This is Part 2 of my Realm of Chaos 25th Anniversary Edition review, covering maps 12-20, plus the secret maps 31 and 32.
Part 1 is HERE:
https://froginaboxstudio.blogspot.com/2026/10/games-from-frogs-box-30-realm-of-chaos.html
MAP 12: HOME SWEET HOME (Jason Fowler)
Here we go. A gentle, relaxing opening vista, with a lake and a silent castle wall... but this is the first map with 300 monsters, so expect some company on your way in. The music reflects this, with relaxing wave sounds giving way to ominous, high-pitched droning, as if encouraging the player to keep their wits about them.
The opening rooms are sparse and claustrophobic, only drip-feeding you small clumps of monsters as you delve deeper into the castle. And the exit door is RIGHT THERE? That can't be right.
Well, it requires the blue skull key... and it's gonna take a LONG time for you to get that. Prepare for a long slow burner.
Creeping past the initial meathead guards and into the central courtyard full of imps and soldiers, everything still seems too quiet. Where's the real challenge, you might ask? There are traps, sure, but they're transparent and easily disarmed.
Something is wrong. And you'll be right to be suspicious.
When you hit a switch next to a dead marine, the tempo ratchets up. The walls come down to reveal a squad of spiders and shotgunners, complete with more imps repopulating the balcony you just cleared out.
Then, the walls in the corner of the map open to reveal chaingunner snipers hiding in gulleys, while shotgunners close in... and the purring of an archvile. Oh, and walls surrounding where you just left a pile of corpses. Uh oh.
Better hurry up, before he starts resurrecting all that meat outside.
And then, this room, where you drop into a huge temple full of hitscanners and imps. And you'd better have some bullets because it's too cramped to use rockets without facerocketing. This opens up into a long interconnected half of the level, with plenty of corridors connecting the dripfeeds of monsters.
Throughout this, the tension never quite fades. Even when everything goes quiet, you're always looking over your shoulder, wondering what's going to come next. And the dread WILL pay off.
The biggest scare is this- in a watery blue cave, THREE archviles pop up in front, while a mob of low-tiers blocks your escape. Have fun! A huge chunk of the map's monsters are in this ONE FIGHT. It's certainly a worthy finale to the suspense the map's been building up until this point.
This map is a slow-burn dread-builder, and it succeeds excellently at what it's trying to do. But it wouldn't do it as well without Cammy's MIDI. This track, aptly titled "Hush", churns and boils at a low tempo, but it puts the fear of death into you.
MAP 13: BLOODLANDS (Rob Berkowitz)
Another 300+ monster joint, and this one is NOT a slowburner- it's a huge barnburner instead. Right from the start, there's a bunch of monsters in the opening room, pelting you all over. A huge firing squad of imps and soldiers, with chaingunners and revenants perched up high.
There's an early rocket launcher in an alcove, though, and if you rush to this high mountain and up the stairs, you can find a big cache of cells and a plasma rifle, evening the odds significantly.
Clearing out the hellknights and arachnotrons in this room is hard work that isn't especially fun, but that's the only really drudgey part of the map.
Seeing this yellow key glowing in this darkened room is a hell of a visual. Especially when the lights suddenly turn on, and there's three mancubi at your back for a proper jumpscare.
And this fortress through the yellow door is a brilliant multi-phase setpiece- definitely the map's highlight. First it's a hitscanner rush through the yellow door- good popcorn fight, very fun to blow them all to smithereens with your rockets and plasma. Just watch out for the archvile behind them!
After that, a round of tomatoes and meatballs shows up to surprise you. Then you can go inside, mop up the archvile hiding in there, dismantle the mancubi guard towers, and you're through. It's a bloody murderfest that gives enough gibs to gratify anyone.
After that is a narrow sewer maze which is thankfully not as stifling as it looks. There are a bunch of pop-up blue rooms with duos of heavies throughout, so keep that plasma handy to deal with those jumpscares.
I love how the maze walls come down after you deal with the relevant switch, it's a great way to reduce tedium.
And the megaphsere secret, with an army of imps in front and a spidermama and her children behind, is a great optional encounter that'll probably save your bacon later.
Sadly, this chaingunner ambush surrounded by voodoo dolls is a huge pain in the ass, and probably the only part of the map i hate. Especially the archvile jumpscare in the exit. It's a piece of 90s cheese that I do not particularly appreciate- but thankfully, it's the only janky use of voodoo dolls like this.
This stage isn't the prettiest, or subtlest, but the feeling of charging through a linear armada of foes and blowing them to bits is hard to beat. That fortress fight is worth the price of admission all by itself.
