Review by Colin Phipps

"The Devil's Fury" is a 12 level episode for Doom 2, complete with 2 demos, some new textures, and designed with deathmatch in mind as well. Alas the included demos are rather boring; they are much too slow to keep you interested for long.

The levels are a real mixture. It seemed like this WAD was a collection of the authors levels - they start poor, and get better. The first few levels are pretty poor. The later levels show promise - there are some good points to levels 5, 6 & 8, and levels 9 and 10 are moderately good. Levels 11 and 12 are pretty good and stand in poor company with the rest of the levels.

All the levels suffer from a lack of detail, but this was less noticeable in the later levels. More seriously, the earlier levels have a number of bugs, including minor HOM, nodes errors; users of Boom and PRBoom will be unable to complete MAP07, because of a serious LINEDEFS bug.

The real quality of this episode is the gameplay. The author creates some excellent fights; in particular there are several great pain elemental fights, where the pain elementals are placed off to one side of the main enemies, so you have to turn away from the main fight to fight them. However the good fights are outweighed by boring ones at the earlier levels.

Here are the comments, level-by-level:

1. Entryway - This level is little more than its name. With only a dozen minor monsters, 4 rooms and a few health bottles, there is very little at this level. The architecture is pretty basic; there are a couple of important doors which are either poorly concealed secrets or badly marked doors.
2. Harvesting Centre - This level starts with a nice lake area, though it is marred by basic architecture and texture misalignment. The later areas of the level are quite well designed, so the parts all fit together nicely into the level progression; however the architecture is boring and needs more detail. There are some traps and secrets, but these are pretty easy, and the fights aren't anything special either.
3. The Gauntlet - A small level set in a building and the yard surrounding it. The fight at the start of this level is quite good, with lots of monsters converging on the start point, but it is too easy to escape. Apart from that there are no other good fights (even the trap set on one of the keycards didn't work right). The design is better, but the level lacks any real atmosphere.
4. The Focus - Everything fans out from a single room at this level - there are lots of keydoors all from one room, all with ugly wide key stripes. More detail is still needed in some areas, but there is some good architecture in other areas, which makes the fights more interesting too. There are a few good traps, but at least one was spoilt because most of the monsters inside were deaf.
5. Earth Lab - Again a fairly short level, but with plenty of action. The level is designed to be a laboratory of some kind; there is a teleporter research room of course, and some "guinea pigs" (demons in cages). There are several interesting rooms at this level which were very well done. The fights are a little tricky, but the traps were still not done well enough to put the player under real pressure.
6. Funhouse - This is a level purely about gameplay. There are a couple of good rooms, but the architecture is mainly there to help with the fights; the rest of the level is just a lot of boring connecting corridors. The opening fight is excellent, as you have to fight distant pain elementals at the same time as nearer overlooking imp and sergeants - it really puts the player under pressure. There are some good fights later on, too, with good use of chaingunners to force the player to take aggressive action in the fights. Some of the traps are perhaps a bit overdone, but they are all fair - the player always gets some warning, so you can usually take some evasive action.
7. This level is pretty difficult. There is no armour for a while, and the odd nasty trap - I'd save often, if I were you. The architecture is rather boring, basically everything is rusty metal. Unfortunately, this level has a major bug, which causes it to crash Boom or PRBoom (and maybe other Boom based ports, but not MBF or LxDoom). So I didn't complete it, and I had to start the next level from scratch :-(.
8. Nowhere - This level centres around one large courtyard; all the other areas are small and quickly lead back to the main arena. There are lots of traps in this yard, but most only contain a couple of monsters like cacos which are easy to beat in this big space. Also, some of these trap monsters didn't wake up until you walked over to their side of the yard. The pain elementals, OTOH, were a much better trap... :-). The design of the main arena is good; the light level is bright but sinister, and there are lots of viewing points and a few secrets too. Some of the side areas were good, but others lacked detail.
9. The Pit - The first all-round good level of the episode :-). There are rather a lot of corridors which the author just decided to fill with minor monsters - without the SSGun these can be a bit tedious. However there were a lot of good fights which made up for this. The architecture is good too; some areas still needed more detail, but the level has a good style.
10. Computer Center - There are some new graphics imported at this level, in particular a good teleporter graphic which adds some style to the level. Unfortunately, the computer areas of this level are boring and need more detail, and the marble castle (?) part looks out of place. There are not many good fights, and if it were not for the demo I think the level progression could be confusing too.

11. Toxin Storage - Brace yourself for a real battle at this level. Right from the first fight the monsters are pressing hard - there are traps, teleports and tricks which make this level great fun to play. There is plenty of ammo fortunately, since I was forced to rely on the plasma rifle more than I normally do - essential for those pain elemental traps.

    The outdoor area is well designed and has great atmosphere. The indoor areas were more interesting than previous levels too; however, a lot of rooms and in particular doors were spoilt by texture misalignments.

12. Apocalypse - Clearly the author saved the best for last, because this level is excellent. The level starts indoors; right from the start there are archville noises, and the dark corridors are very spooky. There is yet more fun with pain elementals; the main courtyard uses one as a lost soul spawner, so there is a constant supply of them to distract you as you try to press on. Not all of the fights are great, but there are some excellent ones which will have you on the edge of your seat.

It's hard to summarize this episode. If you do download it, then I suggest you skip at least the first 4 levels; I know that if I played again, I would jump straight in at level 8 or 9. The good levels are 9,11,12, and there are good bits at many of the other levels.

Really the author should scrap the early levels and bring the rest up to the quality of the best; then I'd have no hesitation about recommending this episode.