Let’s check out DOOM SnapMap, featuring Donald Trump and Raccoons

DOOM has been out for just over a week now, and by all accounts it seems to have been positively received. Our own Aaron Birch gave it an 8.5 in his review earlier in the week, and I find myself agreeing with him after my time with the game. DOOM is fast, brutal and a great challenge, as well as having a captivating minimalist narrative.

But aside from the awesome campaign mode, and the multiplayer which I rather enjoyed in beta, I’ve been very interested to check out the “SnapMap” level creator. Browsing through the tutorials, so far it seems very intuitive to someone like me who has minimal experience in/patience for level design, allowing me to just snap together rooms and corridors, populated them with detailed clutter at the touch of a button and place enemies where I please. It doesn’t have the level of variety in aesthetic design that proper mod tools would, but mod tools also aren’t very inviting to casual content creators such as myself, and that’s clearly the audience id Software are catering for here.

So while I consider whether or not I’ll create a level of my own, I thought I’d have a look at the creations being uploaded by the community over the first week of launch. To spice things up a bit, instead of just playing all the various horde mode maps people have made, I chose maps based on their names and went in blind without having pre-played them first. The results were…interesting?

!!!!!{ I eat ham at 4am }!!!!!

“I eat ham at 4am” turned out to be a very loose political joke that took me far too long to pick up on. Also, in my excitement to rip some demons apart and due to the fact the Glory Kill button is changed from the F key to R in SnapMap, I got utterly destroyed when I overreached and opened up team chat mid combat. A rookie mistake, that I shan’t be repeating…

Raccoon Simulator

Come on, we all knew the “X Simulator” maps were coming. I, for one, was just curious as to how one simulates being a raccoon using only assets designed to create a demon invasion on Mars. I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

Music Maker 9000

I think this one speaks for itself. And I was totally serious about the competition I spoke about in the video. The prize requested by the winner/s must be approved by us, so no babillion-million dollar collector’s items!

E1M2

And here we have a serious map to check out. In fact, “E1M2” is the highest rated map in the SnapMap community (at the time of recording), and is a recreation of the second mission of the first episode of Ultimate DOOM. It features a lot of detail, like secret doors, functioning switches and even the toxic green sludge from the original game. A nice effort, but it’s a shame I don’t remember the original level well enough to truly appreciate the recreation.

And yes, I did the team chat thing again. Also, SHUT UP.

So there you have it, a little taste of SnapMap. I plan to keep having a look through what people come up with so if I encounter anything else you’ll be sure to see another one of these articles. I reckon I have to try that Harvest Moon recreation Kotaku’s Nathan Grayson had a go at recently…

Recommend other SnapMaps to Tom on Twitter: @tomdheath. Don’t forget to follow @load_screen and like us on Facebook.