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WAD created by Bloax and Eric
Summary: Essentially, BURL TUMD is a gameplay mod that increases the speed of almost everything in the game. Thus making the already fast-paced game even faster. All vanilla doom weapons have been modified and you can get new weapons from monster drops. The monsters themselves have also been modified to keep up with the speed of BURL TUMD. The player itself has a few changes, as it moves a lot faster and starts off with BURL TUMD's signature BURL sword. As far as aesthetics go, BURL TUMD adds some modest gibs to all monsters and adds effects to trivial things such as bullets puffs, plasma, etc. It can be used in all gamemodes.
Back Story: BURL TUMD caught my attention once it got selected for FOUR community events in one week (FNF US + Euro, SNS, and SunS). I figured, the wad must be -really- good for it to get picked by four events at once right? So I went ahead and participated in Euro FNF's deathmatch for this wad, and then proceeded to play DooM II Map01 - Map2X as well. This review will be based on all my experiences from those several hours of gameplay.
Review: BURL TUMD tries to set itself apart from other mods by making doom even more fast paced than it already is while staying simple. It sounds like a good concept on paper, but it's poorly executed.
Why? Well, this wad is trying to make Co-op/Survival more fast paced. The problem is that it's not fast paced at all in my opinion. BURL TUMD makes doomguy move a lot faster, but there's a problem with that. Since you move so damn fast, almost all projectile based monsters are waaaaaaaay easier to dodge. I know that projectile speeds have been increased to compensate for BURL TUMD's speed, but the increased projectile speed definitely has little to no impact on the easiness of dodging. Really, the only thing fast paced about monsters are hitscanner Zombies only because it's undodgeable. Another thing is, the author specifically says that rushing in blindly will massacre you, but this will only apply if the area you're running into has hitscanners. If not, then you can pretty much speedrun the map without giving a damn about turtle-speed projectiles.
Lets forget about monsters for a moment and go to the weapons. The modifications to weapons are mediocre. The worst offender of the bunch is the rocket launcher. If you're making a fast paced rocket launcher, the most logical thing that comes to mind would have been to make the rocket launcher fire faster AND make the rocket itself quicker. But this does it all wrong, it actually takes -longer- to fire a rocket than it would in vanilla doom. On top of that, it spawns multiple explosions one by one when it dies instead of spawning it all in one go.
The part that irks me the most about the weapons is the recoil. As a somewhat competitive Doom Player, adding recoil to ANY weapon is an immediate turn off for me. Like, there is absolutely no point in adding a recoil to a mod that boasts about how simple it is. And honestly, why would you add recoil? All it does is mess up your aim in crucial moments. Speaking of effects, another thing I ran into is that the "effects" for some of the weapons are bad. For example, the trail effect of the BFG looks really dorky because of how it circles around midair. Another offender is the plasma rifle's altfire, it's literally just translucent rocket explosions in a straight line.
Even though -most- of the weapons have problems, there are a few weapons I really liked. One being the SuperShotgun, the recolor is pretty nice and sleek. The problem was that the recoil was very annoying. But I immediately overlooked it once I realized how satisfying it is killing enemies with that beast of a weapon. Literally, killing and imp with the SSG will throw it across the room because of how powerful it is. Another likeable weapon is the BURL sword, only because it's satisfying to watch an imp or zombieman get gibbed by the sword. The best weapon by far is the ChainGun. It's basically like quake 2's chaingun where it fires slowly at first but picks up speed quickly. Except in BURL it's even faster than Quake 2 and 10X more satisfying to use since you can literally mow down through hordes of enemies with that godly weapon.
Another thing I like are the gibs. Unlike brutal doom where it's really gorey, this mod sticks true to Doom and uses doom-based gibs instead of making custom ones that just lag the crap out of the user. The whole minimalist approach to gibs was definitely something I dig.
Overall I think this is one of those wads where it has a cool gimmick, but it got over hyped.
6 / 10
