Awesome, simply awesome. Feels like a true Quake episode. I loved the secrets, some easy to find, some tricky.

Played on easy skill, felt great to me. Ammo is abundant, big weapons became available very early in the game. Plenty of health and armor. Great job!

Architecture and textures - very, very good. Loved the combination of base textures and metal, medieval, like a base was abandoned and repurposed by someone else.

Secret levels - very nice addition, well hidden, but not impossible to find.

Maps were perfect on size, a bit on the smaller side, but it's better than having huge levels, this is how Quake levels should be.

Again, great job! 

Leaving another review here after Slipseer because I did some progress in the pack since. This is a real delight. Among all the routes available... I rarely encounter such a fluid maze. I don't think secrets are easier to find than usual, but there's a kind of logic here too. All pieces fall into place gracefully. What a treat. A perfect fusion of oldschool Quake delight. This is an unconditional must play. Thank you and congrats! 

Just needed to add this. Really fine choice of dark drones and ambient noises. Well done. 

ups....sorry...wrong here! 

can you remove #4 pls? 

I already played your map. It's a cool one, I love it. Thanks! 

post #4 removed and I made a new thread just for your map. 

please, remove my previous post and this one also, just to clean the thread... 

There's far too much goodness to cover in one post really. I'm on my second playthrough now, making an extra effort to find all the secret levels. I just found the 3rd secret entrance (in map 5), which is a brilliant visual gag / red herring, so well-played on that front :}

There's two dimensions to the brilliance of course. The first brilliance is of the more conventional kind: the excellence of the level design and gameplay. It's just about the quakeiest thing that ever quaked. It's truly authentic meat-and-potatoes quake combat, as the mechanics of the game was finely tuned for, back in the id1 days, but with even richer and deeper level design.

The second brilliance is how something this structurally and visually rich was expertly crafted to run perfectly on 1997 quake exes and hardware. As I was exploring the large, complex open areas, I couldn't believe this was all happening in under 900 wpolys at all times, but it was and there's some dark Elder magic going on there for sure.

There's been lots of attempts at an "Episode 5" over the years. I think this goes beyond that, and feels more like the opening episode of a true "Quake 2". 

Great stuff, very enjoyable almost-oldschool experience.

The maps are really good in terms of layout and gameplay. Also very well-detailed given the constraints, although one should argue 900 wpoly is quite a lot compaired to the vanilla maps (then again, fairly little compared to modern maps).

Several bits reminded me of classic, I'm inclined to say, Doom-like design. The rocky areas, for instance.
It all seemed to flow well despite being not linear. Good fun on skill 2. I somehow liked how there often were groups of at least three monsters where one would expect one or two. Good ammo balance, while health was a bit scarce which made it just challenging enough, though the secrets helped as well. Disclaimer: I failed to meet the baseline Zothiqueness criteria, because I died a couple of times and resumed from a savegame..

The Sock mazes are fine, too - and, at least the second and third map, very action-packed with not a moment of respite. Though I'm glad they were the secret maps, and not part of the regular set as they are quite different. At times, I felt they are too much Zendar and with all those freaking SK doors... Running around aimlessly and getting lost while searching for the final rune tableau was pretty annoying; my fault though, since I was eager to get into the tower (and failed). I was disappointed at being locked out of exploring the rest of the ze1m1s upon reaching the exit - would've like the shortcut door to open from both sides eventually.

Sadly, was one shootable button short of finding the Ogre Gym. No iron for me.
Not fond of that trying to enforce setttings in quake.rc. Hands off my config!

Demos (ze1m5 and ze1m5s are protocol 666, my bad) 

Forgot to add, the soundtrack fits nicely, very moody. I found it to be quite loud, though. Had to lower the volume to 50% to work with better with the ingame sounds.