TOTAL CHAOS

Yes, this is the Mod Spotlight section of the magazine, but calling Total Chaos a mod is doing it a disservice. This remarkable thing, created by Wadaholic, transforms Doom 2 into a survival horror. But if you’re expecting old Doom assets flipped into some kind of clunky horror game that sounds cool on paper, but doesn’t quite work, well… just look at the screenshots.

This is such a departure from the game it’s based on that I’d believe you if you told me it was a standalone project built from the ground up. I should clarify, however, Total Chaos runs on GZDoom, a 3D-accelerated port that adds support for dynamic lighting, sloped floors, -style skyboxes, and other stuff the vanilla game could only dream of rendering. Even so, the fact that the guts of the ancient are powering this thing is impressive. Wadaholic has been playing   pretty much his whole life, and started making his own maps at just eight years old. His first major mod release was Doom Tournament, a 32-level map pack that added CTF and king of the hill multiplayer modes to the game. But it wasn’t until 2004, after releasing an early demo of what would eventually become Total Chaos, that the project began in earnest. Someone who played the demo commented saying that it was impossible to make a mod scary, which inspired Wadaholic to prove them wrong.