Doom Mod Review : Scoredoom

This is my first Doom Mod Review... I love doom gameplay mods that are good. I think a lot of doom mods are underrated to the point that the community dislikes or trashes them and because of this you see very few to no playthroughs of the Doom Games, nevermind Doom Addons with the mod on youtube. Case in point : This mod I'm doing a review of...

Scoredoom is an engine mod for the classic doom games. It's one of those mods that is a new engine in itself, but it brings new gameplay features to default doom that most engines don't do. Like skulltag, it adds new powerups to the game and enemies as well.  Unlike skulltag, these additions are not something that requires a levelset that is built for them for you to see them in the game... In fact this difference is the reason I recommend this mod over skulltag for single player games. Boring multiplayer (with broken bots that couldn't even handle a co-op game) couldn't save skulltag for me. And the fact that the new enemies and weapons in skulltag don't show up in single player by default is the reason I don't play skulltag, period. However, what I see in Scoredoom makes me not want to play any other engine anymore, period....

Let me elaborate.

Other engines have mods that randomly replace enemies with new ones. Many of these are complete crap and have little to no new enemies, or have issues.  Such mods like Herculine's Doom Downgrade (upgrade), AEOD, Project Brutality don't interest me. Because they don't add Enough new enemies and if they do the enemies are all from other games which is bad because that's not what doom is supposed to be like in the first place. Only Scalliano's 667 Shuffle (despite it being called crap by idiots in an responses to my idgames review of 10x.wad), HXRTC project, and Complex Doom + Addons really do the game justice with enough new content for the game plus other features to make it more than just some randomizer mod.

So why Do I recommend Scoredoom as an engine over even those mods?

Well for first, it adds the powerups that every other doom mod with powerups desperately needed in single player, the equivalent of the Skulltag Rage and Spread powerups! No other mod has done this.. These were so fun in skulltag in the wart series that I loved them to the point of stupidity. Now I get to use them in maps not designed for them. The Rage powerup doubles weapon firing speed. It's hilariously overpowered but it this mod with all of it's new enemies that do tons of damage you will need this. The spread is just as overpowered, even more so than the rage because it triples the weapons fired projectiles without wasting 3x ammo! That is great for tough situations because you can just spread Plasma/Grenade/Rocket tough enemies to death. It's super great for insane maps. So It gets bonus points for that. That adds a ton of fun to existing maps. On top of that adding health regen powerups, damage resistance increasing ones, double and quad damage, and a hillarious damage reflection powerup that hurts enemies when they shoot or damage you, makes this mod's powerups better than any mods powerups by far.

Now the reasons this mod was made was not for that or the new enemies which I will get to in a minute. It was made to add a scoring system to doom. Now you score points for killing or hurting enemies, finding items and secrets and finding keys and opening locked doors that require keys. That is really fun too. But the most fun part is the fact that you can get multikill bonuses with this which are amazingly fun to get. This is really fun in insane maps because you can score huge point amounts.

Another great feature is the secondary fires they added to all guns but the pistol, chainsaw and fist. They allow you to kill enemies easier. The shotgun secondary fires a slug round, the chaingun secondary fires faster but spreads the shots out more, the rocket launcher secondary fires grenades at 2x the speed of the rocket firing speed, the plasma secondary shoots railgun blasts and the BFG secondary shoots a damn nuclear missile just like the nuclear missile launcher on the beastiary armory section at realm667.  All are useful. But the most useful has to be the the new Super Shotgun secondary. It fires the equivalent of 8 shotgun blasts in one shot! Not just 4.... 8! This is so powerful that with quad damage I once kicked  a cyberdemon's ass in 2 hits! It is so useful. I use it when I fight the tougher hell knight, baron, archvile, mancubus replacements and all cyberdemon replacements when I lack a BFG.