MAP 14: DIE HARD (Jim Bagrow)
This map has a similar start to the last one, with another big ol' canyon full of monsters on cliffs. This one's slightly less linear, with two prongs of attack to go through, and a gallery of hitscanners up top between them. Gunners and pinkies guard the left path, and a group of hellknights owns the right passage. No matter which path you take, there'll be gobs of monster meat closing in from all sides.By leaping off the cliffside, you can get to a door that leads to a pain elemental's house with the cutest diagonal sector squares you'll ever see, complete with lost soul babies hiding in the vent.
That setpiece spills into a demonic meeting room with faulty lights- the mancubi and hellknights here are real problems if you don't cut down the fodder to make space for yourself. Especially with the cacos streaming in from the crate maze outside.
And the mancubus on top of one of those crates makes a mean foreman, he'll snipe you if you're not careful. Let alone the archvile inspector that decided to drop by the meeting room!
Crawling through the vents and eliminating the ductworkers takes you to a huge chasm with two tankards in it, with a bunch of guards posted above and on them. Just don't blow yourself up, the reserve barrels are sitting right on top of them. Somebody oughtta call Demon OSHA.
But the real fireworks start when you jump into this huge tankard of water, where all hell breaks loose.
Each switch summons a huge wave of teleporting foes in from all sides, so use your rockets judiciously and get blastin'- it's an adrenaline rush big enough to make you shout 'Yippie-Ki-Yay' and channel your inner John McClane. (Trust me, it took a lot of discipline to not make more Die Hard the movie jokes in this segment.)
This is an action-movie-level climax to the stage, and a banner fight for the megawad so far. Sure, the clean up of the spidermamas at the end is a bit of a buzzkill, but it can't ruin such an entertaining finale.
This map is a great challenge with some wonderful proto-doomcute aesthetics, really encouraging you to use your imagination. I'm not sure if any of this was intended, but the remote office building aesthetic works really well here.
MAP 15: INFESTATION (Rob Berkowitz)
Hoo boy, this map. It has the highest monster count in the entire megawad, at over SEVEN HUNDRED. That's not to say it's the hardest- most of that number is all in one big fight. But still, it's a whopper, perfectly fitting for the map 15 slot. It feels like a turning point for the WAD as a whole, and one of its biggest skill checks.
I love the start of this map, beginning in this gray elevator and descending into a huge, open place vaguely resembling Industral Zone, but a lot bigger. The tower in the center has a cache of supplies, which is very helpful given I came into this map with seven percent health. There's also a big chained switch secret in the starting room that gives you a BFG and a map, which i would HIGHLY recommend getting if you have the patience for it.
As for the combat, the map whets your appetite with this room. You get a blursphere to deal with a huge hallway of zombiemen, for some lovely gibbitude. It's brain-dead, but mowing down fodder is never unfun.
The centerpiece of the map is a huge crucible in a lava-powered chamber, with imps and hellknights and mancubi fighting for their space on the bottom, while heavies populate the balconies and take shots at you. Not to mention, there's lava all over the floor to limit your free space and time. There's a few tunnels you can scramble into to deal with the peanut gallery while the rest infight their problems away. You could spend your ammo to thin the crowds now, but then you'd be left with little to hack away the opposition in the adjoining challenge rooms.
The side challenges are wild and woolly, with tons of fun gimmicks to wow you. Like THIS room, with a bunch of buttons that lower parts of the room, usually with nasty surprises behind them. Just keep yourself armed and your wits about you, and you'll do fine.
And the lines of explosives with zombies beside them are very fun to explode, of course.
But don't think you can rest on your laurels- on your way back through the tunnels, more monsters repopulate them, including a chaingunner surprise party!
This toxic catwalk room is some good fun, and very treacherous. Hellknights and imps roam the narrow walkways, and chaingunners pop out of the towers as soon as you hit the switches. And at the top, some barons of hell wait to chase you away from your final objectives. It doesn't have a lot of foes, but the geometry encourages you to panic and fall to your doom.
On the right side, there's a hitscanner parade with a quadruple helping of meatballs spewing out of the walls upon hitting the switch. Kill them quick, this room's too small for a lost soul orphanage!
In the room after, you can get the archvile stuck on the stairs into this room and save yourself a huge headache. But the next room after can still be a knee knocker.
It's a big central island with spiders atop it, surrounded by a ton of heavies in a narrow space. You can try and kill them before grabbing the blue key, but then you're open to them firing at you through the windows. It's not the toughest segment in the world, but it's a good shot of adrenaline.
