Gosh, can you believe it’s been over five years since I last talked about an rf’ map? 40 episodes after Wire Brush, I’m finally, finally doing that review of Mapgame I’ve wanted to do all these years. And hopefully it won’t be another 40 episodes until I get to do rf’s 1024 megaWAD… if I can find a copy of it somewhere.
Mapgame has long been one of my go-to Doom WADs. I’ve held it on this pedestal, ranked it among my favorite WADs of all time, and any time the topic of best episodes for Doom 1 came up, I’ve offered Mapgame as the gold standard.
…but I also haven’t played it in years. So is it really as good as I remember? Loading this WAD up, was I about to find out I’d been wrong all this time? Was the illusion of the gold-standard of Doom episodes about to be broken? Shockingly, no. Not entirely.
I mean… is Mapgame the single best Doom episode ever? Probably not. But it does hold the hell up ten years later.
Aside from a few questionable moments, this WAD is still 100% on point. I’m not totally sold on the new palette, which gives the whole thing a slightly washed out look. Or the whole area in the second map that’s awkwardly turned 45 degrees seemingly just for the sake of having some non-orthogonal angles. Or the smoking pile of ashes that replaces the final frame of the explosive death animations… despite not transitioning at all from the rest of the animation. So one second a corpse is settling into the familiar bloody, bony splatter, and the next second it’s nothing but ash.
On the other hand, the pale new shade is used to fantastic effect throughout and and helps Mapgame create its own unique look. Immediately after that silly section in M2 I mentioned, rf’ seemingly figures out how to create compelling non-orthogonal architecture and you never see pointlessly rotated areas ever again. And even on the topic of sprite changes, I’m a huge fan of the chaingun replacement, which uses the SMG sprite from the Doom alphas and fires a fast-moving projectile with damage output on par with the chaingun.
While we’re on the what’s-new tangent, Mapgame also mixes in a few textures you’d usually see in later episodes: the vines-on-concrete one from E2, fire textures from E3, plus lots of new stuff involving demon faces and skulls. You know, classic Satan-y stuff. But the biggest addition is a new enemy in the form of a mechanical turret. It’s slightly tougher than a demon, totally immobile, but if you’re out in the open when it starts firing, it’ll turn you into bloody spaghetti in two seconds. As a warning of sorts, the turrets make a constant buzzing sound — a nice, thoughtful touch.
Even with all the changes, I’m stuck by how much Mapgame is still a Knee-Deep in the Dead episode. It doesn’t peddle in any of those tropes I’ve come to expect from WADs that emulate Romero’s Phobos flavor — and it’s got heaps of visual updates, but it still ends up feeling distinctly Knee-Deep in spirit.
Sure, there’s the occasional direct shoutout. The oval walkway in M2 calls back to your first time outdoors in E1M3. The opening area of Mapgame’s M7 comes across as a condensed version of KDITD’s M7. But Mapgame doesn’t rely on homages, or on referring to Romero’s playbook. It feels like an alternate Episode 1, as if it was grown from the same seed but tended by a different gardener.
It’s hard to find much to say about this WAD, honestly. It’s pure, modest mapmaking — the kind of WAD you play and don’t think about at all while you’re playing it. You just know that you come out the other side having loved every minute of it.
Even if I could list all the reasons I love Mapgame, I don’t think I’d want to. This is a mapset that everyone needs to experience and be surprised by — and it’s one that sadly I don’t hear much mention of anymore. I dearly hope that this review will mean even just one more person will play it now who hadn’t heard of it before. You won’t regret it.
Mapgame requires DOOM.WAD and should run in Boom-compatible ports. If you’re not sure how to get it running, this may help. And for more awesome WADs, be sure to check these out!