2018 has been a heck of a year for Doom WADs. I can’t even keep up with the major releases: REKKR, Doom 64 for Doom II, Dimension of the Boomed, and now Avactor. And they’re all amazing. If Dimension of the Boomed hadn’t already taken its place as my WAD of the Year, the title would fall to Avactor.
Avactor: End of the Fifth Cycle is a 12-level epic from Eradrop, a mapper who loves jungle maps as much as I love gimmick maps. Eradrop… drops (sorry) an entirely new textureset into Doom to turn it into a dark, murky, foreboding crawl through overgrown valleys, decaying ziggurats, and sprawling ancient cities.
To complement the new setting is a near-complete recast of all of Doom‘s original characters. Many are simple reskins, including tribal-looking masks for a number of enemies. Each imp is adorned in two skulls, demons bear down on you with eyes glowing out from behind a massive skull mask, and in one of the most delightfully goofy decisions I’ve ever seen in Doom, lost souls wear a giant-ass skull on top of their regular skull. But my absolute favorite little detail is that the hell knight and baron now look like essentially the same creature — except the baron has a bunch of extra armor piled on. It’s such a smart call and makes it so much easier to excuse the fact that knights and barons are effectively the same monster with different HP values.
I’m unclear on the finer details of the setting and story, but a lot of it unfolds naturally over the course of playing the WAD. You can assume that the islands were originally inhabited solely by the tribal natives (imps and demons), who constructed the crumbling temples and ziggurats you see throughout. At some point fairly recently, an invading force “colonized” the islands for themselves. The reskinned hell knights and barons are distinctly medieval-flavored (reminiscent of conquistadors), and you can see the newer cabins and villages they’ve constructed starting in Map04. By Map10 you finally arrive at the site of their initial landfall — and witness the unmistakable evidence that they did not come in peace.
That’s not even including the strange, anachronistic mechanized guardians being churned out of a subterranean factory on literal conveyor belts. The setting is bizarre even for a Doom WAD, but the background details are hinted at to such an extent that you’re willing to accept every aspect of it.
Rarely do I play a WAD where everything is so new, and it was thrilling to encounter each new enemy — some of which are terrifying! — and discover over time what I was up against. I do think that Avactor tips its hand a bit too early with these, though. There’s so much that’s new or at least different, and I would have preferred a slower drip-feed of content. Reintroduce us to the reskins in a first couple maps, then introduce one new critter here and there as the rest of the WAD plays out. Instead of that, you’ll see the majority of the monsters by the second level, and unless I’m remembering incorrectly, absolutely everything is on the table by Map05.
In other ways, the WAD does give you that slow start I was hoping for. I love that for a minute or so at the beginning of Map01 there aren’t any enemies around, and the scope of the island ahead of you has a chance to sink in.
Scope is vital to Avactor’s identify, and to its success. There are smaller, more cramped spaces, but the vast majority of your time is spent in wide-open chambers and landscapes. Avactor’s environments are massive in size but also in complexity and vision. Awe-inspiring temples dominate the landscape, many-sailed warships lurk on the ocean’s horizon, and the rocky, overgrown, vine-laiden islands are characters unto themselves. Secrets are meticulously detailed, elaborate, and interconnected. Hell, even the gore is the best I’ve seen, through a combination of gruesome gib sprites and super-varied bloody floor textures.
Of course, with massive scope comes massive levels. This is where Avactor loses me a bit, since my ideal map length is probably around 5-10 minutes and the shortest one in this WAD took me 35 minutes. Most hover around 45 minutes on a first run — long enough that I almost never played more than one in a sitting. I can imagine I would have lost interest halfway through a 32-map megaWAD of levels this length, especially with such samey visuals, but Avactor wins me right back by being a perfect, concise 12 maps.
The only objective downside of the giant maps, ultimately, is that they’re easier to get lost in. Here, Eradrop demonstrates some triple-A mapping chops, because the breadcrumbs are always there. You have to admire something like Map09, which is probably among the top ten longest and most open I’ve ever played, and yet I always had some clue as to where to go next. If you should ever miss that clue, or lose the trail of crumbs, though… god help you.
Progression tends to be kind of weird, for lack of a better term. In Map04, there’s a set of bars keeping you from the exit, so you assume you have to find some way to lower them… but in the end you just teleport onto the other side and the bars seem to have lowered for no reason. Not bad — just weird. Or there will be some clear goal but to reach that goal you’ll have to go off on some strange tangent that doesn’t have any meaningful connection. You’re on your way back from the tangent, feeling defeated and confused, when you realize something has arbitrarily changed and the path to that original goal is now open. Okay… I guess. Just weird.
Still, there are just as many oddball but awesome design choices, like how Eradrop uses backpacks as a common, regular ammo pickup. The unusual but deliberate way items are placed, where they’re never really in spots you would expect them to be. The clever inclusion of symmetry or repeating elements, but with a slight twist each time that element is repeated. The genius use of transparent, animated, or scrolling textures to create everything from billowing smoke, to assembly line conveyor belts, to moving stone block counterweight systems.
And then, of course, there’s the main course: the gameplay itself. Rather than talk about how all twelve maps play, I’d like to pick one that I think exemplifies all the strengths of Avactor. Map06, Mount of Steel, is a bit of an odd choice because it’s the one where you spend the most time indoors and the least time running around jungles and ancient temples. The whole map takes place on an island dominated by that robot factory I mentioned earlier. Almost all the visual tricks are working overtime here as you delve deeper and witness more and more of the manufacturing process. It’s a fascinating setting that combines Avactor’s signature sense of exploration and discovery with some incredible encounters and nail-biting melees.
On your return trip from the yellow key, you find the cave you’d just been in completely shattered, crumbling into the lava beneath — and populated with enemies ready to send you for a swim. In fact, most trips back through previously-cleared areas involve some major and unexpected change that demands a shift in your strategy. Everything is dynamic, but you also already know the lay of the land when things go south because you’ve been through that land at least once before. In fact, the battle for the red key is, with no exaggeration, my single favorite fight in recent Doom memory. It starts by building anticipation — telling you in no uncertain terms that you’re not getting out of this area without a serious throwdown. Then it teaches you the layout by forcing you to run around hitting a few switches and dodging nasty but mostly unreachable enemies. When the shoe finally drops, you’re set upon from every direction and forced to weave through hordes of monsters, choosing every few seconds between the open, safer, but lava-filled spaces — or the tighter ones where you’re much more likely to be cornered and torn apart. But it’s an informed decision because you already know the ins and outs of this arena.
I dare you to play this map and not come out in love with Avactor. Though, in truth, I think that you could pick any one of the maps in this WAD to play on its own and you’d love it almost as much. Really, it’s one of the finest WADs I’ve played in a long time. If not for my personal preference for shorter maps, it might just have beaten out Dimension of the Boomed. Hell, it might just have been in my top ten favorite WADs ever.
Yes, it’s that good.
Avactor requires DOOM2.WAD and runs on 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!