A thorough piece of work! Its
actually that simple! "Paranoia" shows the tremendous work efforts
of this author. He spent a lot of time on making these levels, and it shows.
Not only that, but he's done a good job too.
Roaming around these military
installations and laboratories isn't exactly a simple matter. Although
incredibly fun it sometimes becomes annoying running around these huge
structures looking for e.g. key. They are indeed very big and very
non-linear. It does give the levels a certain sense of reality. Every
structure, area or room could easily be found anywhere in real life. This is
also due to ton of new textures that has been put into the wad. Most of them
taken from Half-Life, but also from Quake II. They look extremely good and
works perfect together with DooM II's original. Being so big and complex
they are a nice change in pace when it comes to the more or less over
abundant amount of One-map single player levels with a too easy approach to
things. "Paranoia" breaks all the unwritten rules and brings to
DooM the gameplay seen in most new First Person Shooters like Gunman
Chronicles or the king of them all Half-Life. Don't count on blazing through
"Paranoia" in 5 minutes, but prepare yourself for a rarely seen
DooM add-on of very high quality.
Proof of the author's
attention to detail and an example of his tremendous efforts is already seen
early in the level pack. The office buildings are without a doubt the best
I've seen to date! Chairs, desks, filing cabinets, computers and candy
machines placed neatly and carefully to make a the player feel like he's
actually walking around an office building. Again the cool new textures
helps make the illusion
complete.
One thing -perhaps the only thing-
that irritated me is the fact that you feel like a dwarf when facing some of
the new enemies in battle; the grunts are almost the double of your size,
and if you aim at them looking straight ahead the shots hits them somewhere
around the kneecaps. If the author could have fixed it then he probably
would have, because its too obvious a mistake. Its a good thing then, that
you have a wide variety of new weapons to kill them with. Again some of the
best replacements I've encountered. They look and sound good, and adds that
extra something to "Paranoia". Regarding the enemies he's really
selected some great new monsters for us to fight against. They also help to
make it all that more fun. Although DooM's/DooM II's monsters are the
template for all enemies seen in FPS's today, they lose a little of their
scary factor for every wad you play. So the rough, gray and semi-dark feel
of "Paranoia" actually makes up the perfect environment for these
new enemies. A Baron of Hell would have been totally misplaced in
"Paranoia".
To sum up; if you're low on money
and are desperate to feed your PC with something yummy, then download this
wad. I'll bet you'll enjoy it!