MAP32: Go 2 It (The Plutonia Experiment)

MAP32: Go 2 It is the second secret map of Plutonia. It can be reached from MAP31, and uses the music track "Nobody Told Me About id" from Doom.

This level is a highly edited version of Doom II's MAP01: Entryway.

Overview
In the interlevel screen who prelude Go 2 It, it is stated by Id Software it is "the hardest map we had ready for ya". This scaring introduction is due to the unmatched quantity of tough monsters included in the map: an army of 206 very mighty enemies (scoring a total of 138,820 hit points, a record) will attack the player packed in large groups. Among them, 11 pain elementals, who will generate countless lost souls, and nothing less than 19 arch-viles who will take care of multiply the monster's final number. The map is so saturated with enemies that harder skill levels can't host more monsters than "I'm too young to die" does, and special care was took not to allow the player to meet more than a certain number of them at once. Even so in vanilla Doom is inevitable to reach the hard coded active monsters limit, who prevent certain enemies to move even when provoked, thus rendering them harmless targets.

However, despite its fame, the map is quite easy, provided the player knows already every trap. In the first chamber all weapons are present, and plenty of ammo is found thereafter, as well as 9 megaspheres. Specially, the level design allows the player to reach, all along the game, safe spots out of range from enemies, where he can wait monster infighting to make most of the work.

Strategy
Although, at first, Go 2 It may seem to be overdone and far too difficult, there are actually a few important things to keep in mind when playing this.
 * Pick up a key, open a door or move to an unexplored place always reveals pleanty of enemies, who can circle the player and push him in helpless positions, but all those traps can be easily avoided if they are known.
 * It's critical not to let monsters wander everywhere, and eliminate every group before find an another.
 * The player can always engage enemies from spots out of reach to them, at condition he knows where to hide; using well this strategy a player can also win using only the single or double-barrel shotgun.
 * Cells and rockets are widely available, so the player can keep a big distance between him and enemies, provided he knows how to address them in favorable places.
 * Megaspheres are commons, but they must be used with parsimony

Secrets

 * 1) The outdoor area (analogous to the outdoor area of Doom II MAP01: Entryway) counts as a secret.
 * 2) The room containing the red keycard (analogous to the rocket launcher room in Entryway) counts as a secret.

Routes and tricks

 * Three waves of monsters will infest the west courtyard, but the player can hide in the central room and wait enemies kill each other, and can even drawn in there a group of pain elementals from the southern room and a group of mancubi from the north-western corridor.
 * Demons from the northern chamber and monsters revealed after the blue key is taken can be mixed in the central-western room while the player hide in the central room.
 * Cyberdemons and barons of hell from the eastern courtyard can take care of each other.
 * While arch-viles are usually prioritary targets, on this map they can be used to ressurrect weak monsters in order to damage as much as possible strong enemies.
 * Cyberdemons on the western courtyard will likely survive all infighting, but it's not necessary to kill them to take the blue key.
 * Cyberdemons on the eastern courtyard will likely survive all infighting, but it's not necessary to kill to arrive to the exit.
 * All immobilized monsters can be spared, except the arachnotron who blocks the southern corridor, the arch-viles who custody the central-western room and the cyberdemons blocked in the central corridors.
 * Beside them, only the mancubi in the eastern porch must be killed directly by the player.

Records
The Compet-N records for the map are:

Similar levels
Hell Revealed features many levels with similar gameplay, several of them harder yet. See also Hell Revealed II, Alien Vendetta and Kama Sutra.