#4
Posted 02 August 2021 - 08:01 AM
I've finished the map yesterday, took me about 40 minutes - and have very similar feelings about it as Sanek.
While I can understand the restricted use of textures, lack of details and very flat lighting to the visual style based on Doom (and personally actually liked how the sky and these reddish bridges turned out), this must have been by far one of the most confusing and obscure maps I've played.
There was no indication whatsoever as to what any of the switches did or how many are there to push, which given the labrenthine layout of the map, didn't indicate any sense of progression at all. But OK, I got to the exit - only to walk into an ambush (notably a really cool one, which would definitely work in a bit different circumstances). After getting gangbanged and noticing that the cage protecting the final room will be closed if I escape it, with no way of going back - I just reloaded a save game and wandered around the map for like 15-20 minutes, killing some remaining monsters and thinking what I should do with the yellow card. Only after trying out seemingly all possible ways, I've decided to give another go for the ambush, escaped and noticed that some random doors, spread around the map, which were previously closed - are now unlocked (again, with no indication). It still took a lot walking around the map to find them back, not being sure at all what's going on. The least the author could do would be at least adding some different texture on these doors to indicate they will be open later (or a viewscreen).
As I mentioned before, the map's visual style and layout didn't help at all with these kind of gameplay progression, as basically everything looks very similar, there's no focal points (even the central lava bridges look all like eachother), so backtracking was a pain the ass. Found 12/16 secrets, some were pretty clever, a lot seemed to be just random wallhumping, then the ones at the very beginning in the pitch-black dark rooms got me stuck for another few minutes, as I couldn't figure a way out of that loop.
There were some nice combat encounters (notably one with a bunch of commanders in a dark stairway, with lots of lesser monsters inbetween - it was pretty cool seeing a barrage of RPG rockets flying one after another and there was just enough room to dodge them, but nothing to cover). Other than that, most enemy encounters felt kinda like bullet sponges, even the Battlelords at the end - I think it's the same problem as with Chillin', so too many stayputs, which can be tricked quite easily into just trying to walk into invisible wall. I struggled for ammo quite a bit at the beginning (also the shotgun seemed to be located quite far into the map, same with chaingun - luckily I got a shotgun off of one of the pigs at the very beginning) - but then I came to a series of secrets which proved to be vital. Also, not sure if there was some heavy "infighting" going on at one place or were there just added monster noises, as I didn't look at killcounter, but seemed like 2-3 troopers got taken down by pig cops shotguns when entering one of the central bridges (maybe too tight grouping of monsters?).
From positives, I liked how "classic" it all looked and how the layout felt very 3D, with lots of interconnections (which unfortunately only led to more and more confusion though) and the final ambush was a really neat idea, but with no indication on what's going on it was a complete miss. Not sure if you've had this one beta-tested by someone, ToiletDuck, but I think this would help a lot and make this level better without that much extra work.
This post has been edited by Aleks: 02 August 2021 - 08:01 AM
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