Let's take a look at two modern first person shooters using the Doom Engine, The Adventures of Square & Shadow Of The Wool Ball (and it's sequel).
The Adventures of Square
The Adventures of Square is a humorous standalone first-person shooter using the ZDoom Engine, featuring real, retro first-person-shooter gameplay, in the vein of older shooters like Doom and cute n' gorgeous 8-bit pixel artwork, giving you the ChexQuest vibes. The game was developed by BigBrik Games (Based in Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States.)
The brilliant Doctor Octagon has been kidnapped! Square must find him, and rescue him from the clutches of the Circle of Evil, a mysterious cult hellbent on the domination of Shape Land. He will square off against terrible monsters and impossible traps in order to prove that he's no square when it comes to justice. Guide him to the center of the Circles' domain, unravel their malicious plot, and win the day fair and square!
Save anywhere and at anytime! Food is health! No ragdoll physics! It has it all!
There's only 2 episodes so far, Cornered By Circles: Radial Dawn and Galactic Lunacy: A Small Step for Square. A third episode is in currently development, however it's been over 3 years.
With the two episodes, it comes with nineteen fully playable levels (and three secret ones - shh!).
Four maps exclusively for Square-Off play (multiplayer VS) and a Arcade-style Time Attack! mode for Square-Off levels. Offering more playable value to the game.
It also features a full, awesome soundtrack in The Adventures of Square OST, courtesy of the musical minds of James Paddock, Xaser Acheron, Augustus Knezevich, Jazz Mickle, and Paul Corfiatis and amazing voice acting by Ben Paddock, Matt Tropiano, and Matt Cibulas.
It supports both keyboard/mouse and controllers.
This game has alot of horrible puns! (But in a good way).
With the amount of work and dedication from the BigBrik team that they put into this, this game is too good to be free. Beautifully crafted ambient soundscapes and the superb pixel-driven artwork and colorful texturing are just wonderful!
It's a stand-alone game without the need for a source-port of Doom, giving you no accuse to play this awesome game. If you want to introduce your children to FPS games, put without blood, gore and hell-spawns. This game is perfect!
It's available for Windows and Macintosh, there's no Linux support at this time.
Checkout it out here.
http://adventuresofsquare.com/
Shadow of the Wool Ball
Quite possibly one of the most adorable Doom mods ever, Made by this German dude named, MSPaintR0cks (with some help), Shadow of the Wool Ball puts you in the shoes of a heroic hedgehog (no, not Sonic) in search of his kidnapped girlfriend. Can he prevail against the evil might of the kitty empire?
"The goal of this ZDoom project was to create a little cartoony game the way it could have been made in the early 90s... on a slightly extended Wolfenstein 3D engine. Which means you get a Wolf3D gameplay style, but with quite a few tweaks and platformer-esque stuff. But to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing when I started the game. I tried all kinds of weird stuff with the Zdoom engine, drew some even weirder enemy sprites and slowly an entire game started to emerge. At some point, it all was tied together by a little story."
Despite the simplicity of the game layout, there's alot of creativity and neat touches within the level design. It feels professional put together like a legitimate indie game. The cute pixel artwork was all done with MSPaint, nothing wrong with that.
Story: Oh crap! An evil, curtain-scratching and hairball-vomiting force from outer space has arrived on your peaceful home planet! You play as Scot, the Hedgehog. They captured you and all your friends, built ugly factories everywhere and littered the landscapes with cat hair and poop. And on top of that, they took that one girl, Rebecca, you just got together with onto one of their ships, which is heading towards outer space! Do you have the balls of wool to pack your guns, escape from your prison, and go on a journey through space to free your world from this abomination?
It's a brilliant concept. A Wolfenstein 3D-styled Doom mod with cartoony graphics, more interactivity, more strategy, and more immersion. That cat boss especially seems inspired by the Sebastian boss from Rise of the Triad. Additionally, those screens which the villain taunts you also borrows from Dr. Proton's taunts from Duke Nukem 1. I love it when a modern mod for an old game like Doom combines the best aspects of old and new games for a fun experience.
The game 3 mayhem filled episodes with 6 levels, awkward english by a non-native speaker! (Oh my!), a completely new and awes0me soundtrack in the vein of Bobby Prince and more horrible puns!
It's fun and it's cute. Very humorous. All of the characters and levels are memorable!
It's fun, but short, would I recommend this game? Yes! (Doom 2 source port required)
https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=52301
Rise Of The Wool-Ball
This sequel is longer than the original and expands with bigger levels and weapons, just the Rise Of the Traid expanded the "limited" Wolfenstien engine.
For the Story: Time has passed since the events of the first game. Peace has returned to Scott and Rebecca`s home planet.
Just as spring has started to bloom there, both of them awake from their hibernation slumber and start doing what they do after every winter - running happily to the nearby woods, enjoying the beautiful nature and joining some sick moshpits at their favorite metal festival after that.
But this time, their routine gets interrupted by Scott... who mysteriously disappears on their way to the woods. Rebecca immediately starts looking for him, and not much later she comes across the reasons of his disappearance... and some familiar faces too. But those kind of faces she never hoped to see again. Furry, green eyed faces with stubby noses. With mouths emitting a stench of canned tuna. Eew.
Their stench is not the worst thing about them, though. It`s much more their deeply sinister intentions, which are far worse than last time...
Just like the first game, it has awkward English by a non-native speaker (though not as bad this time.) and more horrible puns. (they never get old.) It even adds more humor that will make you chuckle. Halfway through the game, it even has an intermission (nice touch).
There's a little easter egg (secret level) called Shadow of the Hedgelord (nice puns). Making it a nice callback to the original Wolfenstien and the original Wool Ball game.
The amazing soundtrack is quite unique!
Just like the first game it's fun and it's cute. All of the characters and levels are even more memorable! Both games' level of detail and uniqueness of this mod is so high that i evaluate it more like an independent game than a mod
Unlike the first game, it has a standalone download, so no Doom required.
https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=56668
I would love to see these two series to have a crossover!