This is Doom. You know this. The rhythms have been burnt into your DNA by this level: Gun, demons, maze, exit. Now add a ticking time restrict forcing cautious goal prioritisation and exact motion and a stage filled with floating tokens which require assortment (most of them, not less than) earlier than the exit will reveal itself. This is Skulldash: Expanded Edition, a large mod re-released for the GZDoom engine at the moment, and it’s actually fairly sensible as long as you don’t thoughts being just a little hurried.
Skulldash is Doom stretched taut. While the degrees span a variety of difficulties and will be tried in largely non-linear order, they at all times really feel like a ultimate examination; A check of how properly you realize Doom’s techniques, rhythms and monster behaviours. It’s a mod that makes you’re feeling like a professional speedrunner, even while you’re taking part in essentially the most informal of ranges.
Do you play it secure and maintain to your racing line, or do you threat a sequence of death-defying leaps over lava to gather a cluster of treasured blue timer-extending tokens? Do you hassle making an attempt to kill this Archvile with only a chaingun, or do you attempt to weave between cowl as you sprint to the end? The time strain turns ordinarily obsessive scouring for sources right into a collection of significant, high-pressure selections. Intense, however rewarding, and it lends the degrees actual replay worth.
Beyond the ticking timer and collectathon angle, Skulldash brings some further components to the desk. From the GZDoom-engine aspect of the household, you get vertical aiming, leaping/ducking and a few good new map design options like correct 3D room-over-room areas and sloped surfaces. To combine issues up, there’s an extra handful of enemy variants and some new weapons too, though these aren’t used on each stage. Lastly, every ‘tier’ of ranges is capped off with a setpiece boss struggle – typically intense, multi-stage affairs – which should be cleared to be able to unlock the subsequent set of maps.
Astute readers will discover that that is merely the ‘Expanded Edition’ of the mod. Skulldash was first launched in 2015 and whereas properly acquired by most, not many received to play it resulting from it being a singleplayer-only mod for Skulltag, an engine variant designed for on-line multiplayer. This new version has been ported to the way more extensively used GZDoom, and has seen no scarcity of tweaks, revisions and upgrades over the previous two years.
The new model provides one other 19 ranges and a slew of upgrades to all the current 25+ maps, a few of them nearly utterly redesigned, in addition to (offline) score-tracking. It’s a giant ol’ pile of content material and provides as much as one thing simply so long as a full-length retail FPS. Longer, when you plan on replaying ranges looking for 100% assortment charges and hope to unlock all the key phases.
Skulldash is out now, and you’ll grab it here. You’ll want the unique Doom 2 WAD file (purchase the sport on Steam or GOG) and a latest model of the GZDoom engine to run it.
