Fun medium sized level. Awesome ambience! The sound effects really add to the feel and the sound of rumbling lava flows combined with the skybox are great. It's too bad that the skybox doesn't have rolling billowing smoke and fire to go with it, as well as some glowing lava rivers, but it's nice as it is.

4/5 though because one of the secret areas was empty. :(

Wouldn't load the .bsp

I did it from Quake Injector, so I'll try again.

Sorry about that. It should work now.

Video playthrough at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONPbt11ujr4 enjoy :)

This map deserves 5 stars, but it has only 3.7 stars. This map is better than most of those 5 star maps.
I am only playing the four star maps just because to find a good one among them.

A very well-crafted map; far less linear and more interconnected than it seems at first. Good choice of monsters, mostly well used. Very reminiscent of 5rivers, but has the decided advantage of not trying to emulate Doom 3. Tough enemies and tricky terrain make for very challenging combat, but it did not feel unfairly hard.

It works well as a sequel to cda (which I would strongly recommend playing before playing this map), and deliberately echoes the earlier map. This deja vu effect was not always that interesting, though: the final battle in particular was, for all its spectacular violence, rather anti-climactic.

Although the atmosphere is this map is superbly engineered, and the skybox works very well, I had to mark it down to 3/5 because the final combat was just so insanely hard that it wasn't any fun -- and that was on medium. Where does it get fun fighting three gugs and four gaunts in an arena with no cover? Unless I missed an important secret like a pentagram, it's just not possible. I'm not ashamed to admit I turned on God Model just to make it end.

Finishing my trawl through JPL's maps, I return to Gateway to Hell, which I see from the comments I actually played a year ago. I scored it 3/5 back then, but I've revised it up one star this time, as I found it a more enjoyable exploration. The final combat is hard, but not impossible -- I didn't cheat this time. (Mind you, if I'd been on hard skill, I probably would have done!)

Great atmosphere due to the excellent lighting, texture choice, brushwork detail, fantastic custom sounds, etc. The dead Quakeguys placed near weapon pickups add a neat bit of implied storytelling. Monsters are well-placed with some exceptions, but the combat is not very memorable in general (hence 4/5). I played on Normal though.

The final battle is tough but not excessively so once you figure out the "right" way to do it. SPOILERS After you grab the quad and enter the arena, you can take out the droles pretty quickly if you have a lot of rockets left, and if you're fast you should be able to eliminate all but one of the gugs before the quad runs out. After the gugs are all down, killing the final wave of gaunts shouldn't be terribly difficult.