More demons get added to the central room with every side hallway completed, along with two cyberdemons and one last archvile behind the exit door to catch you off guard. There's so many demons in here they'll start killing each other without needing to be asked, especially if you recruit the siege cows to do your dirty work for you. Exploit infighting, don't waste your rad suits, snipe the archviles when you get a chance, and you'll win the day eventually. Massive fights on this scale are rarely as fun as they are here.
But of course, it gets a huge lift from its MIDI. "Machine of My Memories" is the longest song in the RoC25 soundtrack, perfectly fitting for a behemoth of a map like this. It starts off slow, ominous, but builds to a triumphant anthem of carnage, propelling you forward to victory.
And that' not even the end of the map- that would be THIS gigantic gray canyon, with enemies zinging projectiles at you from the distance while you shimmy up the brown pyramid. It's more of a cooldown than a proper char-boiling fight, honestly. Though the sudden appearance of a boneyard of revenants and two more cybers is a bit hectic.
This map is a panopticon of carnage, with a new and exciting setpiece around every corner, and I love every minute of it. I think it's Rob Berkowitz's best work in the entire megawad, and one of the standout RoC25 maps.
The only blemish I can think of is that the secret exit is kind of boneheaded to find, being behind a random wall in the cliffs, but that's what we have DoomWiki for.
MAP 31: THE MANSION (Slava Pestov)
Finally a bit of a breather after the last few bloodbaths, this is a cozy adventure map filled with cute little details every which way. Slava Pestov makes a swing at taking Antoni Chan's crown as the doomcute king of RoC25 in this map, and does a damn fine attempt at it.
I mean, look at these lava chandeliers, chunky benches, everything is as chunky and low poly as it can be, and it's adorable.
Especially this extremely square toilet, complete with demons trying to do their business that you've so rudely interrupted.
Or you can interrupt an imp taking a bath! And even raise the water level of the bathtub! It doesn't do anything, but this is the kind of precious little detail I love to see, especially in 90s maps like this.
As for the gameplay, it mostly consists of bumbling into random rooms and dealing with the occupants all at once, but the scenarios the map presents are joys unto themselves. Like the dining room, where you interrupt a couple of mancubi gourmands and their zombie entourage at the dinner table. Could use a bit of salt.
That's not to say there aren't some spicy things in here. The archvile and baron combo in the library can torch you quick if you're not careful or wasted your ammo on the other residents.
Let alone the demon orgy through the bedroom windows, who'll start teleporting in as soon as you get a good look at them. Should've put up a do not disturb sign, guys!
This map is a lovely breather after Infestation, and an excellent lead-in to the super secret challenge of map 32. Environmental storytelling in Doom is one of my favorite things in maps, and this map has it in spades.
MAP 32: NOWHERE TO HIDE (Rob Berkowitz)
Now, if you want your secret levels to be challenging, this one will do it. It's one big room, with a ton of foes and enough artillery to level a country- or at elast it seems like it. There's enough ammo to get full-up from the start...
If you want more ammunition to blast away the mobs, you need to track down the Commander Keens scattered all around in order to open the motherlode of all ammo caches.
But getting to them is really difficult with all this monster meat in the way- so enlist the spidermommas and cyberdaddies to infight, they can help chop down all the stragglers.
All you need now is to grab the invuln and megasphere, and go to work cleaning up the rest of the boss monsters and chaff. Plus, there's a button that lets you crush the cybers in the center- no monster window dressing here!
It's not especially hard- but it is an absolute joy to play, and turning the tide and blasting the hordes away is a wonderful adrenaline rush. I only don't have much to say about it because of how short it is- but sometimes you only need one fight to make a great map, and this fight is great indeed.
This map DOES get a huge boost from its MIDI, though- cammy kicks you in the ass and tells you to GO, and you LISTEN. It's like you're a shonen protagonist about to steamroll the big bad after getting your powerup. Even the name, Justice for the Planets of Eons Past, feels like something out of an old saturday morning cartoon.
But if you want a REALLY tough secret map... just check map 33! I promise, it's worth it. But, back to the regular map order...
MAP 16: THE WOLF'S HOUR (Jim Bagrow)
Again only with 200+ foes, this map plunks you in a bad neighborhood full of hitscanners and cacos, and it's only big enough for one. So get blasting- you're given more than enough space to dodge the hitscan fire and carve out your turf.
Just watch out for the archvile police, this trio of gangly cops came with flamethrowers today.
The sewers down below are equally occupied, and by much nastier, heavier foes. The revenants are stuck on their perches, but everything else is ripe to close in on you, so beware.
