The good: *Short and fairly straightforward, so there is little chance of getting lost. There’s no terminal but there doesn’t really need to be one (until the end).

*The secrets are numbered and labelled. This is a great idea and I wish more maps did this.

*Combat was decent enough, with no unfairness. There are pattern buffers and shield rechargers available.

The bad: *Lots of enemies have trouble triggering. I think they are set to “Deaf?” Use zones for monster triggers instead. The fight by the x1 shield recharger can be trivial or difficult depending on how many monsters actually end up triggering.

*Ceiling lights are in the floor.

*A pervasive lack of ammo. I had to fall back to my fists at one point.

*The stupid canisters everywhere can block the player’s movement, which is especially annoying if you happen to be in combat.

*An abrupt ending that yanked me out of the level before I had a chance to fully explore it. I find some assault rifle ammo that I can't use, I think the nearby closet might have an assault rifle teleport in (because that would make sense), but nope! It's the level end! I don't even get to use the ammo I just found.

This is why terminals giving the player the option to “ESC to abort” a teleport are great for level transitions. This part may have been true to the original Heretic level, but it did not translate well into Marathon.

*Lighting could use some work, but the actual architecture is OK.

You improved on the textures and all the problems Heretical-Cyborg had initially. I still think it's a little cramped for playing Marathon though...

My recommendation for copying a Doom-Engine map would be to copy E1M1 from the original doom. Would be a great for Marathon. (Could you copy the first seven Doom maps and put them in mini-scenario, please?)

I also have a problem wih RyokoTK's remark about "how boring Heretic is". Lies!

Heretic is fun, and I personally think it's a great game. Unfortunetly, I wish I could say the same thing for this map (I WISH.) It just doesn't go well with Marathon, and although I liked the bay area, the indoor chambers were cramped, too much for my liking. Either way I find it hard to reccomend this.

Still no differential shading. You added the posts in the docks, but you can't actually see them because all of the surfaces are lit in the same way and it just blends together.

Seriously, read up on this stuff. http://pfhorums.com/index.php?showtopic=3918

But literally, go download COLORSPEACK on this site and you can see that those maps are more attractive and easily navigable than this one and they use a single color. Differential shading makes an enormous difference. More distinct lighting in general helps, rather than having dark room after dark room.

Also, you missed a texture on one of the post sides. Whatever. And your ceiling lights need to be checked as "From Ceiling" or they'll be stuck on the floor. Playing through your levels after you make changes like this will help you catch the easy mistakes.

Make another map. E1M1 will never not be boring.

It's about time someone uploaded a new solo map!

Although it was taken from something else, and it has some of the flaws that TK mentioned in his review, it was nice to play something different for once.

Three stars!

Thanks for uploading a solo map. They so rare nowadays. I have not played heretic so I dunno how well you copied E1M1. There are some cosmetic annoyances in the map (lack of shading), but gameplay wise I find few things to complain about. It is a short and easy level. Like first levels in general are.

So it's not exactly your fault that it's a boring map, but it is your fault because you picked a boring map to remake.

But hey, it's also got genuine problems that can be fixed easily for your next map:

1. Differential shading. Know it, love it. Flat lighting in your rooms make them boring.

2. Align your textures properly. And I don't mean where you had them purposely misaligned for secret doors; there are areas where you use textures that have discrete border lines and they're cut off oddly by not being positioned properly on the texture.

3. The texture on the east wall in polygon 93 (and the rest of that stairwell) is not a wall texture, it is a fence texture. It will cause texture smearing on certain graphical settings. Change it to something else.

4. The water moves too fast. Change the speed to somewhere between 0.001-0.005.

Make an original map next time, or at least pick a less boring game than Heretic to crib from.