Veranda
By Mercury191872 - 1 Map
Format: Boom
[Download]
Started: December 31st 2025
Finished: December 31st 2025
Status: Completed
Happy almost New Years! Unless I somehow beat any of the fairly medium to large sized games I'm working on in the next 3 hours this is the last review of 2025, so this admittedly kinda unremarkable doom map will serve as a sappy retrospective because I might as well just accept that I halfway treat my reviews like blog posts at this point. Veranda is a pretty neat single map wad that has some cool vibes but stumbles in a few places. The opening is awful, a set of near pitch black rooms filled with jumpscare chaingunners, almost no health and absolutely no armor, but the subsequent semi-nonlinear section in the mall is pretty good, though it's easy to miss the first key and be lost for a while. The lack of music gives the early bit some good spooky anticipation, but once you start the first fight and your brain switches over to doom mode the lack of music kinda brings down the experience. However the exit fakeout and subsequent real ending were a welcome surprise that ties together the whole map really nicely, though I don't appreciate the inescapable pits all around the final area. Overall it's nothing mindblowingly special but you could do far worse with 40 or so minutes of your life.
Technically the big one year of doom wads retrospective should come a bit later, since it didn't really start until I first played Ashes: 2063 a week or so into January but now feels like a good enough time too. An entire year of playing and reviewing mods for an ancient ass game from years before I even existed, damn. Doom hooked me in with really solid fundamentals in the gameplay department, but the amount of creativity I've seen in the dozens of wads I've been through is what really makes it worth it. Doom rules, for such a simple set of guns and enemies there's tons you can mine from the rock solid core, and while I haven't even literally played either of the primary official campaigns for either doom game, at this point I think it's safe to say that doom, as a collection of all its community made custom everything, is one of my absolute favorite games of all time. Before all this I kinda just saw doom as something I wasn't really into, all the focus being on insane crackhead high difficulty stuff I was never gonna play. The Ashes series suckered me in with all the fun custom stuff and the fulfillment of a game with all the aesthetics of a post-apocalyptic survival game and none of the actual survival mechanics, Portraits of Doom gave me a spot to experiment with pistol starts, Eraser opened my eyes to just how much unique stuff you can do in this engine, and Valiant officially kickstarted the obsession with a vibrant and action packed kick that sent me right off the cliff and headfirst into a community I basically never looked at before. MtPain27's Dean of Doom series has a single line in the intro that never really stood out to me until this point. "At the end of the day, this show is really about spreading the joy of Doom, so let's do so." Well, consider the joy spread to at least one more person. If it's anything at all, coming from some random dumbass unprofessionally throwing words at doom maps on an obscure website, you should play Doom. It doesn't matter what difficulty you're on, it doesn't matter if you're doing pistol start or playing continuous, it doesn't matter if you make a break for the exit or stick around for 100% kills and secrets, it doesn't matter how much you save or cheat or what sourceport you use, you should play Doom. Here's to more of me throwing yet more words at yet more wads in the year to come.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐⭐