DOOM II: Hell on Earth (via UZDoom)

At its worst, this feels like id's cheap attempt to print money by slapping together extra content for their runaway success, ramping up enemy counts and room sizes for big spectacle and in doing so flattening a lot of the texture that made DOOM so strong. It's like going from a restaurant that uses chilli as an actual flavour to one that buys the highest-Scoville peppers they can find because “more number = better than, right??”

American McGee's levels are decent and the first bunch often flow pretty well both internally and as a unit, but they're also slathered in a haze of pitch. Petersen's levels are a mix of distilled encounter-based design, grueling slogs with incessant gotchas, and gimmickry. Romero's few are sometimes among the best and sometimes barely stand out. Shawn Green's single map is just kinda there? Overall the levels are worse, many just flat plains and hub-and-spokes over-stuffed with combat with minimal atmosphere and little of the interwoven level design of the first game. Levels like MAP09: The Pit or MAP23: Barrels o' Fun are so tedious and abstract they have no power except in that they can be so stuffed with enemies they become a chore to complete. Even so, there are some interesting ideas (e.g. I'm nowhere near as down on MAP13: Downtown as most people seem to be) and MAP07: Dead Simple is a much better arena than E2M8 or E3M8. So, it's not all bad—just a real bad average.

The new enemies are (mostly) good challenges, though the map designers sometimes seem to struggle to use them in interesting ways, and the new super shotgun is both cumbersome and satisfying (in part because it's cumbersome). These aspects are undeniable improvements. The rest of the game just doesn't follow suit.