechamber might be a bit of a sticking point, but once you’re past that the final fight is easy, with a lot of room to run around and lots of cover from the archies and cybies who teleport in with designs on blowing you up.

Mudman is a wonderful map. It’s hard as nails, especially if you’re playing with GMOTA like me, but in all honesty it might serve as an intermediate — perhaps even entry level — slaughter map. It’s a beautiful work of art from an up-and-coming author who’s already got a few more maps under their belt (including one in the recent Doom 2 In City Only project.) While I don’t think Mudman is going to change any minds about slaughter maps, I hope to see more of this kind of approach to naturalism in the future.

 

 

 

 

get it on /idgames

 

-june❤

 

It used to be that everyone you'd see was so well scrubbed
Everything's different now, ever since the monsters of mud