#618: Zeppelin Armada
Gear up for some steampunk Doom — and maybe a few feels
Initial release: July 3, 2023
Platform: PC (Doom mapset for limit-removing ports)
Developer: Doomer Boards
Mods used: Gothic Doom, Demon Slayer 1899 1.666, Flashlight++ 9.1, Blood Fixer
Oh, Dexter Hornbuckle, you’ve really screwed up this time. All your gallivanting across the time stream has left a hole for a horde of demons to invade your breathtakingly beautiful steampunk Victorian society with its floating cities and massive airships. What are you ever to do? Well, you could play Zeppelin Armada, the 59th entry in the long-running Doomer Boards Projects series.
Say what you will about the Doomer Boards: they’re anarchic, illiberal, brain-rotted with anti-woke obsession. The shower drain of the Doom community. All true. But Zeppelin Armada will surprise you. DBP as a series has always been a robust hotbed of creativity; after all, it’s been led off and on by Jon “40oz” Vail (of UAC Ultra fame) for the longest time, and in complete fairness, most of its participants tend to be less the brain-rotted, “let’s hunt trans women for sport” type and more just too abrasive and combative for polite society. Either way, Zeppelin Armada represents a big step forward. Sure, their cyberpunk opus, AUGER;ZENITH, got a lot of attention when it was released in 2021; but Zeppelin Armada is just as much a work of genius, if not more. That it got “snubbed” at the 2023 Cacowards is not a statement as to its quality, only a question of its provenance — and anyway, the Cacowards aren’t the be-all end-all of community achievement.
The usual “I played this modded” disclaimer before we go further: I used HorrorMovieRei’s excellent Gothic Doom reskin mod, a blood fixer minimod that gives enemies the proper blood color, Flashlight++ 9.1 (set to a really dim light that nevertheless came in handy once or twice), and the Demon Slayer 1899 weapon mod. Full disclosure: Demon Slayer 1899 is my own update on an older weapons mod by willkuer called Demon Slayer 1887. I didn’t make any changes to its internal programming, I only fixed some bugs with the HUD and added several new graphics for a more complete experience.
Zeppelin Armada comes in two flavors. The first, DBP_59_FULL.wad, has steampunk-y reskins for most of the weapons (though, curiously, not the energy weapons); the other, DBP_59.wad, does not. The experience either way is nevertheless the same, as Doomer Boards aren’t typically in the business of making total conversions, but will often crank out some sort of minor DEHACKED magic to enhance the experience in some small way. You can expect a pretty standard Doom experience with Zeppelin Armada, at least in terms of actually shooting guns and fighting enemies. Where Zeppelin Armada stands out, however, is through the use of some clever storytelling tricks, headed up by 40oz and executed masterfully through the use of midtextures. They’ve done this sort of thing before — DBP52: Havoc in Creation told its story through runes you had to magically translate — but never to this extent, with NPCs you can talk to (by pressing the use button on them repeatedly until they run out of dialogue), quests you can complete (such as rescuing a distraught character’s cat from the mayhem going on outside) and at several points “cutscenes” shown in the form of sequentially-advanced stage plays. The final two maps go even further with dialogue floating in midair as you walk past or through the text, or a narrative appearing before you as you press a button. And while yes, sure, this isn’t the most narrative-heavy game there is even with all the fancy tricks, the team does a decent job of getting you invested in characters like the main character’s daughter Judy in the limited capacities they have. It’s an excellent example of the kind of short-form storytelling that the Doom community has begun indulging in. Can you believe this is all done nearly vanilla, too? It won’t run in the original DOS, but you don’t need a fancy engine like GZDoom to experience this kind of text-intensive storytelling in a Doom wad.
Zeppelin Armada takes you across 18 levels. The first is a simple prologue that introduces you to the world, and while you can leave almost right away, you’re given the opportunity to earn money to buy an early super shotgun. Combat starts properly on the second map, and the difficulty curve grows exponentially, taking you through several scenes of slaughter and culminating in a large mess akin to the final moments of, let’s say, Going Down that is perfectly survivable as long as you’re savvy and make use of your crowd control skills. The final map is an epilogue/credits map, intended to give the player hope that maybe, someday, hopefully soon, we’ll see Dexter and Judy again…
It’s clear that this project was 40oz’s baby; while he was a big part of the narrative outline, he also pulled together a lot of the resources, which triggered a minor controversy when it was discovered that the sprites he used for NPCs were in fact character sprites from the recent adventure game The Excavation of Hob’s Burrow. In his defense, he argued that he had discovered an old sprite sheet somewhere and assumed them to be from some adventure title from the bygone days — and in fairness, Hob’s Burrow is pretty old-school in aesthetic. The devs were flattered to see their characters used this way, but by way of apology 40oz bought the game and implemented new character sprites that, if I’m being honest, kind of fit the theme a bit better anyway.
Mapping duties were split up between 40oz, BiZ, Glikkzy, MortisCausaDonatio, snowy44, LunchLunch, kvsari, Redead-ITA, Sergey “Silverminer” Burow, russin, matador, and Thelokk (who has done work under the name Saltator, and whose name appears as such on the credits screen.) The result is quite varied, a multitude of different approaches to the overall theme. 40oz does a full seven of the maps, which is a pretty sizable portion by DBP standards; he gets us started, and his maps are the ones with the most dialogue. They are probably the strongest in terms of approaching the ideal steampunk world — his maps are gorgeous turn-of-the-century cities full of pipes and machinery and steaming vents bolted onto old brick and wood and stone and metal, with special mention to “Nightwatch” being, basically, a steampunk take on UAC Ultra. Glikkzy’s “Industrial Bureau” is a district of brick and metal, with high towers peeking above the clouds with air-docks for deliveries, while an urbam tram idles at the platform down at street level. “Clockwork Sky” by snowy44 is a sprawling assault on a complex of buildings that reminds me a little of some older urban maps such as Doom II’s “Downtown,” but nicer looking. LunchLunch’s “New St. Icarus” is an interesting run through a tightly-packed urban area with lots of civilians around; should you wing one, hordes of lost souls will chase you towards any sort of shelter, of which there’s honestly rather little. “Bad Balloons” by kvsari is probably the most conceptually simple map, the majority of it being a single lengthy train track through the clouds, but the airship you board has its own interesting moments. If you’re looking for something more old-school, Redead-ITA and Silverminer’s “Highcloud” is just straight up steampunk Plutonia, the most architecturally and aesthetically simple map in the pack by far, but fun nevertheless. “Silvermoon Wharf” by matador is a sprawling empire of old-world flavor as you fight through the streets and atop the rooftops of a waterfront district. Thelokk’s “At Last, Exiled” gives us a chance to assault a well-appointed airship; it’s not as big as what we’ll see later, but it’s plenty of fun. BiZ only gives us two maps; the bigger contribution is “Flying Time Fortress,” which is mostly a large arena to fight monsters in and throw switches, but the moments belowdecks are great-looking nonetheless; the finale map, “Zeppelin Armada,” keeps it simple and stark and symbolic, but it’s powerfully emotional for a Doom map, especially after the ordeal you just went through.
Zeppelin Armada isn’t for everyone. DBPs often indulge in more slaughtery fare — not always, but you’ll certainly feel the pressure playing this, especially on Ultraviolence. But if you like a little bit of slaughter — nothing on the level of Sunder, obviously — and an aesthetic that feels like if Bioshock Infinite wasn’t such a damn Disney movie, then Zeppelin Armada is for you.
— june❤
Zeppelin Armada can be downloaded on Doomworld.
