File:Death By The Dozen (Aftershock)

Description
Death By The Dozen, made for about six players. I thought six was a half dozen, so I have absolutely no idea why the level is named as it is. Apparently it is a common name to use for bakery based goods, so I guess there is sugary goodness somehow involved?

This level, like the previous, has a nice amount of details and space. The level never feels too large in a room, plus every room has brushes altering the flow and making the world appear more detailed. We also get the first level in a while to actually have the name represented in-game.

Interconnectivity is pretty decent. I wish there was an easier way to get from the Water room's Elevator to the platform, running jumps aren't exactly the type of thing that should be relied on often in such an environment. Almost every room has two exits, the exception to the rule being those that are "secret rooms".

We get a couple of rooms that are "secret" in this level. They aren't true secrets as they aren't designated as such, but they are behind Movable Walls that can easily be missed. These rooms are the ones I save for last, first running around the level in the rooms considered to be part of the normal experience before delving into these caches.

The "secret" areas are included in the interconnectivity rating I stated above. Not including these, there are plenty of dead ends. If you know there are secret rooms included in the level, you would be right to search these rooms for some way forward. You can find 2/3 of the secret rooms in this fashion.

Even though the rooms are supposed to be secret, it appears that the designer recommends knowing about them prior to playing to the point that he will explain their location in depth in a readme. Why they are secret in the first place makes little to no sense, especially as there are few resources outside of these rooms. It seems a good excuse to cluster together a bunch of resources while not having much otherwise of use.

The first secret room is off of a room with a couple 25 Health (behind a wall with no clues but being a dead end). Under most circumstances, I would say these 25 Health would be useless, but due to spawn times there might be some situation whereby the extra health could be useful. The level designer even states that this is a hotly contested room, which means it is even less logical for it to be secret. Basically, to paraphrase the idea, he states that "I threw these secrets into the level, but they are a big part of the level and thus if you don't know about them you will be missing out".

The courtyard is rather secret, requiring you to hit the floor of the upper level. As you can otherwise be trapped up here, it is good that such an escape point exists. Even though it is hidden, it is not considered a secret like the other ones, mainly because it has no big cache. The courtyard section of the level does have plenty of weapons though, including one of the few Grenade Launchers and a small cluster of Rockets.

The real secret room of the courtyard is found by hitting the corner of the sky. This one is pretty easy to spot from the Elevator platform (meaning you have to turn around), the indentation will reveal the place to hit. This cache is pretty similar to the first (plus brings you to the first), giving you lots of Nails and Rockets as well as appropriate weapons, two 100 Health for max health, and a Red Armor.

There is another route to the courtyard found by hitting a wall behind some Rockets in the Double-Barrelled Shotgun room. The irony here is that this is probably the biggest secret of the map, even if it rewards you with basically nothing besides another route, because there is absolutely no clues or audio cues to tell you of the location of the Wall.

The third secret is located in the room with the Double-Barrelled Shotgun (only one in the level surprisingly, most of the map has the better weapons) and the Yellow Armor. This is considered to be the Mother Load, a massive collection of stuff including a Red Armor that makes the Yellow Armor useless and weapons that make the Double-Barrelled Shotgun useless. The Mother Load was the easiest secret room for me to find, being in the only dark corner of the Double-Barrelled Shotgun room.

The Mother Load is not contested over heavily as nobody knows about it for whatever reason (why anybody knows about Secret #1 but not Secret #3 is a mystery to me). This is also the only location of a Pentagram, plus an easy Quad to retrieve. All this stuff is used to dominate the heavily contested area of Secret #1, accessed by a Teleporter in Secret #3.

A decent level with nice architecture, my least favorite portion is the usage of "secret rooms" to try to avoid any decent placement of stuff. The Yellow Armor room's stuff is nullified by the Mother Load, while little else of interest exists outside of rooms assumed to be secret. Levels where knowledge is this important isn't that fun for those new to the level.