Total Chaos is a relentlessly bleak and occasionally terrifying remake of one of Doom's greatest mods, though its brilliant legacy is also its biggest weakness

I first became aware of the work of Sam Prebble through Turbo Overkill. Or at least, I thought I did. A largely solo project by Prebble developed under the studio name Trigger Happy Interactive, Turbo Overkill blew me away with its wildly ambitious levels. Taking you from the bowels of its cyberpunk city up into the thick of an interplanetary war, it hardly ever stops throwing creative weapons, abilities, and ideas at you. You even had a retractable chainsaw installed in your leg.

Turbo Overkill was my favourite FPS of 2023 and possibly the best retro shooter I've ever played, certainly contending with the likes of Dusk and Prodeus for the title. Then, with the shock of a repressed memory slamming into my frontal lobe, it occurred to me that this isn't the first time Prebble has done the seemingly impossible.

Prior to making my favourite boomer shooter, the New Zealand-based designer was the architect of Total Chaos. Developed over the best part of a decade, this total conversion mod for Doom 2 did truly unspeakable things with id Software's primordial 3D tech. A grungy survival horror built using GZDoom and, presumably, a Faustian pact, Total Chaos featured proper 3D models, multilayered melee combat, and complex inventory management atop the Doom sourceport.

Prebble has a knack for punching far above his weight, so I was already primed to devour whatever he produced next. This turned out to be a full remake of Total Chaos, turning the mod into a premium FPS that launched on Steam in November. It reconstructs Prebble's mod in Unreal Engine 5, expanding the nightmare with several additional chapters.

Often, the results are as impressive as Prebble's work on Turbo. Total Chaos is almost suffocatingly atmospheric and, in parts, genuinely frightening. But unlike Prebble's shooter, the spectre of the past looms large over Total Chaos in a way it cannot fully escape.

Total Chaos takes place in Fort Oasis, a grey industrial town draped along the coastal cliffs of an abandoned island like a concrete mourning shroud. Your character is shipwrecked upon the shore by a sudden storm, drawn into Fort Oasis by a grim voice that speaks to you over radio, offering to help you escape.

The visual design of Total Chaos is fascinating. The game mostly takes place in maze-like corridors with occasional excursions outside, a combination that acts as a potted history of Prebble's career. The exterior scenes put Prebble's experience as a visual effects artist on full display. The dramatic facades of Fort Oasis teeter on the edge of its cliffs, with segments clearly having crumbled already into the ocean below. Above the rooftops, the skies roil like boiling lead, pelting you with wind, rain and even lightning as you skulk through writhing alleyways and shuffle along rusted gantries.

When you descend into Fort Oasis' bowels, Prebble's Doom-modding heritage comes to the fore. Total Chaos' twisting corridors are far more detailed and varied than either the original Doom or Prebble's mod, often lined by jumbled gravestones or disguised to look like shopping arcades. Nonetheless, their angles and dimensions betray their demonic heritage. You can almost hear id Software's shooter scratching behind the walls of Total Chaos, its screams for freedom muffled by the high-fidelity lacquer coating every inch of Fort Oasis.

Unpicking these corridors is what I enjoy most about Total Chaos, as was the case with the OG mod. The game is divided into nine different levels, each of which is a cleverly disguised, semi-open maze. The way Total Chaos straddles the line between Doom and a more conventional survival horror game is fascinating, feeding Resident Evil-style environmental puzzles through Doom's simpler game of 'find the keycard'. One level, for example, involves locating multiple fuses to unlock doors, while another requires you to find a pair of bolt-cutters to slice through padlocked passageways.

All of this is experienced through Total Chaos' perpetual atmosphere of dread. It's clear from early on that your character is a few shells short of a loaded shotgun, prone to visual and auditory hallucinations that regularly intrude on the level design. The brick and mortar passages you spend much of the game traversing will suddenly shift into spiralling flesh tunnels where the walls writhe with squealing bodies. As you traverse these glistening warrens, snippets of recalled conversation, detail a murky past. A toxic relationship. An abandoned child. A mind that slowly locked itself off from all external help, possibly beyond rescue.

I always admire a horror game that strives to be about more than cheap scares. But I don't think Total Chaos quite has the narrative chops to pull off its ideas. Walking the psychological horror tightrope is very tricky, and Total Chaos alternates between being too vague and too on the nose with its allegories and allusions.

Still, it's a better story than most Resident Evil games have, and its weaknesses don't stop Total Chaos from being frequently tense and occasionally terrifying. Several early moments had me verbally nope-ing out as I fled from some newly encountered horror. And while you will eventually become inured to its most frequently deployed scares, several later sequences will throw you right back into gibbering panic. A mid-game section set in a library had me practically chewing on my own aorta.

As a spooky exploration game, I like Total Chaos a lot. But there are areas where I don't think Total Chaos does enough to separate itself from the mod. Combat, particularly melee combat, is where the game is weakest. Total Chaos lets you craft an impressive array of melee weapons to dispatch enemies with. Stick a hammerhead to a pole to make a sledgehammer, glue some scissors to a handle to make a scissor axe, shove some nails through a plank to fashion a makeshift bat. There's a lot of flexibility here.

Unfortunately, none of these weapons are particularly satisfying to wield. Everything is too lightweight in Total Chaos, from your character's overly nippy dodge ability, to the lack of impact when you drive a pickaxe into an enemy's braincase. Firearms fare better, though you'll use them far less frequently, and even here there is a hollowness to pulling the trigger that belies the meticulous visual design and sleek reload animations.

Moreover, while Total Chaos holds back on guns, it is far too generous when dishing out other resources. I hardly ever felt short on items, regularly having to leave discovered resources behind because my character simply could not carry everything. Wandering into every fight laden like a packhorse further diminished the tension of the already lacklustre combat.

There are ways the overabundance problem can be remedied. Sort of. Survivalist mode makes resources scarcer, but it also introduces a hard save limit which you have to deal with on top, which I found too much of a trade-off. Then there's the recently added new game plus mode.

Not only does this reduce available resources, but it also reconfigures the layout of numerous levels so you can't rely on muscle memory to progress (including an all-new final chapter) and throws in a fearsome persistent enemy to spice things up. It's almost a shame you have to play through the game once to get to this mode, as in many ways it feels like the truer Total Chaos experience.

In some ways, Total Chaos is its own worst enemy. As a Doom mod, Total Chaos was exceptional, unprecedented, a work of bona-fide vision. But perhaps inevitably, its transition to a full game does not represent the same leap. Meanwhile, in becoming a premium release, Total Chaos pits itself against much stiffer competition, and its approach to psychological horror and brutal melee combat feels diminished in the cold hard light of your SOMAs and Silent Hills.

Ultimately, Total Chaos isn't quite the trailblazing masterpiece that Turbo Overkill was. That said, it's still worth blasting through, especially if you're a fan of survival horror or the mazey level design of early '90s shooters. Most of all though, now that Prebble has finally put this long-gestating baby to bed, I'm looking forward to seeing what ridiculously ambitious project he comes up with next.