The one-man conquest of Ire

Eight hours of survival in Sunder’s biggest behemoth yet.

Making long Doom maps is hard—moreso for Insane_Gazebo’s brand of mapping, involving attritional encounters with gargantuan hordes of monsters, and very little room to manoeuvre. In his in-progress chef d’oeuvre Sunder, Gazebo puts the player through the wringer, as they crawl from one overwhelming fight to another in each of its colossal levels. However, this approach can backfire when maps drag on for too long. Eventually, the fun of challenging slaughter is outweighed by the frustration of going through fights which, all similar in their difficulty and massive volume of enemies, seem to bleed into each other.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his most populous map, “City at the Mouth of Ire”. Episode Two’s penult, featuring 6798 enemies and seven and a half hours of action, has the player traverse an oppressive, sprawling technopolis, flushing out Hell’s forces from each of the laboriously detailed skyscrapers and gaining access to more of the city in the process. The second half rewards the weary player with a BFG—and all-out urban warfare with two thousand enemies. The finale takes place on the northern plains, where the player does battle with a caco-cumulus aided by a whole battalion of monsters pouring in from warp gates.


_Aerial view of the labyrinthine street planning of this mind-boggling creation, which would be more stunning if an amputated hand clutching a pistol wasn't in the way._

It is hard to avoid comparisons with similarly time-intensive Map 16, “Whispers of the Gnarled King”. Both levels can become tedious for first-time players, especially since they both don’t give a real sense of progression. However, in this respect Ire does a better job: the mini-skirmishes in each of the towers do a better job of creating a buffer between the bigger fights, better maintaining the engagement of the player. Its architecture helps too: the Downtown-on-steroids design gives a feeling of non-linearity, giving a semblance of choice—albeit nothing more than a semblance. Free rein in which order to tackle the encounters in a Sunder level is a scarcity.

Playthrough

A full step-by-step walkthrough can be found on The Doom Wiki so I’ll go through the highlights. I beat the map with saves on the ITYTD difficulty, finishing on an in-game time of 2:20:10. Unlike Zero Master’s sensational single-segment UV-Max run, I didn’t use any exploits to get early access to the BFG: for a casual run, attempting a glide over and over again would be more trouble than it’s worth.


_A room which definitely triggered my Ire._

The biggest pain of the start is the final fight of the second tower the player infiltrates. As far as I know, the idea is to lure the archviles into the atrium, and camp in the hallway they were in while firing rockets at anything that tries to enter, but in reality the outgoing archviles would block then blast me as I tried to run past them.


_The cathedral fight. Like its cousin in "God Machine,” it's all out warfare in a vaguely ecclesiastical building._

The first major encounter poses problems too. Hell nobles (to use Decino’s neologism) swarm the area faster than one can pick them off with a rocket launcher. Pushing through the horde to manipulate its movement is crucial for survival, but lacking the biggest-hitting weapon at this stage means that getting stuck is usually a death sentence; nor do the revenant turrets overhead help matters.

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This arena is a test of one’s circle-strafing skills, specifically the ability to make on-the-spot pathing decisions to minimise the risk of getting stuck and otherwise losing health, while maintaining a state of near-paranoia about rogue infighting rockets.


_The stairway to hell.... wait, that's not right._


_The final battle, an overt tribute to Map 8 of groundbreaking community WAD "Mock 2"._

But by far the most vexing combat is reserved for the conclusion: 1500 enemies confront the poor player, no doubt covered in burns and gashes and suffering from crotch rot. Cacodemons glide in from the north, while monsters spawn in at the nadir of the massive staircase—including way too many archviles, which I generally prioritise. Eventually, hive mothers (chaperoned by more viles) spawn in to do some damage, before being tore to shreds by projectiles flying in all directions, from all quarters of the combat zone.

As the Wiki so rightly points out, health pickups are a finite resource, so consider rationing the single soul sphere at ground level for emergencies. Treating this kinda like a game of Touhou helps more than anything, avoiding projectiles and AV zaps to minimise health loss.


_The end._

Surviving the most gruelling encounter in the entire WAD so far gives the player a brief respite from massacre… before the chilling realisation sinks in that they will have to go through all this, all over again.

“City at the Mouth of Ire” sits on the edge of the kind of campaign-length, densely-populated monstrosities like Okuplok and Profane Promiseland which Doomtubers play start to finish in ten-hour livestreams—a fun idea at first, before eventually becoming daunting, almost mind-numbing. But while it might not be the most entertaining map in the levelset gameplay-wise, it represents an unwavering dedication to the WAD’s claustrophobic design: despite its enormity, in every encounter I was backed against the wall, punching and kicking for breathing room. Ire, I’d argue, is Gazebo at his most visionary.