Downward Spiral - named after an album by NIN. Not my style, but the title fits. This a very cool level - one of my all time favorites. This is the first really difficult level in TI. One really gets a sense of accomplishment upon reaching the first save terminal. Starting out on Repository II, we're told that we're being sent to a place for group neural network activity. That's an interesting way to describe a church. This is also the first time we hear about the paradox - that the Pfhor could actually alter history - this doesn't sound like a good thing.
Anyway, this level boasts a number of firsts. It is the first, so far as I know, to employ spiral staircases. They are beautifully implemented and feel very real. It is also the first I believe to involve structures with multiple stacked levels. This sort of thing is commonplace today so we tend to take it for granted, but think about the original trilogy - there may be multiple floors, but we rarely can go above or below where we have been. This makes for simpler, easy to follow maps, but it detracts from realism. The map notes for Downward Spiral particularly note the difficulties the mapmakers had in dealing with vertices that were from different levels and making sure they were attaching new poly's to the right ones. More challenging design - more challenging gameplay. I also think that this is the first use of destructible walls. Why should a door be the only way to enter a room - why not have walls that explode? The cross on the rooftop is a nice touch - it looks real, even though it is entirely faked. This level is also the first to make extensive use of ambushes from behind. You learn very quickly that you need to watch your back or you'll be toast. I'm not sure I like that - particularly since it's overdone in TI, but it's very effective in improving player skills!
The cathedral is one of the best laid out rooms I have seen in any scenario. There are many monsters to kill, but ample room to do so without taking damage. The challenge is that there are well-placed walls that obstruct player movement, making the dodging of enemies and enemy fire challenging to say the least. The cathedral also contains something truly unique to this scenario - swinging doors! Did you notice how the confession booth doors opened? How did they do that - the M engine doesn't support swinging doors? Looking in map mode, you can easily see how this works - they used a series of platforms that retract in very quick succession, giving the appearance of a swinging door. Pretty cool, if not particularly real in appearance. We will see this trick again, and on a larger scale. Anyone game for making trick horizontally sliding doors? It should be doable using the same mechanism.
The first time I saw the underground passages behind the destructible walls, it blew me away - literally. This was such a cool trick and so unexpected. The first of these areas also brings us another first in a Marathon scenario - ledge jumping. Yes, we've pillar jumped before, but ledge jumping is tricky in its own right. It helps to strafe-run - you can almost always make the jumps if you run forward and sideways at the same time. There are a lot of other nice touches here. For example, the bell sound when you step into the bell tower. Everything gels nicely here - if you can make it to the first save term!
