007: License to Spell DooM (007LTSD.WAD)

Stephen Clark was something of a self-appointed vanilla advocate, a dude believed that OG Doom and Doom II were capable of great things that could close some of the gap between them and Quake and subsequent FPS games. He made Operation: Lightning, a Doom II episode that deliberately evoked Quake II with its dropships and had carefully arranged vanilla sector machinery to create effects like exploding reactors, flooding vessels, and collapsing bases. Then he took his lessons learned and authored Fragport, a 2001 "21st Century Doom 2 Episode" that was actually a megaWAD and which toned down some of OP-LITE2's worst excesses. Then he pushed Heretic into uncomfortably ingenious places with the Shadowcaster episode in 2002. This is also the year where he learned to stop worrying and love the ZDoom. Enter 007: License to Spell DooM, an E4 replacement for The Ultimate Doom.

You're Jody Russell, the man with the blood on his hands, a one-man wrecking crew who singlehandedly stiff-armed Satan's space-based seizure of Fragport. Three years later, you were part of an elite strike force sent in to discover why a planet had become blanketed with errant electrical storms. Spoiler alert: it was demons. That's Kill Crazy: 2, Vast Legions of Hell: 0. With Pandemonium licking its wounds, you've been reduced to covert ops against human-on-human violence. Unfortunately, some dorks who call themselves Master Implicators of Sinister SWAT and International Level Espionage (MISSILE) have opened contact with the forces of darkness and are now powering their operations with infernal energies, not to mention featuring demons as station personnel. The offal organization forces their issue by holding the Earth at ransom, threatening to destroy cities one by one with nuclear weapons until they are paid an exorbitant sum. Being the operative with the most experience in confounding Carcerian crises ("there are old demonologists, and there are bold demonologists..."), you are the shoe-in pick for this affair.

007: License to Spell Doom feels like Clark cut loose with all of the things that he would have liked to do in vanilla, but couldn't, with a heaping spoonful of things that must have been a pain in the ass to do through painstakingly sequenced linedefs. You will be treated to swimming (often through submerged tunnels), fumbling through script-imposed darkness, tons o' midtexture raised floors, self-destruct timers (like, five of them not counting the security force countdown in E4M3), destructible walls, copious amount of Quake II-esque mission objectives, ambient noises, story-expounding cutscenes, and a lava-flood platforming extravaganza.

All of this works. It's functional. You will get the opportunity to shoot one barrel, thereby unleashing a flood of explosive containers onto a Baron police force, afterward detonating them for the ultimate getaway distraction. Plenty of mission objectives involve shutting down plant equipment or otherwise manipulating it into some sort of catastrophic lineup. Admittedly, a lot of this boils down to Quake-esque "sequence complete" button-pushing but sometimes it's a little more creative. Like, throwing a dead body into an open-air vat of... liquid helium. Not to bag on the scientific accuracy of a game with demons from Hell, but Clark has a few basic facts about how superconductors are actually cooled, like the medium and its temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin, but then throws the rest of thermodynamics into the wind. I think that the specificity of what was divulged in this little monologue caught me off-guard. A Facebook Facts-grade handling of the information is in keeping with how Clark has also written about the reactors and, I suppose, Ian Fleming stories from which this episode gets its name.

Anyway, Clark has you carefully scripted to go through the motions of a secret-agent badass, but there are situations where this scripting gets in the way of its execution. The aforementioned barrel distraction occurs at the climax of E4M5. You have a squadron of Barons in an enclosed room, politely asking you to lay down your weapons and comply and patiently awaiting your response. You're prevented from escaping by an impassable line that encloses them and also keeps you from just scarpering out the exit chute. The intent I guess is not that you need the distraction to escape but to set the timer to a shorter duration. Even after you cause the "distraction", which triggers the removal of the impassable lines, you are forced into leaving by way of the conveyor chute by an arbitrary blocking line across the door that you came in from. In practice, this is the sort of situation that would have been better rendered as a cutscene or left alone entirely.

