Goreship Splatterforest - Dunkelschwamm

  

    I am guessing the 'Goreship' from the map title is the white ship that reminds me a toilet in the above screenshot. I am guessing the splatterforest is the simple forest not pictured. There is also a Hell section of this map but I guess 'Goreship Splatterforest Hell' was too long.

SCMapDB page

Author: Robootto

Date of final release: 2006

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Goreship Splatterforest

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | January 1, 2021 | 3443 characters

    The best you can hope for with Robootto maps is a kind of strange sense of exploring something that couldn't so much to be have been made as much as to have happened. Goreship Splatterforest gives those vibes at times, and has a surprising sense of progression within. Room after room of seemingly infinitely respawning aliens. The players must escape from a bizarre structure which we could pretend is a ship, starting from the bathroom.

    The player is equipped with only a pistol and a measly helping of bullets out of spawn, so wading through the respawning bullsquids and other various baddies on the way up to a large suspended room within a room which houses the map's weapons. Dying and respawning has consequences, and those consequences are annoying and frustrating. Since most of the map is respawning enemies but no clear direction except the one you stumble on it feels annoying and frustrating throughout. There's a quality in this that many Robootto maps have where they slowly wear you down with this kind of inertia until you really don't want to play, and then it hits you with an ending so baffling and disappointing you aren't sure if it's the ending at all.

    This map is notable even among other Robootto maps as being not just ugly but truly sloppily put together. Flat transparent brushes of lines of bottles populate a spacious bathroom housing no facilities befitting a bathroom. Rooms are just big, vacuous spaces with massive portraits of characters from The Ship. The outdoor areas in particular are full of visleaf errors and details disappearing into the sky depending on what direction you look at them from. The entire outdoor world simply floats in the sky with no attempt made to make the environment seem housed or surrounded by anything. The whole map gives a feeling that it's barely clinging to existence for reasons that it could not even bring itself to fathom.

    The last part of the map is "Hell". It's called that because there are giant letters which say "Hell". For whatever reason you can either gauss jump or create a staircase of crates up to the middle of the E where you can find a purple room. That's the end. There's another spot in the same area where what seems to be a door is marked with "Exit" but as far as we could tell this does nothing but serve to distract from the purple room which is the closest thing to closure that this map will give you.

    The first thing to do in this map is run for the ladder and get the weapons despite many enemies around you, and then try your hardest not to fall and die climbing back down that ladder. It's kinda fun once you have a bunch of weapons to liquefy enemies with, but the map is a slog. It's poorly brushed out, the architecture of the level is barely reminiscent of any recognizable shapes, the respawning enemies are annoying, and the final room is a confusing disappointment.

    I don't recommend for server lists or playing with friends.

Pros:

• There are some dumb, fun moments to be had when you're given a full arsenal and tons of enemies

Cons:

• The level is just plain ugly
• The respawning enemies make moving around like molasses
• Confusing and dumb ending
• Reaching the weapons is an unfun ordeal

Score: 0.5 / 10