Review by Colin Phipps

There's an interesting story that lead me to this review. I was discussing with someone the "advantage" of the Compuserve action games forum for finding Doom levels, compared to ftp sites. The main difference is that Compuserve forums show the number of times a file has been downloaded. I saw that good levels like AN_COOP and Memento Mori were amongst the low counts, so it seems that a low count doesn't mean a level is bad. Anyway, CATHDRL.ZIP stood out with one of the highest download counts, so I decided to try it out.

Initially I was very disappointed. You start outside the cathedral; the outdoor area is a large, square, flat and grassy; the cathedral itself is decorated in BROWNPIP (like the old Doom 1 light brown textures, butwith some pipes showing), so it looked nothing like a church. The windows were all covered in flame textures, but these turned out to be shoot-through, with chaingunners and such behind them to annoy you. There are a coupld of wafer thin walls supporting a switch, which are in the middle of the grassy area, but only visible from one side - very weird.

The inside is rather better though. The main part of the cathedral has lots of supporting pillars, and decorations like the cross, and banners and torches. There are some other good rooms too, like the dark burial chambers with coffins in. Alas the rest of the cathedral is not so good; you get to go around the windows you were being shot at through earlier, clearing up the monsters; these rooms are not that good, with rather patchy texturing. There are some very bland corridors too.

The gameplay is also mixed. The main part of the cathedral has a good mix of enemies, and an archville to make things interesting. There are a ocuple of other slightly interesting fights, but no traps. There are lots of secret sectors, but these were excessive (3 or 4 secret sectors in one secret area), and all the secret areas were required to complete the level. Ammo and health were limited, but I got through ok.

Overall, this level has some good areas, but too many bad points to recommend. And it seems that download counts don't count for much :-P.