TOTAL CHAOS
A modthatmakesDoom2 unrecognisable.ByAndyKelly
Thevoiceactingisn’t
AAA,butdoesthejob.EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT (^) I GUIDE I HOW TO I DIARY I REINSTALL I M U S T P L A Y
elements from Amnesia, Resident Evil,
Silent Hill, and even Dark Souls. And
so, after a decade of experiments,
false starts, and dead ends, Total
Chaos as we know it was finally born.
VANISHING POINT
Total Chaos is set on Fort Oasis, a
remote island in a wind-battered sea
that was once home to a thriving coal
mining community. But, suddenly,
the miners disappeared, leaving the
facility abandoned and something
lurking in their place. The game
begins with you waking up on the
island after a shipwreck, with a voice
on the other end of a crackly radio
compelling you to find them. But it’s
clear from the offset that something
has gone seriously wrong here.
Thefirstthingyou’llnoticewhen
you fire up Total Chaos is how good
it looks – and I don’t just mean for a
Doom mod. 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. 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. 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.
There’s also a surprising amount
of sophistication in how the game
Y
es, this is the Mod
Spotlight section of
the magazine, but
calling Total Chaos a
mod is doing it a
disservice. This remarkable thing,
created by Wadaholic, transforms
Doom 2 into a survival horror. But if
you’re expecting old Doom assets
flipped into some kind of clunky
horror game that sounds cool on
paper but doesn’t quite work, well...
just look at the screenshots.
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. 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. Even so, the fact
that the guts of the ancient (but still
great) Doom 2 are powering this
thing is impressive.
Wadaholic has been playing Doom
pretty much his whole life, and
started making his own maps at just
eight years old. 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. But it wasn’t until
2004, after releasing an early demo of
what would eventually become Total
Chaos, that the project began in
earnest. Someone who played the
demo commented saying that it was
impossible to make a Doom mod
scary, which inspired Wadaholic to
prove them wrong.
He created several prototypes
using the GZDoom engine, including
an ambitious monsters versus
marines multiplayer shooter with a
Counter-Strike-style buy menu. But,
eventually, he settled on the idea of a
survival horror game, borrowing
IT’S CLEAR FROM
THE OFFSET
THAT SOMETHING HAS
GONE SERIOUSLY
WRONG HERE