Some things are just clumsy sequences that are at odds with the daring action narrative. The final segment of E4M6 is just too dark. I can about handle the light level at the beginning of E4M8; E4M6 is about as inky as the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It's wholly unnecessary to also have monster roadblocks between you and the exit. I'm also not fond of the smashy-smashy scavenger hunt that occurs during the 15 minute countdown in E4M8. You are under the gun to prevent Fragport from getting nuked and have no clear path to the launch pad, except knowing that you need a green key. Clark pads out the action by requiring you to smash up the equipment in their experimental labs for no purpose other than to destroy MISSILE's weird science. This arbitrarily results in the yellow door going open, somewhere behind which you will find the green key. I disliked this one because I missed a panel somewhere and couldn't locate it on my first run against the timer.

Relatively speaking, though, these are minor sins against the two soft-locks that the player comes up against in E4M3, "Logistics Complex". The player has two opportunities to put the game in an unwinnable condition. The northwest warehouse has a keycard that's stuck behind a laser barrier. The solution is to pull the power conduit for the main generator in the basement, which gives you 15 seconds of no power in the building before the backup generator takes the load. The problem is that Mr. Russell automatically grabs the conduit once you get near it, starting the sequence with no warning, and there's no way to repeat the action. The central warehouse has an identical situation except the power is out when you arrive. To be fair, the player is warned ahead of time to check out the security station before you return power, but it's baffling that this sort of situation was allowed to exist. Clark was so protective of his scripting that the player can't even enter the blacked-out warehouse until after they've grabbed the fuse from the first one.

I accept that all of this is the cost of doing business in pushing boundaries with scripting in ZDoom. For all of my complaining, Clark did a thorough job in proofing his scenarios. Sure, it would have been more tidy to kill the player rather than have soft-locks, but I imagine that the author found it hard to justify doing so based on what Russell is doing in that particular moment. The only way I can make it work in my head is to have some security protocol that runs when the warehouse powers back up, and locking the player in by slamming the door shut when the coupling is grabbed. With the "Sludge Refinery" distraction, I am astounded to realize that it is basically a fully functional albeit clumsy quick-time event that puts the player at the reigns of a cutscene. I don't think that it's the sort of thing that would elevate PWADs as a whole but I'm glad that Clark did it.

Stephen did all of these scripting things but didn't really tinker much with the mechanics of Doom. He reduced the max ammo available to the player, but I didn't find this to be a huge loss. Lost souls have had their health doubled in order to make them "a threat". More like a godawful ammo sponge that you should take a chainsaw too. If you want to make lost souls dangerous then you ought to take inspiration from Doom 64. Clark adds one new monster, the "enhanced" green demon. I believe that these replace spectres in the game. It's something like three times as healthy as a demon and moves and attacks faster. These things suck to run into as they are even worse ammo sponges due to how quickly they move. You can fairly reliably chainsaw them too, though, so at least you can make up ammo losses when you're not under duress. About the most fun I had with the green demon was when I got it to infight something like a Baron.

TUD also uses... stealth monsters, which I'm surprised to find out were created for DOSDoom and are thus not some sort of ZDoom-exclusive feature. Stealth beasties are invisible when they are idle or moving around so your first glimpse of them typically happens when they attack. I will entertain that there are tasteful uses for stealth monsters but 007: License to Spell Doom uses every available stealth version, which explains why lost soul versions don't appear. (I guess they weren't part of Andy Baker's implementation.) This is also probably the answer as to why the enhanced, green demons don't show up in stealth form. All this time, I thought that "stealth" was some kind of a flag, but they are separate entities. Thank GOD.

