Sins of the Flesh

I think this megawad is an easy 5 stars.   I haven't played it in 5 years+ yet every other map had a memorable set piece or fight. While I do admit I don't really find the last 4 maps to be good I think most players will enjoy playing and ending the run on map20 or 25 without missing on much. If you think it is too easy in the first half just continue playing because it stops holding back after you reach map31.   It is hard to pick a favorite map as it has a few nice castles/catacomb maps. I guess beast island even though it shows its age and isn't the most complex map in the wad, it just has a different atmosphere from the other maps and that alone makes it fun to replay. (Followed by suffering for an hour in the pyramid adventure Mesri Halek which gives a similar feeling to the beast island, although I hate the puzzles at the end of that one especially the trollish exit switch)   Not so fun knowledge: Mesri Halek gets called egyptian slaughter in the doom community but it is actually مصري هالك and if you put it in google translate you'll get a confirmation that it means perished/doomed egyptian instead.

Originally I wasn’t wowed by it when I went to Boiling Point, due to it being rather easy. However, I decided to play it today because I was a long time ago told one of my own maps is like MAP03 and I subconsciously took influence from Danne. After playing it, I think there hasn’t been a wad that truly speaks to me in such a way like this. Every single map is aligned to exactly what I like in Doom, especially large scale early 2010s type slaughter, which despite being on the easy side of things, still makes me happy and fires those neurons. I wish Danne mapped more after Sunlust due to how fucking good his maps in that and this are, but honestly this is enough quality made by one man.

What impresses me about Aliens TC is its respect for silence. There's the famous monsterless opener, but it applies everywhere in this wad from encounter design to map layout. There's fairly little variety in terms of enemies and you deal with almost every one of them the same way, but Fisher makes them count by making them appear in ambushes or in areas that are visually and design-wise framed as dangerous, such as the specially textured "alien nests". In other words, incidental combat in Aliens TC is kept to a minimum, punctuation marks during long stretches of corridor and vent checking, which isn't as boring as it sounds as most of them are fairly well-decorated (with special effects that holds up beautifully, especially in the alien nests) and moodily-lit, and with the tight ammo balancing, you'd want to go everywhere (I also recommend playing continuous, incidentally). Add to that a bevy of custom sounds lifted from the movies, and you've got an atmospheric pressure cooker.   Related to that point is how the map layouts support it. Aliens TC map layouts are frequently very labyrinthine and sprawling, and a lot of the time these places exist more for diegetic reasons than gameplay reasons. You could be exploring several stairwells, hangar bays, computer rooms, and a lot of them will have little to no material reward besides sending you to another interconnection around the base. It gives the impression that this space would exist with or without you, making them feel vast and consuming in a way a more "efficient", event-rich layout would not. That doesn't mean the level are devoid of concepts and hooks; the opposite actually: a crate-maze that one ups IWAD E2M2 by having different access points at different heights, a crisscrossing sewer maze that gradually unfolds through switches, an alien nest with multiple entries and fake walls. As it can be seen from this list, while there are a handful of more action-oriented scenarios in Aliens TC, at its heart it is a game about throwing you in a giant location where Aliens can hunt you down at any moment. Early on and Fisher has realized the potential of Doom as the most compelling maze game on Earth, something echoed down in later generations in the form of the Magnoilian sprawls of Ribbiks, the geometric death traps of BeeWen, the 90s tributes of Tarnsman.    It does feel like it could use some better specific combat encounters that don't feel so repetitive, but it does have the good sense to end before any fatigue can set in. There's no doubt a better version could be made today if anyone was up to it, but the 94 version got an astonishing amount right and remains a good, honest lesson for those who could look past the more unpolished aspects, texture-alignment and all, of the nascent modding scene.

There's a billion versions of Aliens TC on idgames and not all of them work on modern systems, so I recommend this version prepared by Quasar.

One of the first PWADs I ever played shortly after it was released. What more can be said? It's an absolute classic, along with it's sequel. I won't lie though, it's HARD. REALLY HARD. I've played it many times over the years and it never gets any easier. Great map designs, diabolical monster counts, an absolute slog to the end... but when you get there, it's satisfying. Very satisfying. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it's pretty DAMN fucking good!

Guys wtf with the bad reviews? look at the year of the release ofc this isnt a sunder or a sunlust, but for the year of the release this is a great megawad. althought i dont recomend  it nowadays cuz there are tons of better wads for 1997 this one was pretty good.