7th of December 2024

New Invasion - Episode 1 by High Treason

High Treason's New Invasion is an hour-long episode. Now, your first challenge is getting this thing to actually run. The author didn't design the episode with a modern port in mind; it's made strictly for the vanilla version of Duke3D (Atomic). What this means is that either you should get yourself a genuine antique computer or just use DOSBox. I happen to have an old 166mhz junk with Windows 98 installed, but it doesn't have a sound card (yet) and I don't really have any convenient means of transferring files to it. After wasting some time trying to get Duke3D to work in DOSBox (your sound settings have to be very specific, just like back in the day), I could put up with its 800x600 resolution (on a 1080p monitor), sluggish mouse aiming, flickering graphics and mono sound effects for about five minutes before calling it quits. EDuke32 doesn't work properly (at the very least doors in the third map won't open), so forgetaboutit. The author recommends xDuke, but it hasn't been updated in years and also has only bad resolution options available. Luckily everything seems to work fine in Rednukem, so fetch yourself a copy here, toss the mod files into the same directory and launch New Invasion via dnni.bat.

High Treason's maps tend to have highly experimental features that demonstrate the author's deep knowledge of how the Build engine works under the hood. So it is here, as none of the rather amazing stuff you'll come across relies on new code but just plain old-fashioned Build editor tricks. The first map has an operable sluice gate, the third a moving train (and this one is a "bit" more elaborate than just a simple conveyor belt effect), the fourth a dynamic clock, the seventh a game of tic-tac-toe, etc. It's not just fancy tricks either, as many of these effects are heavily intergrated into the gameplay; in the fourth map you'll be jumping off a plane without a parachute while fighting enemies on your way down. For someone to come up with all this stuff nearly 30 years after the game was released and have it all packed into an hour-long episode makes you feel like a kid again - at its best, at least.
And the maps aren't exclusively about these effects either. The church with its arches, stained-glass windows and elaborately curved ceiling looks fantastic, the airport with its open terminal and hazy surroundings has a dream-like quality to it, and the use of vegetation against a red sky in the last map is quite effective. Every map is different and they're integrated together well into a seamless adventure as you pursue the mod's mysterious antagonist.

But there are times when all these tricks rather than serve the gameplay turn against it. The sixth level is particularly notorious. Even after looking at a Youtube walkthrough, the map's house section seemed more of a "fuck you" than anything else. (This also may be one section where RedNukem didn't really work up to the mod's standards, as I never saw fire in the fireplace.) The following office section was more logically solvable, and I did in fact enjoy that segment a lot with its breaking of the 4th wall. HOWEVER, solving the puzzle requires not only knowledge of the Build/Mapster32 editor but also that you bother to launch it, making the puzzle basically impossible to solve for those unfamiliar with the editor. Surely this is a rather harsh way of limiting your audience to a small subset of Duke3D players. You're also expected to kill a non-cocooned woman in the fifth map. I can't recall this ever being required before, so it caught me completely off guard until I checked the Youtube walkthrough. It also seems that a temporary quirk prevented me from solving a crane puzzle in the same map until it solved itself after wandering around a good few minutes.

The final boss is quite inventive, being a variant of the Doom 2 demon wall boss type but here involving some neat gameplay tricks without ever being too obscure or difficult. After this there's still a jungle map that feels a bit out of sequence. Moreover, the map involves another puzzle that I could "solve" only by looking at a walkthrough, as it seems to require knowledge of a quirk that I wasn't even aware of.

Conclusion: There's a lot to love in New Invasion, from its extensive use of exotic effects to its all-around good map design and balanced combat. However, there's also a lot in the mod to annoy the hell out of you, from the mod's cumbersome setup process (although you can avoid all that by following my advice in the first paragraph) to its attitude problem of making some of its puzzles practically impossible to solve unless you know everything the author does. Still, I definitely recommend playing New Invasion; just don't hesitate to consult a walkthrough (in addition to the Youtube walkthrough linked above, the mod's readme also has one) even if that goes against your principles.

Score: 8
Download: Mirror 1, Mirror 2 (direct link removed for now as Windows Defender detected a virus in zip file SO BEWARE, although this is probably a false positive)
Version: 1.4, 1.5
Author: High Treason