Stealth monsters aside, the combat is... understated for Clark, if you think about the hordes of monsters he formula-fed into the playing areas of Fragport. You'll still have to put up with him reseeding previously explored areas once you hit major progression points, but--excepting the hub of E4M7 ("Geothermal Plant")--they're smaller closets or spawns lying in ambush. More worryingly, 007LTSD has a LOT of hitscanners. This isn't an issue in and of itself (see: Knee Deep in the Dead), but it's a groan-inducing cocktail when combined with stealth monsters, especially shotgun guys. Looking back at the available health in DoomWiki I can see that there are plenty of healing items to be had in these maps. In practice, though, I felt like there were long stretches where I was just barely getting by. 

I think that the episode largely benefits from a slower, tactical approach for all of these reasons. Clark appears to acknowledge this in his use of timers to force the player into acting in haste, specifically the longer timers in E4M3 and E4M8. I'm a naturally impatient player so I generally struggle with tamping down my worst impulses unless I'm browbeaten into it (re: Bloodstain). This may be a good part of the reason why I struggled with health management in the midst of so many freakin' former humans. So, my advice is: play it like you're a secret agent and not, say, John Matrix. Your life absolutely depends on it.

In case one of these scenarios appeals to you but you can't see yourself playing through the whole episode, good news! 007: License to Spell Doom is absolutely pistol-start friendly. The early levels may be awhile before you get your whole kit but once you get to E4M6 Clark starts you out in a forest with a plasma gun, a rocket launcher, and ammo growing on trees. Which figures, since your first order of business involves fighting two Cyberdemons poised as auto-defense turrets. Getting guns is just as straightforward in E4M7 and E4M8. Of course, it would definitely be helpful to know where the secrets are, especially those ammo caches in E4M7.

If you were hoping to hear some DoomCute rendition of the "James Bond Theme" theme or maybe "Theme from Mission Impossible", well,  007: License to Spell Doom doesn't have any new music. In fact, it purposefully disincludes ANY music. Clark insists that it ruins the atmosphere, and he does have a bunch of ambient noises to try to build in player immersion. Unfortunately, the plodding pacing of its tactical combat--weighed down by reams of tech panels staffed by hitscanners and stealth monsters--determines the atmosphere more than any bit of music ever could. You could get away with using "Sinister" for pretty much any of these levels on UV and it would match the pacing pretty well. Well, maybe not E4M1.

"But, wait!" I hear you say. "Where are all the mazes and bizarre puzzles? It can't be a Stephen Clark mapset without those!" The spirit of mazes hasn't exactly left TUD's work, but a lot of the feeling has been offloaded on areas with more complex three-dimensional spaces. These sorts of structures come into full force in E4M4 and then peak with E4M6's Blue Zone, which at its peak has three floors stacked on top of each other. If you're really craving mazes and manikins, though, then you'll find that Clark's less lauded design tropes have been smuggled off into E4M9, "Dark Shrine". 

E4M9 is the more traditionally-textured E4 level, bedecked in green marble and wood and dark metal. It has voodoo dolls just sitting out in the open as play hazards as well as featuring into three puzzles that must be done in order to acquire the green skull key. If you've played Shadowcaster then you ought to have a good idea of what you will have to do. Each of these scenarios is a potential soft-lock situation as you have to shove the voodoo doll / "manikin" while under the protection of an invul sphere. If you do it wrong or blank out and run out of powerup time, then you'll have to quit and try again. As far as mazes go, I really liked the fogged catacombs in the northeast part of the map. It's a fun take on a tired trope as the fog makes the otherwise simple layout compelling in its navigation, combat, and atmosphere.

Clark is an interesting case as a Doom author because the first part of his career was spent making "21st century" PWADs that worked hard to mimic features in post-Doom FPS games... in vanilla... only to move on to ZDoom once he had 1) seen a good portion of its features, post-Shadowcaster, and 2) decided that he had pushed the .EXE as far as he could. To be fair, when it came to aping "immersive" features from other games, he pretty much had. 007: License to Spell Doom showcases a lot of components that were similarly used in Assault on Tei Tenga, like cutscenes and scripted events. It's still a traditionally-paced episode in one fundamental fashion. Unlike TEITENGA and Hell Factory, 007LTSD neglects to make use of a hub system.