The big cave that you spill out into is less claustrophobic, but no less populated, courtesy of a smattering of hitscanners and a few heavies. So blast your way through to this room...
That's populated with Mancubi on the ledge, an army of imps pouring in, and a big spiderdemon will be ready to rip you to shreds. It's a brutal three-pronged assault, but the imps are the squishiest part of this army. Blast past them to grab a BFG, then pick off everything else from the safety of the Big Fucking Gun's handle.
And that's the end of the map! It's short, to be sure, but very sweet. I wish Jim Bagrow contributed more to this set, he made some fine work with his tightly calibrated, explosive setpiece maps.
MAP 17: NO ESCAPE (Antoni Chan)
Like most of Antoni Chan's maps, this one is short, quick, and breezy with a few flashes of brilliance. It's got just over a hundred monsters, so that means it's another breather. Okay, this opening with the hitscanners pinning you down is pretty hectic, but still.
I do love this bit with the chaingunners stuck on a high console- they can still hit you, though, so blast them all away while dodging the other close-quarters foes.
But then you hit this part, with the flashing RUN!!! text, and things get spicy. Archviles in the dark can see you- and you'd better run, lest you get torched! It's one of my favorite setpieces in the entire WAD- and honestly, I wish this kind of segment was around for some reprisals later.
This congested red cave is a cooldown after that bit of excitement, but it can still kill you if you fall. so don't do that. And make sure to kill everything before you try to shimmy up the stairs, lest you get stuck and bitten to bits.
And this revenant and baron pinning in the red key passage is a tight squeeze indeed. And more and more heavies are hiding in this cramped hall, so take care, use corners, and super shotgun judiciously.
And watch out for the archviles on the way back!
And of course, it ends on a triple cyber surprise, thankfully in an open arena. Not an especially fresh conclusion, but it lets you put the secret BFG to work.
This map isn't especially memorable in the grand scheme of the WAD, but it goes down easy. Even if its title certainly doesn't fit. But it gets a huge lift from its music, which feels like skydiving out of a jet plane. Another winner from Cammy.
MAP 18: DEAD RADIO (Steve Duff)
Holy shit, this map has over 500 monsters. that's how you know it's not messing around. This map is absolutely HUGE, an enormous sci-fi facility with all sorts of bells and whistles. These white lights blinking on and off are a great aesthetic motif that the level uses a lot- one of many brilliant aesthetic touches.
Speaking of aesthetics, just LOOK at this secret unholy ritual, complete with bloody pentagram and skulls stacked up. It's great. But back to the map itself...
To start, the level is huge and roamable, with only occasional trickles of chaingunners, revenants, and pinkies hiding around. The encounters are kept at a drip feed for the most part, but the joy lies in exploring this massive place. You'll visit the main hub multiple times, and usually there's something new- and nasty- waiting for you.There's not a lot of fights I have much to say about, since most of them are pretty self explanatory, but there's a few. The slime room with the crushers can get hairy in a hurry thanks to some mean cybers, so keep away from them or try to lure them to a flattened doom- or make them infight with the mobs of hellknights and revenants.
Which, by the way, are let loose when the slime rises upon collecting the key. You can get sandwiched FAST if you're not careful.
And there's a triple archvile ambush when you hit the switch afterwards, too! That's probably the rudest part of the map, but you'll probably only die to it once.
Another highlight is foretold by this ominous sight of a bunch of corpses in front of a door... a lovely little bit of aesthetics.
This leads to a huge mess of a fight. You've got a spider mastermind behind you, ready to chew you to shreds if you're idle, but a equally huge mess of revenants and other horrors up ahead, spilling out into the main room in a huge ambush. Find a safe corner for yourself and do NOT get stuck, or you're dead. The three archviles at the far end of the room are priority ONE, otherwise you are completely hosed.
The cage fight with the archviles and mancubi is only hard if you get caught off guard- you can just run outside and snipe the vile from the distance.
The final fight in the pit of nukage is a beautiful piece of chaos. Three passages to ascend to and hit switches in, but both have archviles who'll teleport into the arena and get to work reviving the corpses. And the second one will summon TWO spidermamas in there, too! Infighting will only get you so far, but waiting out the chaos will win the day. Just keep an eye on those rad suits, tick tock!
The secrets can take the edge off this map's immense length, but they are hard to find. I had to look up most of them. That aside, Dead Radio is one of RoC25's standout maps- paced brilliantly for its length, electrically entertaining, and visually a sight to behold. It's a testament to Steve Duff's immense quality as a mapper that my top THREE maps in this WAD are all his work, and this is one of them.
