Well, although I haven’t really seen any of the “Friday 13th” films (apart from possibly “Freddy Vs. Jason” and/or “Jason X” when I was a teenager), I was still kind of in a horror mood so, when I saw a WAD called “Friday 13th: Jason’s Doom (V.2)” mentioned on the “ZDoom” forums, I just had to check it out.
As usual, I played this WAD using the “GZ Doom” source port and from what I’ve read on the site, it only seems to work with this source port. It sounds weird to say it, but I should warn you that this review also contains GAMEPLAY SPOILERS and at least one GRUESOME IMAGE too.
Anyway, let’s take a look at “Friday 13th: Jason’s Doom (V.2 )”:
This is a single-level WAD that is apparently based on the NES videogame adaptation of the first “Friday 13th” movie. Since the earliest non-handheld games console that I’ve ever played is probably the SNES, I can’t really compare this WAD to the game that it’s based on.
“Friday 13th: Jason’s Doom (V.2 )” takes place entirely in a small house, where you are chased by Jason Vorhees and you must use whatever weapons you can find lying around in order to fend him off. In other words, this WAD is basically just like a boss battle of some kind.
Hi there 🙂
Given the retro 1980s-style graphics, this WAD isn’t really particularly scary, although it certainly has it’s suspenseful moments. In other words, you’ll spend about half of your time searching the house for Jason and you’ll spend the other half of your time frantically running away from him whilst firing whatever weapon you’re holding.
Surprisingly, he isn’t hiding in the creepy skull room.
As for the gameplay, it’s fairly challenging. Not only is there only one health power-up in the entire level, but Jason can teleport around the house at will too. Not only that, many of the weapons that you can find are relatively weak too. Then again, this WAD probably wouldn’t be much fun if it was easy.
Plus, just like in any classic horror movie, there’s a part in this WAD where you think that you’ve killed Jason – only for him to suddenly come back to life a few minutes later. I really liked this element of the game since it was very reminiscent of old horror movies.
Woo hoo! I’ve won! He’s dropped the blue key, so I can leave!
Oh no, I totally didn’t expect THAT…
Another interesting element of this WAD is that it contains surprisingly realistic blood spatter effects that can quickly turn parts of the level into an absolute bloodbath fairly quickly. Although I really liked how this added to the “horror movie” atmosphere of the level, it doesn’t really go that well with the more innocent-looking retro graphics.
Realistic blood spattered on unrealistic walls. This is very uncanny.
As for the weapons in this WAD, there’s a surprising – and realistic- array of weapons on offer here. The most useful weapon is either the crossbow or the standard “Doom” shotgun. Both weapons have a reasonable rate of fire and inflict mild/moderate damage to Jason.
Other weapons include a machete (which is next to useless), the flare pistol from “Blood” (which is considerably less powerful than it should be), a really badass nailgun (which chews through it’s limited supply of ammo very quickly) and the pipebombs from “Duke Nukem 3D”.
This gun looks cool, I’ll just give it a couple of test shots. What? It’s out of ammo ALREADY!
Although the pipebombs are probably the most powerful weapon in the game, there’s a significant delay between throwing them and switching to the detonator. Since Jason moves very fast and also has the ability to teleport, what this basically means is that this weapon is also next to useless.
Come get some! Or not.
All in all, this is a rather fun little WAD. Yes, it isn’t particularly scary and it’s basically nothing more than a single boss battle, but it’s enjoyably challenging and suspenseful.
If I had to give it a rating out of five, it would get three and a half.
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