I think that the way in which Clark integrated the scripting across the entire episode makes it worth the playthrough. It won't win any aesthetic awards but this is focusing on the wrong thing. Looking back at all the ZDoom maps that I've reviewed between 1999 to 2002 (I have yet to play through Dark 7 but hope to do so eventually!), none of them really stand out in terms of great-looking architecture. Slopes was a bit of a game-changer in 2001, with Sin City looking great through its elegant lighting, texturing, and sloped architecture, but 2002 is just a brutal year to compete with in visuals. This is the same Top 10 list with freakin' Alien Vendetta and Caverns of Darkness, which isn't meant to downplay how nice the others, like CH Retro Episode or 2002: A Doom Odyssey, look.

Granted, TUD starts things off on pretty much the worst possible foot with E4M1, the so-plain-that-it's-ugly-as-sin "Outpost 3J". In subsequent levels, Clark's use of midtexture floors and slopes sands off the rough edges of his environmental design while still being recognizable as Stephen's brand of DoomCute pseudo-realism. The look of the maps is dominated by an industrial-tech aesthetic that is rendered through OG Doom textures. There are so many shiny silver pipes and midtexture grating platforms and staircases and DoomCute tech centers that the bases end up looking a bit too clean. Apparently, this was meant to evoke the appearance of Quake II and, interestingly enough, SiN. I haven't seen SiN mentioned much within the Doom community. I have no idea whether the scenes here echo its sort of industrial areas. Ni'mRoD would be the closest comparison to something that used an advanced source port and I think that it more successfully mines the Quake II look in building structures and grimy industry (as do Hell Factory and DooM: Resurrection).

Personally, my favorite maps to look at in this set are E4M4 and E4M9, which crib a bit from Knee Deep in the Dead and Thy Flesh Consumed, respectively, with an honorable mention to E4M5's northeast room. For some reason my brain gleans this as belonging distinctly to Knee Deep in the Dead but from what I can tell it's actually a motif that I first saw in Fava Beans's E1M7. If anyone can think of other instances of this particular architectural style then please let me know. I'm curious as to why it has entered into my conscience as something indelibly Phobosian. Did I just feel Birkel's architecture THAT strongly?

Back in 2003, only a year after Clark had published this, Cyb's main critique of the set is that its scripting was "a little dodgy". Now that we're something like 22 years in the future (almost to the day!) I would describe it as "invasive". I have heard some authors critique combat in a PWAD as feeling more like the PWAD is playing the player than the other way around. At its clumsiest, this is exactly what 007: License to Spell Doom feels like, instead of with scripting instead of encounter design. If you want to truly enjoy Clark's Ultimate Episode then you will need to be able to surrender your control to the author. And, I dunno, maybe bump the difficulty down to HMP. There'll be plenty of time to die another day.

007: LICENSE TO SPELL DOOM

by Stephen "The Ultimate DooMer" Clark

Outpost 3J

E4M1

The first part of this level is pretty much every outdoor Clark level that I've ever played, but with slopes! There is nothing particularly engaging about the long, slow canyon crawl with the pistol. The sheer number of imps and demons, when combined with the open area and limited armament, makes for dull combat. I'll grant that the slopes add a lot of much-needed character to Stephen's otherwise plain level geometry. The outpost itself is a bite-sized portion of, again, every paramilitary compound that I've seen from Stephen. The bad guys power up the laser grid, though, and you are forced to look for a side-entrance. There's a neat action / adventure key item bit where you need to find an item capable of digging through earth. I imagine this is a bit of where the "over-scripting" complaints come from, however, as you walk past the chainsaw's location and must come to the place where you need it before it's made available for pickup. This is sort of similar to the dynamite since the cavern that leads to the underwater segment only opens after visiting the plunger. It feels slightly less arbitrary there, though, since it's sort of masked as a monster closet. If you like the limited cave tunnel segment then I strongly recommend that you give Tuxlar's You Dig a try. The preponderance of rounded right angles in the caverns is unfortunate for an author who tries to immerse the player, if expected. It isn't until you break through to the base that you're finally free of the pistol with some desperately needed chaingun pickups. The outpost segment makes decent use of ZDoom's midtexture bridge capability in order to make a more believable series of warehouses. You can also see more of the author's desire to incorporate Duke Nukem 3D elements with the destructible consoles in the northeast computer room.

