ONEMANDOOM: WAD Reviews: Europa 2 (EAEURO02.WAD)

EUROPA 2

by Erik Alm

2001 appeared to have been a pretty formative year for Erik. Alm made five submissions for Sam Woodman's One Week Mapping Contest, demonstrating an esoteric taste that spanned "short and sweet" to large-scale challenges informed by Hell Revealed. It also marked the debut of his Europa series. The first entry was a massive labyrinth that mixed his stiff encounter design with a tangled layout and key sidequest that evoked shades of 1995. This entry - the second - closes out 2001 on a high note that sees a drastic change of style away from some of his less user-friendly design decisions. EAEURO02 is a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in a Boom-compatible port. As is the case with EAGOTH1 and EAGOTH2, you need to play this with the Gothic DeathMatch II texture pack.

There is no unambiguous story link between this adventure and the previous one but it isn't much of a stretch to assume that it is another assault on the Doomed moonbase. Following your successful "reconnaissance" mission, which confirmed the strength of the interlopers, you are given an actual squad with which to carry out the mission. Things are looking way more promising up until the imposing but clueless leader, Doomboy, alerts the resident goat-men. The soldiers are torn to shreds, leaving you to sort the mess out alone. Good thing that an entire army's worth of gear teleported down with them.

I ought to dash your hopes lest you randomly coast to this PWAD riding some kind of Scythe. Europa 2 points the way toward the enormous scale of "Fire and Ice" and while it isn't quite so unforgiving the differences will be indiscernible for folks looking for Alm's vignette-style level design. There are big fights and big prizes. The outdoor gangway that dominates the map's eastern half features, among other things, a ridiculous amount of Hell nobles to be followed up later with an enormous wave of demons. Arch-viles lurk with exacting purpose and there's at least one moment where you're confronted by a huge monster closet reveal. If you're more interested in the orthogonal, cavernous castle architecture then try a lower difficulty level. ITYTD / HNTR has something like 1/5 of UV's monster count, the tradeoff involving proportionally less ammo.

The first moments of EAEURO02 lead you to believe that it will be similar in spirit to its predecessor. You have your pick of six different teleport destinations but it becomes abundantly clear after making the jump that Alm has engineered each starting point for player survivability. Most of the landing pads have a healthy amount of supplies including, potentially, an invul sphere. The least helpful location starts you off with the BFG but, hey, it's the big freakin' gun! You can explore and fight through the rest of the level at your leisure, slowly opening up the layout and rooting out the heavily entrenched opposition. You still have a quest for the keys, but it's the mandatory pursuit of all six. Erik abandoned the potentially frustrating nine skull sidequest. In its place is the northwestern wing, which has six different pens of goodies. Which one you get depends on your chosen starting area.

Europa 2 still has a sprawling layout but Alm has moved away from chaining disparate areas together by way of cramped hallways. Most of its playing spaces consist of broad thoroughfares and the vast majority of its areas are open-air. In this it bears a lot of resemblance to Chris Couleur's work from Eternal Doom. Boom's elevated limits allow Erik more freedom to interconnect the individual segments with windows, both midtexture and otherwise. This is especially true given that he has placed a handful of large, freestanding structures within these zones. Some are small keeps unto themselves. One of them even has its own battlements!

My comparisons to ETERNAL are not idle. All of the combat and carnage that you endure stretches across a formidable switch hunt that sends you back and forth through the sprawling fortress grounds. It's one thing to realize that the easternmost floodgates have opened, ushering in a new wave of Hellspawn and opening up another battleground between good and evil. It's another when you realize that the wing ultimately sends you back to the northwesternmost point (via teleporter, thankfully) and the exit proper. It's a good thing that Doomguy is so freakin' fast because you have a lot of ground to cover and the mental map may not be so strong when you're being constantly hounded by infernal interference.

It's interesting to see the "evolution" of Alm's slaughter game given how absolutely beefy and unforgiving the lineage began with his contributions to ONEWEEK. It's been a long time since I've played Hell Revealed but the sheer insanity of "The 24 Cyber Spirits" paints with the same sort of broad brush but taken to new excesses. Europa 1 features a similar sort of sprawling layout and its tight, connecting corridors suggest the same sort of congestion that features in ONEWEEK's connective tissue but on a smaller scale. Its larger areas, as before, feature centerpiece battles that range from fun blasts to grueling invasions while dialing back on the excessive meat.

Europa 2, then, makes some changes in the execution of its layout and architecture. The broader runways move toward what we now recognize as the "modern" emphasis on combat which champions maneuverability amidst chaos over dutifully seeking architectural cover. This opens the way for bigger scale fights and a greater feeling of exposure, of course, but many Doomheads have found this style preferable. Alm's open-air setting doubles down on the player paranoia and rewards attentiveness by shutting hitscanner zombies out so you won't be instantly punished for simply being out in the open. Apart from a handful of Spiderdemons, of course.

This is a conspicuously chunky level but not in the same way that makes "Cyber Spirits" so grueling. The dangerous popcorn enemies are entirely absent on HMP and UV and barely present on the lowest tiers. Contrast against a relative wealth of commandos and shotgun guys in Europa 1. Much of the body count here is dedicated toward imps, demons, Hell nobles, and cacodemons. The rest appear, of course, but there's a predilection in EAEURO02 toward the use of simple attack patterns. It also feels less dickish in its encounters and traps. EAEURO01 was more blunt in its delivery of sucker punches. It's also nice to be able to back out into a wide open space that you can sort of re-approach vs. some of Europa 1's choke points, like the elevator down into its northwest quadrant.

The map is a fair bit far from Scythe's "cute" level design not only in size but also in having plenty of quirks that keep it from feeling streamlined in a mostly modern sense. The mirrored buildings on the eastern end of the promenade are a bit unwieldy with their Cyberdemons and corner-pockets of revenants. It may be difficult to make a tactical approach toward the latter, too, when you're under assault from the water-bound step pyramid. The fortress and its four arch-vile towers present another "clunky" moment. Not from the area-denial, mind you, but in visiting the small turrets in order to complete the keep's portion of the far-reaching switch hunt.

In playing these earliest morsels of Alm's authorial career I am bearing witness to a broader variety of authorial preferences than one might expect given the enormous legacy and resulting weight of his Scythe series. The larger, complex levels represented in works like Europa 2 are most interesting to me, of course. They feature a substantial area to explore, much of which is left to the player's design. There are a proportional number of switches to find, too, which drive the player to pour over every inch of Erik's microcosms. It would be a shame to miss hitting a button while you're shooting and scooting to the delightful tune of Final Fantasy VI's "The Devil's Lab".

Combat is also a constant focus with his 2001-era style ranging from creative fights to a complete lack of subtlety in those instances where the player must fend off an encroaching army. I appreciate both sides and the quietude in between, especially since Alm's encounter design showcases one of the true if largely accidental geniuses of Doom: battles serving as puzzles with dynamic elements. There is rarely a simple major component between any of these sprawling adventures, whether it's navigating their sprawling layouts or surviving the more carefully engineered sometimes-slaughter scenarios.

I like the direction of Europa 2. The Gothic slaughter playground has a good-natured edge to it and it's great to get away from the more cramped connective tissue that dominated "24 Cyber Spirits" and EAEURO01. I'm even more interested in seeing where Erik takes things with the third iteration given him namedropping Vrack. It's still a bit much for anyone looking to relive the magic of Scythe, but it's nice to see how Alm throttles down the difficulty. Go ahead - give it a shot. Fans of Coleur's work in Eternal Doom ought to take note as well.