These are tricks that plenty of horror games pull, of course, but they’re done well here-and, again, it’s worth remembering that this is a Doom mod. There’s also a surprising amount of sophistication in how the game builds tension, with flickering lights, an eerie ambient soundscape, and objects clattering to the floor as you turn blind corners. It also reminds me a lot of the similarly grubby Condemned games-those weird CSI-meets-Manhunt first-person shooters the world seems to have forgotten about. Fort Oasis is a beautifully filthy place with grimy textures, a tastefully muted colour palette and a subtly unsettling atmosphere reminiscent of the first few Silent Hill games.
Wadaholic has done some incredible stuff with GZDoom here, taking advantage of the popular port’s support for high-res textures, detailed 3D character models, and ambient lighting. The first thing you’ll notice when you fire up Total Chaos is how good it looks-and I don’t just mean for a Doom mod.
Someone who played the demo commented saying that it was impossible to make a Doom mod scary, which inspired Wadaholic to prove them wrong. But it wasn’t until 2004, after releasing an early demo of what would eventually become Total Chaos, that the project began in earnest. His first major mod release was Doom Tournament, a 32-level map pack that added CTF and king of the hill multiplayer modes to the game. Wadaholic has been playing Doom pretty much his whole life, and started making his own maps at just eight years old.
Even so, the fact that the guts of the ancient (but still great) Doom 2 are powering this thing is impressive. I should clarify, however, Total Chaos runs on GZDoom, a 3D-accelerated Doom port that adds support for dynamic lighting, sloped floors, Quake 2-style skyboxes, and other stuff the vanilla game could only dream of rendering. This is such a departure from the game it’s based on that I’d believe you if you told me it was a standalone project built from the ground up.
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