E4M2

Transit System

The railway system is a nice change of scenery from what has felt like ages of plain, outdoor Clark levels. It definitely fits the "influenced by...Half-Life" bill. Specifically, it's structured like those levels where you have to ride a rail cart through a tunnel that is jam-packed with those pesky marines. There's no cart, though, and you have little need to walk alongside the electrified rail as you fight your way through the industrial tunnels. The ambient mechanical noise definitely helps to sell the atmosphere. To me, "Transit" feels like it's more densely-packed than it actually is after considering the breadth of the tunnel system. I think that part of this is because of the numerous cramped, industrial tunnels and multiple instances of room-over-room stuff. There's an early segment where you cross through multiple tiers of a pipe chase and a later one with a warehouse underneath an apparent control room. It also helps that most of the stations have makeshift barricades that used to be staffed by humans but are now fortified by zombies and imps. Not to downplay the importance of demon shock troopers, of course. When you are assaulting the entrenched opposition, the combat is at its best. Trying to balance attention between the approaching monsters and the long-ranged beasties confined to the skull walls is as dynamic as this level gets. Because of this, the two stations near the heart of the level - the one with the red key door and the other with the elevator to the offices - are standouts. The rest is plain corridor-shooting and room-clearing with OG Doom's unintimidating bestiary. At its worst, you are running up and chainsawing the HP-inflated lost souls in a perfunctorily unsatisfying manner. The quest for the ten or so explosive triggers is the true meat of this map and leads you through most of the level's special features. This includes some deep-water flooded store rooms, a ZDoomified fork-lift, an exploding pipe, and - of course - an obligatory minor air duct maze. If you find the computer area map then half the work is done as there is no mistaking the geometric shape of the plungers on the automap. As far as scripting complaints go, the player cannot vault over the railing into the deep water area until after you climb up the ladder from the other side. This is even more of an arbitrary barrier to exploration than the chainsaw path in E4M1.

