Umbra
By rd - 1 Map
Format: MBF21
[Download]
Started: January 19th 2025
Finished: January 31st 2025
Status: Shelved
(I'm gonna refrain from rating this one since most of my issues are really just personal taste things rather than actual problems with the map.)
I went into this really hoping I'd enjoy it. I'd heard that it was a beautiful map with a ton of visual detail, an incredible atmosphere and an emotionally touching story, so while I was skeptical considering it was advertised as being extremely long and "microslaughter", I wanted to give it a chance. Unfortunately, I just don't click with what Umbra is trying to accomplish. The map very quickly became massively confusing to navigate, I was running out of ammo constantly due to just how many enemies there were, and I was always low on health due to the big rooms with lots of enemies and a pretty limited amount of healing items. I even had to turn up my brightness a decent bit because the map is so DARK everywhere that I was having an insanely hard time seeing anything. I quit after about 30 minutes of this, but came back one last time to give it a last try before I put it down for good. I was hopeful that the mod's custom lowest difficulty (which was stated to reduce enemy count by a decent bit) would alleviate some of my issues, and I'd still be able to have a good time, only to realize that the opening encounters (where I was already struggling on HMP) were almost completely unchanged, and the total monster count was still nearly 4 THOUSAND. I got a little further than on my first attempt but still ended up having the same issues. Too many enemies, too big/confusing to navigate, and not enough resources to reliably fight things. I gave it an honest try but this just isn't my thing. I will say, if any of this sounds like your thing, you'll probably love it and have a fantastic time. Umbra is great at what it's trying to do, but what it's trying to do is absolutely not my thing. Maybe one day I'll run through it with IDDQD or a custom weapon mod just to see the whole thing, but for now I'm going back to my usual style of Doom WADs.
Rating - N/A