Brutal Minecraft is a Doom 2 mod in where I can only assume Steve has finally had it with creepers continually blowing up his house and has decided to hunt down every last monster. From zombies, ghouls and even the big nosed villagers that are just as friendly ever, they are all going down in your journey spanning through 16 or so custom maps. We start off with the original Doom 2 opening level but with all the textures being replaced to fit the Minecraft theme and every enemy now being a green zombie. Weapons have also been replaced for the occasion with your chainsaw becoming a sword. As cool as it sounds, it, unfortunately, has an extremely slow wind-up and damage output, as well as lacks a stun effect making your fists a better choice for close range.
Punching a zombie in the face is just a bad idea as it sounds but you will soon run out of machine-gun ammo and will be swarmed if you don’t take care of them due to their sheer numbers. Once you get deeper into this familiar map, the mod splices its own sections into it with a pretty neat transition and is the last time it uses stock level design. After this, it won’t take long for you to get your mitts on a custom voxel shotgun and you’ll have no issue blasting apart zombies nor have any ammo problems throughout the rest of that stage. This mod is built around Brutal Doom so the level of violence is extremely high, with the gore and viscera caused when you shoot apart a foe being something you may want to think twice about if handing to the younger gamers out there.
As soon as you reach the second map, the tone switches from decently designed areas to explore, over to a giant wide open area containing a ton of enemies in the slaughterfest style of mod. The sheer amount of enemies you will face is insane and will inevitably murder your framerate. I was getting around 14fps average after having slain countless creatures from the seemingly endless zombie horde and it brought forth memories of playing Doom’s joke mod called Nuts. Its real problem has to be both the combination of a lack of ammo and containing nothing more powerful than a super-shotgun by that point to make thinning them out faster. You won’t be long before you find yourself with nothing but your fists again and be torn apart. The best course of action for this level is to keep moving, but this is made incredibly dangerous by the introduction of Creepers who run far faster than you and whose explosion will insta-kill you if it gets close enough. It will soon introduce ranged enemies after flipping a switch as well.
Truthfully, it is a miracle I even made it past the second stage and if you do too, don’t expect it to get any easier. By halfway through the third level, I’ve accepted that this was simply too much and activated god mode to see what else lays ahead that painful path. The earlier maps had a slightly eerie tone to them, and I found it pretty interesting that it capitalizes on that to get progressively more dark & foreboding as it goes on. Pretty soon you’ll find yourself sprinting through a dark forest, being trapped in a haunted house, and making your way down to hell. There are even some boss fights along the way such as Slenderman and a floating head creature. It’s quite an interesting trek through the world of Minecraft, but you’ll rarely have time to take in the ambiance with the nonstop legion of enemies all too eager to violently rip you apart and feast on your corpse. And no, that is not an over exaggeration, the death by zombie animation is that brutal.
You will eventually gather quite the arsenal of new weapons to put to good use and some inventory items with useful effects such as freezing time. It is worth mentioning that you will want to pick Classic mode before starting it up since that gets rid of Brutal Doom’s reloading gimmick that really does not play well with the type of gameplay this mod is going for. Unfortunately, that will break something and cause the weapons that formerly needed reloading such as the shotgun to revert back to its original sprite instead of the new voxel look. A small price to pay if you ask me, as its unrelenting and occasionally very cheap difficulty won’t budge an inch and you will need all the help you can get. This mod is not yet finished and will end in its third act as it switches from a hell theme to a Stalker inspired one. All in all, it is an interesting experiment and will take your hatred for Creepers to a new level should you choose to give it a shot.
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