It’s been an eventful week of WAD playing here, much more so than the last in terms of the sheer number of WADs under my belt. Believe it or not, I’ve gone through twelve in seven days, and while a few of those were one-off levels, over half of them were episode-length affairs, and one was a full 32-level megaWAD (albeit a concise one). This leaves me with an interesting dilemma: I don’t have either the desire or the capability to write cogently about all of them this week. So, instead, I’ve chosen to go in the opposite direction. I’m going to write about one of them. I’ll be detailing my experiences with some of the others at a later point in time, I’m sure, but I wanted to change things up yet again by doing something a little bit more long-form than the previous weeks. Why not try it on and see how it fits?

That MP Feeling

As you might surmise from its title, Dark 7: Mission Pack is a follow-up to author Bryant Robinson’s seven-level ZDoom episode Dark 7, which was released for Doom 2 way back in 2002 (both of them were, in fact). Despite the “Mission Pack” designation, though, it’s not an abridged experience, featuring roughly the same amount of content its predecessor had, and in some respects more. Truthfully, had it been released as Dark 7: The Sequel or Dark 7: Yet Again likely no one would have batted an eyelash. It has all the bells and whistles you’d expect to see from a ZDoom WAD, like sloped surfaces and the occasional scripted event, as well as quite a few resources (sounds, textures, etc.) culled from other sources.

Dark 7 MP stars a mercenary (looking conspicuously like the Doomguy) hired on by the UAC to help them course-correct after one of their innumerable self-inflicted catastrophic mishaps. And by “course-correct” I of course mean “shoot stuff”. The first of the WAD’s seven levels is actually a brief expository cutscene whose dialogue contains syntactic gems such as “Are the credits place where I want them to be?” and “So this is going to be another bug cleaning up job huh?”. Watching a cutscene play out in the Doom engine complete with poorly-constructed sentences is a lot like watching an eight-year-old attempt Shakespeare: the fact that it happens at all is impressive. It lasts all of about 45 seconds, just long enough to be charming rather than grating; from there on out the mapset is nothing but business.

All throughout, MP is quite nice to look at, with Robinson making excellent use of Nick Baker’s nightmare1 texture set to create a series of dark, foreboding installations for you to blast your way through. While having the bulk of the mapset consist of dim, deserted UAC facilities could have been an exercise in monotony, Robinson is smart enough to inject a number of more natural features into the levels. You’ll traverse not just bases but the environments surrounding them as well, and even when inside you’ll often have skylights, windows, or other features to keep you from feeling claustrophobic. All of this is subtly brought to life with ambient sounds that don’t hit you over the head with their existence, as is too often the case with ZDoom maps.

It’s a pretty pleasant WAD to play, too. Things start out simple, with the difficulty gradually escalating as things proceed. Even so, it’s definitely on the easier side of the difficulty scale, and the lack of difficulty settings is a little disappointing. It bears saying, though, that the boss battles are a vast improvement over their dull, easily-defeated counterparts in the original Dark 7. The cramped dual-Cyberdemon fight at the end of MAP06 is the clear highlight of the set in terms of combat encounters. The Spiderdemon fight that caps things off in MAP07 is maybe not brain surgery (well, it is for ol’ Spidey, I guess), but there’s a potentially lethal surprise awaiting you once it’s done.

One reason for the somewhat slight challenge in Dark 7 MP is Cory Whittle’s SiN weapon mod, which is packaged with the WAD and intended to be run alongside it. Mind you, these weapons are actually well-done and suit the aesthetic of the levels perfectly, but they’re also super powerful. The assault rifle you start the game with is capable of rapid fire and pinpoint accuracy over long ranges, while the shotgun, found in the first room, is essentially an SSG that fires faster and only consumes one shell. The shotgun is so effective and so efficient that there’s rarely a need to use anything else, and you’ll find enough ammo for it that you won’t often be forced to. With such powerful ordinance, Robinson probably could have upped the ante a bit on the monster side.

It’s worth mentioning that a large part of Dark 7 MP’s presentation involves assets and ideas on loan from other sources. Apart from the aforementioned SiN weapon pack, you’ll likely notice ambient effects from Quake 2, item sounds from Unreal, and monster noises from Doom 64. The whole affair has a distinctly Quake 2 flavor to it, owing a lot to the simple mission objectives you receive in each map and the WAD’s custom soundtrack, which has shades of Sonic Mayhem. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been playing user maps for very long, and Robinson actually does quite well at keeping these disparate parts from ever becoming discordant, but you may find yourself, as I did, pausing the game at some point to do a quick mental tally of how many games you’ve seen and heard in the last minute.

From top to bottom, Dark 7 Mission Pack is a really polished and enjoyable set of maps, and while you may occasionally wish it was more difficult or wonder why exactly there’s so much of other games in it, the package as a whole is so well-constructed that these thoughts will likely be only momentary. It doesn’t overstay its welcome or weigh its maps down with ZDoom features that needlessly draw attention to their own existence; it exudes confidence in pretty much every respect, and its concise two-hour running time compares favorably to pretty much any other two hours of Doom I’ve played.

Nothing Wrong That I Can't Fix...

So, part of the reason I decided to focus on a single WAD this week has to do with last week’s post, more specifically my mixed feelings about it. It wasn’t the shoddy writing that bothered me. No, I’ve gotten used to that. Rather, I was kind of miffed that I spent half of it talking about a WAD I didn’t much care for when I could have gone into greater detail about the one that I did. This is why I didn’t write anything about Dark 7, which I actually liked, just not nearly as much as the Mission Pack. Anyway, this will likely be the model going forward. Unless of course I change my mind next week, which is equally likely. Until then.