Name:Ultimate Challenge
Number:6
Year:1993
Levelset for:Spear of Destiny
Publisher:Formgen
Developer:Formgen
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:5/5
Time:7 hours 00 minutes
As Greg Lake once said, welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. Well, there's no Giger cover art to draw us in here, it's just more Spear of Destiny. The same old, same old. Let's just see how much copy/pasting I could do from the last expansion, shall we? Once again, I'm playing on Bring 'em On.
There's a box of bullets behind a barrel at the start. Giving me that much ammo right away. I get the feeling I'm not in Castle Wolfenstein anymore. No dogs this time, but there are a selection of corpses behind me, subtly indicating that BJ had some trouble getting in here. Mostly a decent intro level, but I did notice that there are suspicious puddles of blood near the walls, replacing the rats from last time as the obvious secret indicator.
Did you know dogs can bite through walls if you're on the corners of tiles which you can't otherwise get across? Dunno at which part that lovely bit of gameplay was added, but I hate it, and I'm not at all regretting playing this. We've gone straight into the usual shenanigans in Wolfenstein level design too, better carefully check every room as you enter it or get sniped by a guard, repeat for every room. Oh, and there are over sixty enemies.
I also gotta say, this has been going on off and on since the original episodes, but this level really cinched this game as being a weird, surrealistic fever dream. The quasi-tactical nature of the gunplay, the bizarre usage of wall textures and more pictures of Hitler than in a neo-nazi's hard drive. Any description of this game beyond the basic sounds unhinged.
I'm glad we're going straight into the annoying part of Wolfenstein level design. I swear, I feel like I'm playing SWAT 4, but with nazis...and none of the fun. When that game puts ten enemies in a room, it's the most terrifying thing ever, and there's a sense of satisfaction when you finally put them all down. Here, it's ten enemies every room, and there are a ton of rooms. It's already so bad that they've just given me the gatling gun, in an open room. Not even the illusion with a secret with a massive blood puddle outside.
Hey, we've actually gone down to having smaller groups of enemies per room. It actually feels manageable, or I've just gotten back into the habit of corner checking everything. Exploiting my ability to see around corners when there are two, or just running in and running out when there are two points of concern when I enter a room. It's almost becoming a fine science.
The secret floor entrance is weird. There are four elevators here. One you can't reach near the start, another about halfway through, doesn't need any keys to enter, another in an obvious secret, then the actual secret exit. This one isn't in an obvious secret, and needs both keys when you're inside. It's also got both a maze and a pushwall maze, because why wouldn't you do that at this point?
What the heck is this wall texture supposed to be? I know what it looks like, a deliberately hideous texture from a Cruelty Squad imitator. It isn't interesting or cool, it just reminds me that I'm shooting the same enemies in the same halls again and again. The bats are back, and this level has a lot of choke point usage, funnel enemies through a tunnel or get gunned down. I'm running out of things to say and they've run out of things to do. At least the end section has enough secrets within secrets to feel like a secret level, even if I wish I was playing Blake Stone right now.
The boss is the exact same one as last time, who was just a new coat of paint on the regular Spear boss, who was slightly different from the last six bosses. So once again, it's about the level, in which I have to kill dozens of dogs. After that, it turns into a maze level, so much and so long that I got lost a few times. With a map. By the time I found the boss it was just placed like a random enemy.
Floor 6:
We start with a secret maze, because why wouldn't you start with one of those? It isn't that secret, since there's no exit out of the starting room and it's obvious which walls you push, but man, come on. It's a long level, the designers here were really feeling like they needed to get absolutely everything they could out of a Wolfenstein level, much to its detriment.
Floor 7:
Most of this level is a giant spiral. You keep going forward, then left. The game throws a few guards on your right, but for most of the first half, you're just doing the exact same things over and over again. At most, there's going to be a group of enemies in front of a door. Still, I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
There's a tell-tale sign of a secret in the opening area, but there's no secret, not even out the door in the next room. No major enemies straight away, and a bit of confusion only leading to an empty room where a bunch of dogs are facing away from me. I practically bowl them down. This level has multiple encircling hallways around a series of rooms. One of them is a secret maze. I cannot even muster the sarcasm to say I love that, just stop doing that.
