/vr/ - Retro Games

AT_WORK.WAD
at_work.zip (99 KB, 1994-07-01) - Bradley Allen
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=481

okay it's a My Workplace In Doom map, but before you stop reading, it's pretty good. not just a cramped office full of tiny rooms and cubicles (although these do feature in some quantity), it also has some large open-plan areas with different ceiling heights which give a good sense of space, and avoid feeling like a flat maze, even though the floor height hardly varies throughout.

gameplay is relatively easy, although suffers from the usual problem of maps like this, which is you wake up the monsters before you find any weapons and end up clearing half the map with the shotgun you took off the guy outside the room you started in. indeed in my case i woke up the cyberdemon the text file warned me about before having any reasonable means to deal with it, but the map is big enough to give it the runaround until you stumble on a better weapon. indeed i entertained myself by using it to dispose of several barons (note also the author says "I like killing barons, so there are a few")

despite all that i enjoyed my first time through it. replay value isn't so great though, it's fun to explore and look in all the rooms and occasionally find something interesting, but once known/learned, it's quite a slow play to get to 100% due to having to open so many small rooms with one or two monsters in them. took me 35 minutes to clear to 100%/100% on first attempt, 23 the second time once i knew where to go for weapons/ammo/soulspheres etc. can be exited in less than a minute once you know where the keys are.