And the MUSIC, is one of the grooviest tracks in the entire wad. "...Dinner With the Moon" is a dance beat worthy of Club Doom itself, and makes the level feel like a perfect flow of combat and setpieces.
This is one of those maps that elevates an entire megawad by its presence... and it's not even the best map in the set!
MAP 19: PORT FURY (Steve Duff)
This map may have less monsters than Dead Radio, but don't relax yet. The opening room is full of hitscanners, which killed me a LOT since I came into this map with only a smidge of health left from Dead Radio.
The opening rooms here are very oppressive, cramped, and not as fun as you'd expected. This room, with the hitscanners stuffed in tight passages and revenant and archvile hiding behind the pillars, is pretty aggravating even with the free soulsphere.
That, plus this green marble room. Filled with cacos, arachnotrons, hellknights, and two barons blocking you from getting the yellow key. It's a bit downbeat for my liking. But if you look carefully around can get you a super shotgun and a secret plasma rifle to take the edge off.
And this stairs segment with the pop up monster closets behind you is aggravating with Doomguy's lack of looking up or down.
That's not the exciting part of the map, though. that would be THIS, when you get lowered into a giant port, complete with ship, and a huge gaggle of monsters waiting for you. Get pillagin', matey!
Dodging around the dead simpletons' projectiles is good fun as you scramble to get to your objectives. The cyber-captains is particularly dangerous given he looks over the entire map- so don't stand still or he'll turn you into paste. Nor can you ignore the spider-queen of the seas stashed in one of the high buildings.
But there's oodles of cells, rockets, and health all around, so let your weapons flow.
Dont' bother trying to kill the boss monsters- you can find buttons to crush them for you later. One such switch opens this packing facility off to the side, staffed by imps and Nazis. Who knows what they're doing in there, but it's your job to keep them from hauling anchor.
Leap into the revenant crucible, grab the red key, don't get burned on the way. Then, you have to escape through the production line itself- the dangerous spots conveniently marked with pounded meat.
Then, the entire harbor gets overrun by a caco and lost soul swarm, and the cybers get let off their pedestals. Don't think you can just run away, either- there's an extra cyber and two archviles behind the exit door, AND two Revenants on the elevator...
And once you get back to the opening rooms, they've been repopulated with hitscanners and change. The slime room following is another clunker- that exit sign's not fooling anybody. As soon as you get your bearings, you can leave.
I'm a bit mixed on this map. It's got some good ideas- but most of the rooms in it resort to cheap gotcha traps, which Mr. Duff has shown he's above for the most part. And the map's action is a lot less elegant than what's come before. At least the ship area is cool... but the surrounding rooms are less so.
MAP 20: TELEPORTER CENTRAL (Antoni Chan)
Now this is a bit of a gimmick map- but it's also Antoni Chan's most complex map in the entire set, comparable to Outpost 27 in terms of spatial efficiency, but far more vicious and a fair bit bigger. The main room has a lot of teleporters in it that take you across the entire map. More than one of them lead to the same room, so there's a lot of different ways to approach this one. Each end of the map has a different key, and you'll need all three to make your escape.
In the east, there's this claustrophobic tunnel with a parade of hitscanners and revenants, which is probably the easiest one to deal with since all the monsters in it come single file.
It's connected to a toxic basin, which of course can really mess you up if you slip and fall. Once you raise the bridge to get to the balcony, it's just a matter of hitting switches, and dealing with the walls of meat pouring in until the key is yours for the taking.
This pillar room is a bit of a bear to deal with, with all the hitscanners warping in in this awkward as hell arena, and the arachnotrons peppering you from up above. Definitely my least favorite.
At least you can run out of the room, letting you deal with the monsters trickling back to the starting hub single file. Of course, taking the alternate route to kill off the arachnos first can also ease up the pressure.
Or, find a secret to block the pillars from rising, thus making it significantly easier.
In the west is a plasma shootout with an army of soldiers and arachnotron tanks- definitely my favorite room in the set.
Especially when the archvile officers roll in at the end, trying to restart the party. Better hope you saved your rockets, because clogging the gap with ordinance is the only path to safety.
The ending room is a kick in the teeth, though- FOUR archviles surrounding you, but at least you get a megasphere to take off some of the burn. Not that it matters, since the mancubi kill you on a death exit immediately afterwards, setting the stage for the next map.
This map is a very good time, with a fair few different ways to approach it and a nice variety of challenges. And the nonlinear nature makes all the attempts that ended in death sting a little less. Definitely Antoni Chan's best map in the set.
Part 3 of the review is HERE:
https://froginaboxstudio.blogspot.com/2026/10/games-from-frogs-box-3075-realm-of.html
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