Review by Colin Phipps

"The New Breed: Return To Earth" is a single level, which uses the "New Breed conversion" (a set of patches by Mark Pullen), as well as the Boom engine, to create a greatly changed playing environment.

The main changes are the weapons and monsters. You weapons are seriously upgraded, so they fire much faster and look a lot meaner :-). Mind you the off-centre weapon graphics and the lack of an aiming sight made things tricky at first for a Doom-only player like me.

The level has some neat graphics and effects. There are some interesting Boom effects used, like modified colourmaps and lighting, which add a lot of style to the level. I liked the detailed use of computer consoles and such that give a very high-tech feel to the level. The level also uses a lot of coloured lighting, but there was so little action in these areas that it seemed a waste to me.

The monsters are all upgraded too; all the monsters used in the level are made to look like human opponents, with the weapons to match. Their reaction times are a lot faster, so you basically have to blast anything that moves and fast! However, the monsters tend to be used in very small groups, usually only 1 or 2 at a time, which makes the fights rather boring - any enemy you see you blast to bits, without needing to worry about others.

Also, I had a problem with this level because it reassigned some cheat codes and stuff, which conflicted with my keysetup :-(. There are some nice graphics at this level, but the gameplay could be better.