Dark Shrine

E4M9

This is the obligatory Hell level in the same way that Fragport had a single sojourn to infernal depths with its MAP24 ("Balanced Chaos"). It's also a fusion of Doom and some of the aspects of Clark's Shadowcaster. The ambient noises are cribbed from both Heretic and Hexen and definitely help to cement "Dark Shrine"'s otherworldly atmosphere. It also has a puzzle gauntlet in order to acquire the green key which duplicates aspects of SHADOW's voodoo doll / exploding pod puzzles. If you haven't experienced this mechanic then, well, they each involve grabbing an invul sphere and then pushing a "manikin" around. Be sure to save ahead of your attempts. I didn't find them difficult but YMMV, especially the doll bridge. The map has some cool scenes, like the vast cavern that houses the green skull. The northwestern hall off the "manikin" hub has a great wood and metal look. Clark has smeared a lot of fog over some of both more and less interesting areas. If there's blood on the floor then expect an accompanying red haze. I think that the effect detracts from some areas but it's pretty much the only thing that makes the unfinished basement area to the northeast work. It's interesting to see Stephen take bold, new directions on maze craft. It's similar in spirit to "Blackout!" (Operation: Lightning's MAP07) in that the confounding factor is the player's visibility. Here, though, the author eschews eye strain for the surprise factor of monsters appearing to pop out of the fog. It isn't nearly as frustrating and it adds quite a bit of surprise to the lost soul attacks! Clark also abuses the foggy haze to secretly re-seed the basement with beasties as you tentatively explore it. This works a bit better thematically, with the feeling that monsters are literally manifesting from the mist. It's somewhat disappointing that the secret lab that's hidden behind the dark shrine is a fairly humdrum techbase facility. I dunno what I was really expecting, though. Maybe the infernal / tech mix that Chris Lutz showed off in Inferno, SubP:AR, and Caverns of Darkness? In any case both it and its reward are underwhelming and the player character seems just as bemused at the secrecy surrounding the BFG. You do get a classic setup for its powers against a spread of cacodemons, though. "Dark Shrine" also marks the third level with a deep water navigation sequence. The blood trench is evocative of similar constructions glimpsed in Doom II's "Courtyard" (MAP18) and its marble / blood maze ilk. It in turn is suggestive of the walled-off portions of Hell seen in OG Doom's "House of Pain" (E3M4). Clark obviously intended to add some depth to these glorified sewer / air duct sections. The net impact still results with the player trudging through narrow corridors and pouncing on monsters. Here, as with E4M2, the beasties are lost souls. Stephen intended to make them more dangerous by boosting their health but the change only underscores the superficiality of Clark's encounter design. There is at least something here in how their inflated health eats up your dwindling enviro suit timer.

E4M3

Logistics Complex

It's back to the outdoor facility look. Some elements here are clearly descended from Fragport, like the copy-and-pasted cranes from "Freight Depot" and "Dockside". In fact, the spirit of the latter is strongly reflected in "Complex", as they both send the player strolling among a bunch of warehouse-type buildings. They even share similar railway annexes and, understandably, boats for the player to climb on. While Clark has made pains to better define the realism of his level geometry, however, he clearly has no issue with the ridiculous tower-like boats. The fog makes an appearance once you're above ground and, thanks to the subdued outside monster placement, contributes to a haunted feeling during your initial foray. The relative peace is juxtaposed against a periodic klaxon that sounds every minute to inform you of an incoming security force. You're against a sort of soft time limit but it's not game over if you can't clear the level before backup arrives. In fact, it's perfectly possible for quasi-resourceful players to eliminate all opposition. The task will be far simpler if you obtained the BFG from the secret level and carried it forward since the security force is a horde of Barons. The alternative is entirely befitting of Clark's Mission: Impossible stylings, however. It will help immensely if you can find the plasma gun. After that you'll have to blast the goat men with what limited cell ammo you can carry, retreat to grab some more, and then attack again. There are two neat bits in here involving power to warehouses that are nonetheless clumsily executed as messing up either one will result in a soft lock. Clark did not deign to warn players when they are triggering a puzzle that only has a one-time, evaporative state. One of the buildings has a laser shield-bound key in its information center. You can grab a fuse in the basement to cut power off, thus deactivating the field, with the backup generator kicking in fifteen seconds later. There's no way to repeat this effect, so you're SOL if you don't make the logical leap and make it back in time. Another warehouse must be snuck into as it starts out with no power though. If you make it down into its basement and slap the fuse obtained from the first-mentioned warehouse in place before grabbing the initially available key in the information center then, well, you will be shut out forever. To be fair, Clark explicitly warns you about this through subtitles when you enter the warehouse.

