Plutonia 2

Nicely done succesor of Plutonia

This is the first, and one of the best I've ever seen.

this is a best megawads i ever seen, it's petty good.

I have a long lasting love/hate relationship with the original Plutonia. I find it to easily be the hardest of the classic vanilla official Doom releases to the point of frustration with some design choices, like chaingunners galore in their barricaded towers. The entire megawad is very brown or green in texturing too and gets a bit drab. That said I continue to go back to it off and on throughout the years. I finally hit up Plutonia 2 this year and it lives up to its name, it's tough as nails, more brown walls and green ooze everywhere, chaingunners, unsafe starts, etc. Some maps like MAP11: Arch-Violence I hated because it was so tiresome. There were others I found really frustrating in the later teens and early 20's too. Don't expect many safe starts in any of these maps, the majority of them have you in enemy crosshairs immediately, along with tons of cramped sections in several maps, to a crazy degree that it seems impossible to beat most of these maps on a first run without knowing the traps and gimmicks. On the plus side, like Plutonia 1, I still had a fun time overall and this definitely felt like an official sequel. The style changed dramatically in the last chunk of maps and for the best, environments started looking much more interesting with a lot of reds, some maps were simpler but very effective, and I really enjoyed the final stretch along with this incarnation of the Icon of Sin battle at the end. The new music is awesome. I played on continuous play via UV and GZDoom, no mods. Clocked in a little over 8 hours. If you're up for some pain and difficulty, check this one out.

sequel wads, you see so many of them, being sequels to fine franchises, those that are really close to sequels of other famous megawads but still being quite different (the Hell Revealed and Kama Sutra for an example), and then you got the team that decides to make an official sequel to an IWAD. now, the idea of doing this seems to have skyrocketed after Plutonia 2, which I guess is the first major one, afterwards you got the TWID sets, Doom 64 mapsets being made, TNT Revilution along with Devilution, isn't it clear that each and every one of us here on Doomworld is just a rabid fan of such a great game?

Plutonia 2 plays pretty appropriately for a sequel wad. it actually doesn't offer anything new besides a storyline, status bar, menu bar, and levels, but back in the day there were expansion packs (Hell 2 Pay, Perditions Gate, Build Engine add-ons) which have the same sort of thing, and Plutonia 2 honestly feels like that. but the gameplay is not standard Plutonia. standard Plutonia has low monster counts but difficult monster encounters in usually small levels. this has larger levels, larger monster counts, but still retains the aspect of difficult monster encounters. and just because there's more space to work with does not mean things are actually easier. you have to find your sense of place, where things are, and pick off the problems as they show face. there's gonna be some instances of hordes to deal with, usually smaller than your average Hell Revealed horde but still problematic in several levels. and like Plutonia, the biggest problem monsters are gonna be chaingunners, revenants, arch-viles, and mancubi, along with cyberdemons, pain elementals, and any particularly well-situated enemy to find.

you can pick just about any level to be a worthwhile challenge, as many levels are designed around exposing you to the galls of teleporting enemies throughout the wad. even from the second level, which has some nasty teleporting ambushes already. notable levels usually end up being chaos-fests in some ways, MAP09 being an example, followed by chunks of MAP16 and MAP17 (a perfect nonlinear adventure level with loads of meat). MAP18 is one of those wads that on subsequent playthroughs, is one of the most deceptively tough levels to offer. MAP20 is a grind-fest where you really want to pay attention to hitscanners, and then there's MAP23, the level I remember most (but loathe the most I should say), because of it's huge damaging blood pit and slaughter-lite encounters. MAP29 shines as another non-linear adventure level, good odysseys compounded by some other ones like MAP26. you gotta pay attention to the authors here, Eternal is all about proper monster placement that is almost starvation worthy while TVDV has some innovative ideas for vanilla (and his boss level is downright cool). Gusta and Pipicz carry some of the harder levels worth grinding through. you're gonna enjoy Plutonia 2 as long as you can enjoy the difficult combat that it entails.