Review by Colin Phipps

Another castle level, I thought. You start the level outside the castle, facing the high turretted wall. However, unlike most castle levels you can't hang around, since you are quickly under fire from chaingunners and mancubi; as the author says, there are lots of counterattacks at this level, so you have to be on the lookout.

The architecture is not very good; while the outside of the castle looks imposing enough, the inside is an anticlimax. Inside the main gate are a couple of boring gray stone rooms. As you get deeper inside, there are a lot of texture misalignments (though these are not too serious), and some bad tutti fruiti. There are also a lot of pitch black areas, which are a nuisance (though you do get light amp goggles for some of these). And there are faults with some windows - often the ceiling through the window is as high or higher than what it looks like outside, which looks tacky.

The castle is surrounded by a moat, then a strip of land, then high cliffs; about half way through the level, the cliffs open up to reveal lots of imps and other badies. This is an excellent fight, as you race around the cliffs, clearing imps which dodging shots from the castle battlements. Every step of the way there are new surprises, as revenants and archvilles appear, or more chaingunners open fire from the castle.

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of other fights of even reasonable quality, and the rest of the level is pretty dull. There are a number of dead end traps (including a sensless hit-a-switch-and-get-instantly-crushed trap), so save often. At the end there is a fairly routine cyberdemon & spiderdemon fight; any Doom player worth the name knows how to fight this, and there is plenty of space. Acid is inconsistently marked (some red acid hurts, some doesn't). It is also rather hard to get around the level, due to the very illogical layout inside the castle.