Halloween Hospital - GrandmasterJ

 

    Are you ready for Halloween in a Hospital? This map uses the typical scary map formula, respawning zombies, a maze, and players must go on a scavenger hunt to figure out how to progress.

SCMapDB page

Author: GreenTea MiaoMiaoLe

Date of final release: 2017

Maps in package: 1

Map review of High Rise

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by GrandmasterJ | November 28, 2021 | 4835 characters

    I don't have good experiences with halloween themed maps. Usually they are mazes filled with respawning enemies (typically Afraid of Monsters zombies) and I don't have a lot of fun playing them. This map is exactly all that but I actually managed to play to the end and beat it and didn't have a terrible time doing it.

    The map is a big hospital with most of its doors locked. You can peek in through windows and see future areas, there is a lot of teasing of future areas which is nice because you know where to look when doors open and things unlock. Getting into the hospital was kind of a pain because there are two paths to take right at the beginning and they are both long and only one gets you to a window you can crawl through.

    Once inside the hospital acts as a large dark maze that you have to travel through and open up each section. The main gameplay feature is the addition of blue squares players must destroy. After a certain number of blue squares are destroyed the next phase of the level opens up. Some of the blue squares are well hidden and hard to find. After we opened up the next level we were still finding blue squares so its a nice touch that we don't have to hunt down every single blue square before opening up that area, I don't think my teammate and I would have kept playing if that was the case.

    The biggest complaint I have is the same complaint I have with a lot of Halloween maze maps, the infinitely respawning enemies. There is a right way to put infinitely spawning enemies and that is to give them low health and not use the Afraid of Monsters zombie models. In this map there are a lot of them, some are the fast AoM zombies, and they have too much health. We have to hunt down well hidden blue squares, having fast and hard to hit zombies zipping around slapping our cheeks while we do it is not very fun.

    One good thing about the respawning enemies is that they do change as you hit milestones. There were certain parts were the respawning zombies were turned off in some areas and that made things a lot more bearable.

    There was also a spawn point change which I usually see as a good thing. But in this map shortcuts are opening up all the time, the normal spawn is a pretty good spawn point throughout the map. But then it adds a spawn point, not replaces, in the hospital. So now you don't know where you are going to spawn and don't have the benefit of using all the shortcuts. Later, a zombie starts spawning in this secondary spawn point killing us before we knew what was happening.

    Despite all my complaints the map does a lot of things really well. I like the inclusion of HEV corpses that you can use to add to your score. I was playing this two player and we got a little competitive with finding these guys. I ended up with the high score by the way. The map is really well put together too. Its easy to get turned around in but that's because it is a actually a maze disguised as a hospital. As far as mazes go it looks good and has some unique rooms to help with navigation.

    The TV teleporters was a nice feature. I didn't read the summary so I didn't get the hint, it took me a while to figure out. Once I figured the TVs out it was an nice feature.

    The later part of the map reveals what looks like an apartment on top of the hospital. I was so excited for something new at this point so imagine my disappointment when I was told to hunt down green cubes and destroy them. After blasting all the green cubes in the apartment nothing happened. My teammate went back to the hospital part to see if green cubes appeared and found that a bunch of doors opened and we now had to go hunt for green cubes in the hospital. I was psyched for a change of pace and instead I had to go back to respawning zombie hell to search for more shootable geometry.

    Eventually we hit the end and were transported to a mystical forest where a two headed zombie jumped down a ledge and we jumped up the ledge and shot it from safety. This map was pretty frustrating for me so it was cathartic that we could totally cheese the last boss.

Pros:

• Not frustrating or obtuse enough that I gave up partway through
• lots of shortcuts
• fun inclusion of score-corpses
• Nice looking map, TVs are very nice
• Cheesing the last boss was an absolute pleasure

Cons:

• Infinitely respawning fast zombies in tight spaces while you hunt for things
• Discovery of new area is undermined by forced backtracking immediately after
• The map is a maze
• the spawn point update is nt particularly helpful
• the second spawn point eventually has a zombie in it that will spawn kill players

Score: 4.5 / 10