Part 13: Chapter 2, Level 6

"Sick of throwing your hard-earned money down the tubes in rent? Of course you are! That's why your friends at Cabalco Home Construction and Real Estate have just finished a darling new subdivision. We know land is expensive and scarce so we went ahead and dumped some fresh loam over that nasty old radioactive/toxic cesspit at Love Canal! A new house from Cabalco has never been so cheap! And, if you're planning a family, buy big! Please disregard any rumors you've heard about infertility, general malaise, constant vomiting, the ubiquitous 'three-headed love child' or any other such nonsense. Here at Cabalco we care and our housing prices are more than fair!"

Personally, this is one of my favorite levels simply for the fact that it shows off some more of what LithTech could do that wasn't directly in relation to a badly balanced fully-3D Duke 3D clone. I remember the first time I played this game I had just learned about canal locks in relation to the Panama Canal or something along those lines, and even being several years after Blood II came out, that a game from 1998 was able to do that sort of thing was impressive to me.

Unfortunately, this is tempered by one of the single longest and most boring encounters in the game. It perfectly encapsulates the real problem with the game now that it's relying on mostly Shikari and Drudge Lords to populate parts of the levels that are supposed to be the big fight areas, and it leads me to believe that the concepts for the enemies themselves are flawed - I mean, every encounter with a Drudge Lord, at least when I didn't abuse shotgun-switching to shred it, has consisted of either A) pour bullets into it while it tries to remember I'm there long enough to throw fireballs at me, or B) jump around a far-too-cramped area hoping I only get lightly singed by the splash damage rather than completely cooked by eating the fireball directly.

I mean, when you think about it - this is an enemy that takes a lot of bullets to go down and launches decently-fast, highly-damaging fireballs three at a time at you. It's basically a weaker Cyberdemon. Thing is, those were rightfully placed in extremely limited numbers; between Ultimate Doom and Doom II you only find ten of them, and Final Doom, without secrets, another 16. Outside of that one level in Plutonia Experiment, you know who throws multiple Cyberdemons at once, constantly, at you? People who are fucking intentionally trolling you and everybody else who plays their mod by making it intentionally shitty and impossible. We can just be thankful one of the lessons Monolith learned from the Shogo/Blood II brouhaha is to never rush a game out like this again.