The mod has tons of new enemies in it. Some random replacement mods have a few beastiary enemies or even a lot..... But this one has 90% of the beastiary enemies in it at least, and tons of new ones on top of that. Total count of enemies : 300+! If there ever was a mod to add enough beastiary enemies into the game, this is it.  Expect to fight a lot of heretic/hexen/duke3d/blood themed enemies though... It's not entirely faithful to doom.  Some of the enemies will challenge you. The default former humans now have tons more variety with the addition of autoshotgunners, auto-pistollers, rocket zombies (multiple kinds!), grenade throwing zombies, super shotgun shooting zombies that drop the ssg, and more. And if you think that's good, they finally added in the tank and flying vehicle enemies on the beastiary to randomly replace zombies. It makes sense, soldiers should be driving vehicles. The vehicles are tough too... They even have a chaingun toting super tank that appears a lot as well... That's not scratching the surface when it comes to demons. They have dark imps, snake imps, more dark imps, doom  64 imps,  mutant imps, etc. Same thing is true for demon's spectres, etc. The cacodemon and hell knight/baron replacements are really cool. They have some unique kinds of cacodemon and lost soul replacements not found in any other mod, such as weakeners, mini cacodemons that shoot fireballs that stick to walls that when you hit or touch them, reduce your damage resistance by 1/2, making you take more damage for a while.  They also have a mutated caco-cyst that fires automatic fireballs, he is nasty.  The hellknight/baron replacements are cool. They have Hell Warriors, Bruiser Demons, Hell's furies, cyber hell knights, cyber barons, baron/arachnotron hybrids, hellknight/arachnotron hybrids, teleporting balor's, the belphegor's from skulltag, and a cyber varient of them too! The archvile replacements are quite cool as well. A lot are from the beastiary, but a few are not. One really cool one, the arch spawner, summons in a horde of various enemies to guard him as a periodic attack. He flies and is green colored. If you see him, kill him QUICK. Then there are the cyberdemon and spider replacements. Thamuzes, Annihilators, Infernux grands, you name it. Lots of duke3d cyclodian emporer reskins are also seen in this category. You also will fight cyberdemon/spider mastermind hybrids, many of them. You get thamuz masterminds, thamuz annihilators, and worse. For spider replacements you get the usual demolishers, but you also get insanity spiders from the boss resource wad and the insanely overpowered supreme fiends that are basically flying spider masterminds with bomb attacks. They are bad. On top of that they add a lot of new cyber and spider replacements not found on the beastiary, like insanity spiders (from the boss resource wad), insanity arachnophyte's (!), insanity demolishers, and even a fucking insanity supreme fiend! If there ever was a mod to feature the perfect cast of new enemies, it's this people!

To balance the huge amount of super damaging enemies, they boosted your normal (non soul sphere) max health to 200. It fits but it doesn't really make it easier. Enemies do tons and tons of damage, and even with 200 health, you can be instakilled by nonboss enemies on easy. It's a little TOO hard. I made a plugin to reduce damage by a lot to balance this out.

Some other features of the mod may end up becoming hard as hell for doom 1 players. The boss levels in Doom 1 were easy enough in the original game. In this mod however, they have been changed significantly. Now instead of the level ending or a wall lowering to allow the player to reach the exit when the bosses die, you have to fight a huge gauntlet of 15+ bosses. The first one you kill spawns another boss, plus powerups and tons of new enemies once you kill it. That one will do the same till you have killed tons of bosses. They are all different. You Fight baron replacements in e1m8, cyber replacements in e2m8, spider replacements in e3m8 and e4m8. You have to deal with a huge boss horde like this to finally end the boss level. It's hard as hell and has killed me a lot. Luckily you can turn it off. But I still like it too much to get rid of it. It's a cool concept.

It does have a few issues. In 3.0r2 you cannot do online high scoring with the new enemies turned on. It sucks. And to enable the bonus pack monsters you should copy the sdcustomcombined.ini to the sdcustom.ini before loading. There are a few bugs though. 2 enemies have the same sprites, a lost soul and cacodemon replacement, and it looks bad. More game breaking is one enemy added by the bonus pack breaks the game bad. This enemy,  the nukage beast, if found in a level, can make the engine crash with a "kernel exception" error. To fix this, edit your modified sdcustom.ini from above to remove the "nukagebeast=2" line from it and your zdoom-<username>.ini as well. Because of the way the mod works, the nukage beast becomes unkillable as well, and you should remove it from the ini files to not have this issue like I did.

To download this mod, you can download it from scoredoom.com. There is a list of high scores from lots of major wads. They also have a section under faq that lists every kind of the 300 enemies seen in the mod.  But that download is missing addons I have made for the mod that you should get....

I have made the following addon packs for scoredoom....
Sd-dlpatch.wad - Makes dynamic lighting work by default - a must for me
sd-easier.wad - reduces enemy damage by a shit ton. Only use if you aren't that good at doom.
sd-flash.wad - adds a flashlight to use in maps that have darker areas. Hit F to toggle
sd-gfxpatch.wad - GREATLY improves blood and lighting effects. Adds halos to light sources
sd-improvedguns.wad - Makes guns shoot faster by default. Only use in hard as hell maps like Hell Revealed...
sd-improvedgunsprites.wad - Replaces all the gun sprites with better ones from a mod I found online.
You can find these addons in the skins folder of the gzscoredoom folder in my scoredoom download
which you can get here. Whichever download you get, this one or the one on scoredoom.com, simply extract the gzscoredoom folder to your doom folder, copy whatever doom iwads/pwads you have to that folder and run gzscoredoom.exe -file <wad name> to play.