Play This Now: Urban Brawl (Action Doom 2)

It warms my heart when clever nerds get together to create something new out of old technology. More often than not it results in little more than great big face lifts, like Tenebrae for the original Quake, while technically extremely impressive does nothing to change or improve actual gameplay. But occasionally you get something like Urban Brawl, the stand-alone prequel to a Doom 2 mod I was previously unfamiliar with (and bears very little resemblance to this). What they've produced is basically an old school 2D beat-'em-up in 3D with the Doom engine, with an art style I could only describe as a poor man's Frank Miller with more color. It also offers branching paths with multiple endings, though, much like an old 2D game, it does get brutally difficult at times. You might also have to look past the not-so-great voice acting and writing that makes Max Payne's hammiest lines seem straight out of a Steinbeck classic, but if you can you've got a unique and admirable (and free!) time-waster.

Download, action2.zip (56.9MB)

-K.