Actual - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Actual is an early Sven map where players take on the role of airplane crash survivors. They must penetrate a strange laboratory in order to escape the wreckage.

SCMapDB page

Author: The_6th_Monkey

Date of final release: 2003

Maps in package: 2

Map review of Actual

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | January 23, 2022 | 3930 characters

    Actual is a 2 part mapset released almost 20 years ago as of writing this review. It's an action survival walkthrough map.

    The first Actual map opens in an airplane, which impressively crashes in a sequence where parts of the plane are blown off, revealing the outside. After the crash, players must swim in the half-submerged plane to safety. By swimming you can find what looks like a breakroom area with a few aliens in it. From there, you can swim and crawl around in caves until the map ends. That's the map. It's short and finding your way out of the plane is kind of difficult because it doesn't look like you should be able to swim through it. I think that part of this is also because the scale is all wrong, so the players are actually much smaller than they may think they are while attempting to navigate the underwater wreckage.

    The second map does not begin automatically. You must ensure this appears next in the rotation yourself.

    The second map begins in cave, which all looks like fullbright for some reason. After escaping from the cave, the players will find themselves hanging on the side of a cliff which feels like an off-brand Surface Tension. The trek along the weirdly lit cliffside is fraught with battle with alien controllers and vortigaunts. At the end of the cliff segment, there is a spawnpoint update at the entrance of a runoff pipe. Following that the players will find themselves in some sort of treatment plant. There's a switch quest in here which requites lots of roundabout navigation through ruined industrial plants, as is often the case in Half-Life, battling Ichthyosaurs, Pit Drones, Shock Troopers, headcrabs, and houndeyes along the way. This map, similarly to the first, ends abruptly after you swim through a big grinder looking thing where a bunch of ichthyosaurs came from. This whole water treatment plant thing was a pain in the ass because enemies spawn in all over the entire level portion every time the player makes an ounce of progress, so we would be instantly ambushed and killed, and then have to wade through enemies on the way back. I think this could have been helped a bit if players were given some utility weapons like a grenade or snarks or something. Instead we had to use assault weapons like the MP5 and shotgun, or a precision weapon like the 357.

    Both maps are kind of clunky, are brushed decently but demonstrate glaring flaws, are paced weird and abruptly, feel unfinished by the time they end, and have slow, frustrating combat. Most of the arenas are built to bottleneck players into approaching a linear arena linearly, or linearly approaching an arena where they will be surrounded all at once. The beginning plane crash was pretty neat, and I liked how it looked like rocks were breaking through parts of the plane when escaping it later. Everything else felt very amateurish and grinding to play.

    I don't really recommend this map for anybody. It's pretty forgettable and comes across as rushed. It feels like a bunch of half-baked ideas thrown together right after one fairly solid one was executed almost well. You can afford to leave this off your server rotations unless you're really looking for some filler. It won't last players long.

Pros:

• The beginning plane crash sequence was really neat
• Shooting down alien controllers with the 357 on the cliffside felt fine
• Some of the brushwork looks pretty good

Cons:

• Mostly forgettable after the crash
• Annoying battles most of the time which are slow and frequently railroad players into bad situations
• Second map's lighting is crazy weird
• Both maps end abruptly
• Even the well brushed bits had weird proportions and stuff
• Pretty bad weapons for the situations

Score: 4.8 / 10