I feel like tossing in a hallway with a bunch of small rooms, then not actually doing anything with them on a boss floor of all things is a bad sign. Why do so many rooms feel like dining rooms? I guess some could be offices, but this has been a persistent problem in this levelset. Same boss as the last one, the bootleg Barnacle Wil guy, he shoots bullets and rockets. I've gotten so used to this kind of fight that I handled him incredibly quickly.
Floor 11:
This one actually has a bit of fun in it. There's an oddly shaped section, two outer hallways, two inner hallways and two interior rooms, where one gunshot, at the entrance, will more or less awaken every enemy inside. Just enough that you have to worry, but not so many it's cutting them down by the dozens. It took me a few attempts to get through. It was actually nice doing something other than constant corner checking and enemies just being dumped in front of me.
The opening to this level is a series of hallways with pillars where dozens of enemies are free to fire upon you. The only help you'll get until you're past them is a secret cache of ammo which is not enough. Even when you get past that, the only health for a while is in a secret door you really need to trick open to get. Fortunately, that was the tricky part, after that it's mostly a maze. Hey, at least the path to the secret exit is normal...except for the part where those bubble tiles are shoved in your face again. Huzzah!
Floor 20:
One of the oddest levels in this game. It's another one path forward the entire time, we'll through in keys even though that makes no sense. Except this time, a lot of the rooms are either shaped like Nevada or just a triangle. Most of the level is taken up by this, as in, they fill out the entire grid of the possible level. There's 8 secrets inside, somehow, and I didn't really feel like going back and looking for all of them.
Floor 13:
Quite possibly the most bizarre case of level design I've seen. I ended up finding a secret early on which ended up putting me into a path which was more or less the same experience as the last, secret level. Technically it differs because there are two paths to the end of the level, each with their own key, but this honestly irked me the first time around. This should be the kind of thing I say is clever, but somehow this levelpack manages to ruin it.
Floor 15:
Another long hauler. To start, it at least tries the actually fun part of Wolfenstein gameplay, a big area full of enemies you have to move around rather than just gun down. Since some of them open up locked doors which actually give you more options for the battle, this is quite tricky. It takes me multiple tries and it's only 18 enemies. After that, it's a lot of slowly going through a maze-like area against enemies which often get the first strike against you if you don't know they're there, with constant backtracking to health and ammo caches.
Floor 16:
68 secrets!? On a boss floor? This isn't an easy one, because the skeleton mech knight (which I'm sure isn't the right name) isn't tied down like last time, and he's fast. Very fast. He's silent except when he's shooting at you, so if you accidentally awaken him the first time you'll notice is when you hear yourself dying. Since I didn't have a cache of ammo but a cache of health, I had to look around and ended up nearly solving the rest of the level...and finding out that I missed the cache of ammo. Sigh...
This level quite handily demonstrates why boss levels aren't long corridors with curves to them. Because it's unfun, and it's blatantly obvious that it isn't a test of skill. Since there are other enemies here, it's about finding those before waking the boss. Note, most the ammo is actually behind him, so I hope you weren't pistol starting these. Once I kill him, it's time to use the key...wait a minute, there's no door out of here. I HAVE TO SECRET HUNT!? I go over the entire level, I find nothing. This is actually the worst level in a FPS I've ever seen. I don't mean that in hyperbole. I haven't seen the entire level, but I know there's going to be a maze and we're going to violate every single principle of good level design.
Okay, the rest of the level, after a set of three pushblocks with no obvious indicators, is just a simple "go back and forth along shrinking hallways", but it is annoying, because at the end you have to go back to fill out your health and ammo for the final battle.
Wait, what!? Did someone slip in a level from Wolfendoom? This is very strange. At least before the mobile RPGs, the whole Wolfenstein/Commander Keen/Doom connections were supposed to be easter eggs. This is the earliest actual in-canon reference to that. And it's from a dubiously canon spin-off nobody likes. Huh. Anyway, the Angel of Death has an entirely new fight. I spend three tries trying to find him, look up where he is online, then gun him down when he gets stuck on a wall. The ending cutscene is the same as before.
This gets a 1. The only time I had a smile on my face was when I was playing the final level, and that isn't even a "I won the game joke". No, that was as good as any of these boss levels ever were, the reference was cool. Everything else was just a ceaseless, unending parade of bad level design choices. All of them, often at the same time. There is no reason to play this, I have already revealed the only interesting part of this. Even if you were doing so because you were trying to learn from bad level design, you already got enough of that from the base games in their worse levels. You don't need twenty levels of that.
Next time...we see what's so special about The Quest of the Space Beagle.
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