When a friend of mine first told me about Doom: The Golden Souls, i was cautiosly interested. A mod to the sequel to one of the best shooters of all time, infusing it with the energy and goals of classic collectathon platformers like mario 64? As usual, i took a note somewhere and promised my friend i'd check it out sooner or later. Turns out, it's surprisingly good.
The WAD does make a lot of small adjustments to the kinda shaky Doom 2 platforming to make it more enjoyable, and that combined with some generally very solid level design makes the game a blast to play through. There are a few level design hiccups but its overall very fun to work your way through hordes of enemies in the usual classic Doom style while also looking for collectibles in the WADs uncharacteristically colorful levels (at least by Doom standards). For my introduction into the Doom WAD world, this is a hell of a first encounter, and one im glad i experienced.
Note: this is a bit of a legacy review, as i'm clocking in at roughly 7 months between playing and writing. For better or worse, that means i'm typing this mostly out of memory.