Astral Abstraction
By The Final Event - 30 Maps
Format: UZDoom
[Download]
Started: May 13th 2025
Finished: May 22nd 2025
Status: Abandoned
Yeah this one kinda lost me after a while. Astral Abstraction does have a good handle on atmosphere, similar to quake except with actual music instead of just ambient droning, and the level design is fairly solid, but there's a lot of gameplay changes I can't really vibe with. Gameplay and encounter design is faster and more hectic, with tons of instant teleports to spawn in enemies and rooms that lock you in until everything is dead. The lower tier weapons are much stronger, but the SSG, rocket launcher and plasma gun feel weaker for some reason. Health, ammo, and armor balancing is WEIRD too, a lot of fights only have a handful of stimpacks, chaingun and plasma ammo is pretty rare, and worst of all, astral abstraction is allergic to giving you armor for big fights. This, coupled with some extremely rude enemy placement makes the fights hard in an annoying way that tired me out over the course of E2 and the beginning of E3, until I threw my hands up and dropped the wad when E3M3 threw me in a tiny room with only a super shotgun, 8 revenants, 3 mancubi, and 3 archviles, all with literally zero armor and like 4 stimpacks for healing. I'm not sure if this is the fault of bad difficulty balancing or the difficulties being mislabeled (there's no nightmare skill and the UV equivalent seems to be a weird time trial difficulty, so maybe the HMP equivalent is actually the UV equivalent and the "normal mode" is actually in the HNTR slot instead?? why do wads make up wack ass difficulty names and then not explain which one is supposed to be normal mode) but it got frustrating pretty fast. I probably could've (and should have) bumped down the difficulty, but I wasn't a huge fan of the more hectic fights, and the visuals are pretty lacking in variety overall. A lower difficulty also wouldn't have fixed the jank platforming which sucks since you still have classic doom's default horrible air control instead of something more fluid. Also shoutouts to E2M5 which has no enemies and is just a long ass game of simon says where you instantly die from messing up once, who came up with this. There's definitely something cool here but I didn't vibe with a lot of the design choices, and the frustrating difficulty gave me a good enough reason to drop this and move on to something else.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐
Favorite/Least Favorite Map skipped because the WAD wasn't completed.