A Day in Hell - GrandmasterJ

 

    A Day in Hell comes in two flavors, a daytime map with a house filled with human grunts and a nighttime map with a house filled with zombies that teleports players to an arena to fight human grunts after they've finished clearing the house.

SCMapDB page

Author: MassAsster

Date of final release: 2003

Maps in package: 2

Map review of A Day in Hell

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | December 29, 2021 | 7122 characters

    I think A Day In Hell is a fine example of an average map. It does a few things I like and it does a few things I don't like, most times it seems to do things that have good and bad sides to it that all balance out.

I played the e1 map first, it started us off in a nice spawn room with a decent selection of weapons and no ammo, which is a chronic problem in most Sven maps, lack of ammo. Taking a single step forward activates a cutscene explaining our mission. Swimming through the portal flanked by two scream-mask wearing guards you get to a house full of human grunts. The grunts were mostly trapped inside the house, shooting ineffectively through non-breakable glass. But some of the windows open and there are a few spots where the glass does break and some spots with gaps in the windows.

    The combat would be great, but it was all too frequently that my teammate and I would run out of ammo and suicide charge into the fray just to respawn and resupply. The lack of ammo is a huge issue throughout both maps.

    The house itself has some weird proportions, its a little big. I can understand high ceilings but all the textures are stretched so the player models look and feel small in the rooms. The design makes me feel like a midget. Then some of the doors are placed too close together or hallways are not wide enough for doors, getting caught between doors was an issue. The texture is also flipped wrong on one or both sides of many doors., doors pivoting on the side with the doorknob.

    Eventually, after killing every single person in the house the basement opens up. Down the staircase and into a teleport into an even worse proportioned basement there are even more grunts. Some samey boring badly proportioned rooms later we get a cutscene where we learn it is too late and the virus has been released. We lose. The End.

    That was e1, contrary to the map description f1 feels waaaaay different. The house map itself is the exact same, and the basement section is very similar, but enemy composition, lighting, and basement section are all pretty different. Plus, the unrelated grunt section is a whole other thing.

    After the less well-equipped spawn room (only get a revolver) that still does not have any ammo we get a similar cutscene the first map had, but with zombies. After swimming through the portal we are thrust into a swarm of respawning zombies. I have a love/hate relationship with respawning zombies, it is very hard to tell if they spawn infinitely, if there is a limit, and whether or not another trigger is involved. I will say that after we killed the boss (which eats corpses and regains all it's health, so it took a little strategy) we managed to kill the zombies until they stopped respawning.

    After clearing both the boss in the house, all zombies from the house, and all zombies outside the house, in that order, the basement opens up.

    The basement is just a touch worse proportioned than the upstairs, the stairs up must be jumped up, the steps are too high to allow actual walking. This is actually a great feature/oversight because there are plenty of gonom replacement enemies down here that will regain all their health by eating corpses. Kiting these monsters through the whole basement and to these stairs so we could snipe them safely was the only way we could do the basement.

    There is a staircase halfway through the basement that is a master-class in function over form, just high enough to step on, and each step was the minimum width possible. It looks terrible but I had a great time on it.

    The final boss is a gonome with the nemesis skin that some of the Resident Evil Sven maps use. The zombies use They Hunger models, and there are some licker models.

    After everything is dead a teleporter opens up underneath where the player is teleported to after the portal in spawn. This means that players still alive after the house is cleared will have to suicide to access the next area. After going through the spawn portal players will teleport to the house, fall a bit, and then teleport to a warzone. This is very weird, jarring, and could certainly have been handled better.

    The totally unrelated grunt area had the same respawning enemy conundrum as before, are they spawning infinitely, to a certain number, or is there a trigger? I believe this section has infinitely spawning grunts. Which means completing the objective, which is given as 'destroy the grunt's communications', will be accomplished by rushing.

    The area has these bunker pyramids filled with weapons and ammo. Why aren't these appearing in the spawn area? The shotgun appeared in the spawn area, why not these? Anyway, you get dropped between two pyramids, right out in the open for a grunt to shoot you once or twice sometimes. Gear up in the pyramids which have nice big windows allowing grunts to sometimes wiggle inside and plenty of grenades to pour in.

    Speaking of grenades, I noticed a lot of grenades thrown by grunts in this area seem to hit an invisible ceiling and come back down almost on top of them. I had no problems lobbing grenades but perhaps the ceiling is too low for AI thrown grenades.

    There are plenty of walls high enough to make ducking down behind them totally worth it. There is also a moat in the middle of this area. It's hard to get out of the moat. Grenades are sprinkled in front of some walls between spawn and the moat, grenades are essential for our two person strategy for dealing with this section. This means we had to run around the frontlines collecting resources. It would have been better to spawn all this stuff in spawn.

    Our winning strategy was having one person draw the enemies, the second person coming in later to take their attention, and the first person running to the other side, tossing all their grenades to scatter the grunts, and then hitting the communications array (a radio under a canopy) with the crowbar which won the mission and ended the map.

    I went into writing this review intending to give it a 6, but for every good thing there was equal bad. Nothing went so wrong that it ruined the enjoyment, and nothing went so right that I have nothing to complain about. A truly average map.

Pros:

• Spawn area that had some weapons
• Lots of straightforward action
• I appreciated the cutscenes, it definitely seems like this map had a lot of care and effort put into it.

Cons:

• Wonky proportions, architecture of the house is hard to navigate, especially the doors
• NO AMMO
• No real indication on respawning zombies in the first half of f1, we killed all of them as a last resort to attempt at progression
• There were a lot of enemies that ate player corpses for full health, this is annoying and for two players needed cheesing
• NO AMMO! When we get ammo in the second half of f1 it's broken up into pyramids and you spawn in the middle, just put it in the spawn room

Score: 5 / 10