Phobos Island

E4M4

"Island" is a bit of a misnomer. I mean, I was expecting more rugged wilderness or something. This is more of a floating fortress. The main compound is tightly packed with corridors and rooms that evoke Knee Deep in the Dead's various motifs. I see homages to "Nuclear Station" (fitting given that this level's climax involves a reactor), "Command Control", and "Computer Station", some more strongly than others. This gives it a very comfy feel when juxtaposed with Clark's more realistic / functional architecture. The layout feels like an obstacle course, particularly the eastern side which starts out early with its oblique atrium. It isn't exactly challenging to move around in but the positioning of the numerous lifts and steep staircases felt unusually cumbersome. I believe that we are conditioned into believing that having the high ground confers an innate advantage but here it generally leads to monsters gathering at the foot of the ledge, making them kind of a pain in the ass to shoot. The combat is very corridor shooter and tactical.  There is one fun pitched fight around the green key as it drops you into the middle of an infernal love-in that you can marshal into infighting. Clark also introduces the "enhanced demon", a green fellow who is faster and far more durable than the classic model, at least three times as much. They aren't very fun to fight. Their very nature makes them ammo sponges and the chainsaw is just as reliable against them as it is versus the lost souls. The big finale in this level is a self-destruct sequence where you trigger some kind of nuclear accident. Hopefully you did your secret organization proud in scouting the perimeter so that you can find your escape... boat. Otherwise, I'm not sure how Clark expected you to know where to cram the power cell that you snag as you run out. It'll be rough figuring it out on the fly given how thickly guarded your escape routes are.

E4M5

Sludge Refinery

If the previous level was about homages to Phobos then, well, this is more of an ode to industrial functionality. There are tons o' huge pipes, vats, and other trimmings familiar to 007 like the obligatory tram station and the dockyards. The heart of this map is a multi-tier series of catwalks over a huge slime vat. It looks nice and realistic, though it isn't much fun to fight the cacodemons that are released into the space as you progress. My favorite room is the northeastern nukage area, which reminds me of Fava Beans's E1M7 ("Titan Anomaly"). It's a cool room, but I couldn't really enjoy the combat in it as it was jam-packed with hellspawn, so much so that I felt justified in doing the door trick to provoke infighting. "Refinery" has a more concrete series of objectives than some of the previous missions. You are systematically shutting down the sludge factory, one piece of machinery at a time. You may have to hunt for a key... or two. I feel like I missed something with the green marine who was locked up with the red key card. Russell's monologue made it sound like he was a fellow operative who got stuck in the Refinery. Was there some message like a distress signal that I missed out on? The clumsiest scripted moment in this map is a showdown with the Barons after you place the detonators. You're meant to sort of duck between the pipes so that you can take a shot at the conspicuous cache of barrels, triggering an avalanche that you can then detonate. You can't actually leave the room until you do as you are forced into the corner by invisible lines. Even when you manage this, you can't flee up the staircase you came from as the door is also invisibly blocked. Clark's only acceptable egress is out via the conveyor belt and into the ocean. I appreciate the desire to engineer a daring escape, but it didn't feel very intuitive. In ZDoom news, this level marks the first appearance of... stealth monsters! I can hardly contain my joy.

Communications Facility

E4M6

This map's ancestry is best traced back to Operation: Lightning. The majority of the level's layout, with its sprawling corridors and elevators, evokes its MAP10 ("Habitation Decks"), while the final segment bafflingly utilizes the more or less total darkness gimmick of its MAP07 ("Blackout!"). The layout isn't difficult to navigate except for the intentional 3D maziness of areas like the Blue Zone. Clark prepares you for what's going to happen with a few midtexture rooms-over-rooms but the Blue Zone is on a whole other level. I like the way that this level starts out. It firmly presses the plasma rifle and rocket launcher into your hands, gives you plenty of ammo, and then tells you to take down two "auto turrets" (Cyberdemons hiding in the pitch black). Secret Agents might take awhile in order to find the chaingun but it's very up front with your equipment. If I have one complaint about the combat it's that it doesn't feel like there's enough health for the 400-some monsters that you'll have to fight. I don't like the way that the level ends. Once you shut down the reactor, all of the lighting in the level goes pitch black, with emergency backup power illuminating only the doors and elevators. It could be worse, I suppose; you could have to beat a reactor self destruct sequence in the dark. At the very least, you won't be trying to EXPLORE the level in shadow and can rely on the automap to get your bearings. You'll have more than a few monsters between the reactor room and the exit, however, making it a long walk with no health.

