Reelism 2
By Kinsie - N/A Maps (non-traditional structure)
Format: UZDoom
[Download]
Started: April 15th 2025
Finished: April 30th 2025
Status: Shelved
Nyeh. My thoughts on Reelism 2 are especially weird now because I remember finding it ages ago before i properly got into classic doom and had a lot of fun with it before, but now it just doesn't want to click with me. At its core I like what Reelism 2 is going for, an arcade-y horde mode with tons of unique maps, and a between run shop system where you can spend your points to start the next run with buffs is conceptually great, but it's a death by 1000 cuts situation where a huge pile of minor annoyances stop me from really getting into it. The "reel" in Reelism refers to how before each round, the game spins 3 random roulettes to decide the type of weapons and enemies you'll be playing with, and a random bonus effect. For the most part I like this system, it adds variety with all the combinations, and the huge quantity of guns and enemies keeps things fresh. Unfortunately the effect wheel tends to absolutely ruin things 80% of the time. Some effects are fine, things like super speed, enemies exploding on death, enemies gaining the ability to fly, there are some cool ones. But there's a large chunk of effects that purely exist to make the next 60 seconds of your run completely miserable for no reason. Crazy ice physics that can cause you to fling yourself off the map the second it activates, the game downgrading its resolution to the point that it genuinely becomes unplayable and painful to look at, draining your health constantly (hey wait that doesn't sound too bad-) while covering your screen in bees that make it impossible to see, being shrunk down so small that you can no longer automatically walk up stairs, so many of these random effects just make the game worse to play. Some of the weapon reels are like this too, one in particular just spawns in intentionally bad weapons for no reason, and sometimes the enemy reel choice results in the game spamming one single enemy type at you, which defeats the purpose of variety in the first place. Ammo is annoyingly limited as well since it only drops from enemies, and only the ammo type associated with the current weapon wheel will actually drop, with no real way to regain ammo for guns you got on previous reels. It leads to runs sometimes feeling very RNG heavy in a really bad way, which wouldn't be completely bad if this game just wanted to be a silly horde mode, but Reelism 2 has an actual progression system. There IS a true end goal that leads to credits, having you do a run on endurance mode (double length), clear the game's boss rush mode, and finish a hidden extremely annoying map, but the near constant jank randomness makes it kinda difficulty to want to engage with the game when it actually wants to be hard. This is also not helped by how the game's score and shop system. After each run, the score you earned can be used to start with various guns, extra ammo/health/armor, or other buffs, but any leftover points when you start another run are completely deleted. This makes sense in theory, otherwise you'd be able to stockpile points until you can buy literally everything and be massively overpowered, but with things like endurance mode or the secret maps requiring you to go in with a lot of score, you end up needing to get points from a failed run, in order to win a run and get more points, then spend them all on buffs and/or access to a secret map (yes EVERY TIME you wanna play a secret map you have to pay a TON of points for a single attempt), but then uh-oh you got the ice physics effect and slid off the map and instantly died, better redo that cycle again for another attempt. It's painful. If I could change a single thing about Reelism 2, it'd be this. Instead of your score being converted directly to points, your money during the hub should be calculated based on your high score on all the maps being combined and put through a formula, and the secret maps should be permanently added to the map roster after reaching a certain overall high score. It admittedly also doesn't help that I sorta, don't like the game's style?? A lot of the enemies and bosses are insanely wacky and random to the point that i find them a bit annoying, which isn't a dealbreaker but it doesn't help things when you add on a lot of my other issues. I really, really, REALLY, want to like Reelism 2, the concept is cool, there's a lot of effort and tons of cool content, but it just doesn't mesh together. It can't quite decide if it wants to be a wacky silly fun game, or a hard roguelike/horde mode type thing, or just an infinitely replayable arcade game, and each time one of those aspects gets too strong, it overpowers the other parts in a way that fragments the experience a bit. Give it a try if you're into it, there's a reason this wad is still very popular, but I can't really vibe with it as much as I wanted to.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐
Favorite/Least Favorite Map skipped due to Reelism 2's very different structure.