E4M7

Geothermal Plant

Well, if by geothermal, you mean straight from Hell. This is a big red rock cavern level. It looks okay but the best-looking cave segment, not counting the spectacle of the central area and its huge network of catwalk-connected pillars, is restricted to a secret annex in the northwest part of the level. Everything else is basically Clark's techno-industrial style but with funny, irregular red walls. Including the mess hall. The tram station is the major holdout, which sort of makes sense since it's a contiguous part of the techbase infrastructure. It sticks out like a sore thumb, though, and between its copy-pasted look, initially ineffective zombiman guards, and usually holding a key (the blue one in E4M4, E4M5, and here in E4M7), it's beginning to feel bemusingly DoomCute. This level has some meaty combat with at least one big wave o' Barons unleashed into the central area. I appreciate that Clark is being more up front about throwing all of the weapons your way at the beginning of the map, even if you do have to muscle your way through the imps on the catwalks. The plethora of rockets and cell ammo, particularly if you find the secret ammo caches, helps with the chunkier monsters. I was slightly miffed at seeing a few stealth Barons (on principle, I guess), but Clark is so accommodating about their inclusion that I can't possibly be mad about it. My two major frustrations with this map were, first, the explosives required to blow up the furnace. It couldn't be in some kind of armory? All you get is a cryptic "secret floor hatches have been revealed" and it's up to you to figure out exactly where they opened up. I refused to consider that they could be up in the spires found at the beginning of the level. Then I took a closer look at the automap and saw that there was a tiny square in the center of each column. The other frustration is, well, the exit linedef in this level is marked as impassable. This wasn't an issue back when Clark made the level and it isn't an issue with the current version of GZDoom as of this writing. The last version of ZDoom and the GZDoom rev that I had back in 2022, however, which are now something like 7 to 8 years out of date, break this by prioritizing the impassable flag. At least, I THINK that's what's going on. The bottom line is, make sure you're playing in a recent revision of GZDoom!

Centre of Operations

E4M8

This is pretty much 007LTSD in a nutshell, with a few added gimmicks. The first is a flooding section that Clark probably wanted to do ever since OP-LITE2's vat segment in MAP11. Except, it's an extended staircase platforming segment over rising lava and Doom's slippery inertia will probably have you plummeting to your death more than once. After that there is a "turn on the power" bit but the maintenance room is about the ideal level of pitch black. I appreciate the purple line, which--should you choose to follow it--directs you toward your starting weapons kit. (And the replacement power coupling.) Clark has included not one, but two timers in this map. The first is a 15 minute rush to prevent Fragport from getting nuked. Your quest will include a smash-'em-all scavenger hunt in the experimental lab as well as a madcap dash through the munitions factory. The panel-smashing bit is annoying. There's a lot of equipment to destroy and I somehow managed to perpetually overlook something during my first run against the clock. The munitions factory is obnoxiously full of monsters, including stealth barons. I wasn't fond of clearing this against the timer and instead ran through it about as quickly as I could, coming back later to mop up the remainders. It's worth checking out as one of the rooms contains a BFG, which could help at the launch pad. Once you beat the timer you get to tango with dual Cyberdemons. This is a classic setup and the rocket in the middle makes this enjoyable awkward. Once the Cybs are dead you get to deal with your arch-nemesis. This dude is kind of a letdown compared to the terrible two as he basically just struts back and forth behind a constant stream of rockets, plasma bolts, and BFG blasts. Lob a few rockets at him and call it a day.  The final escape sequence... Slaying the Black Knight gets you a BFG if you didn't find the one from the munitions lab. This is great because you'd be hard-pressed to deal with all the roadblock beasties PLUS two Spider Masterminds. HOWEVER, I was annoyingly greased by random base explosions on two occasions while I tried to beat the timer.

BEWARE THE WOODEN WALL DEMON