Moria - GrandmasterJ

 

    We must face the long dark of Moria. Be on your guard. There are older and fouler things than Orcs, in the deep places of the world.

SCMapDB page

Author: NIPPER

Date of final release: 2004, community fix on 2019

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Moria

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | January 23, 2022 | 6267 characters

    When I was a wee lad playing Counter-Strike 1.6 I knew of Nipper from the great and fun maps he made, usually with a prominently displayed "NIPPER" somewhere in the map. When I first got into Sven all those years ago I saw that Nipper had made a bunch of Sven maps and from then I had just assumed they were the greatest Sven maps ever made. Now that I'm older and cynical I can understand that not all of Nipper's ideas were solid gold.

    The map starts off with a pet peeve of mine, enemies in player spawn. This isn't so bad in this map, as players spawn on a raised platform around the edge of the room. But the middle area fills up with vortigaunts (called Orcs and thankfully not shooting electricity and reviving each other) real fast and players are limited to melee weapons. Eventually a "Troll" shows up and we have to kill it to progress. Killing a gonome *the troll" is hard enough in confined spaces, but killing one with only melee weapons while an infinitely spawning (as long as the troll is alive) horde of vortigaunts comes in to crowd up the room. The gonome can easily get up the platform and hurt players when the appear. At one point both my teammate and I died and the gonome did one frame of the eating animation. I thought I was fast enough and it didn't have a chance to eat but since it started the eating animation it regained full health. We began to throw our crowbars at it while avoiding its attacks, picking up new crowbars along the way. This would have been a good tactic but this particular boss had some wonky hitboxes and the crowbar flew through it multiple times. We had to melee it to death. Killing that gonome was a huge slog. This is the spawn room.

    Eventually the troll is gone and players can progress. The vortigaunts do not stop spawning in player spawn though, so when players respawn they will have to fight these vortigaunts immediately. The next area is accessed through a very narrow hallway, easily blocked by these respawning enemies. It is very annoying.

    The next room is very impressive looking, the whole map looks pretty good. The brushwork is somewhat rough in some places, but the textures and architecture really come together. This next room in particular looks good and really captures the feel of Moria from the Lord of the Rings. It's a huge room filled with giant pillars. Vortigaunts and pit drones respawn endlessly , I think it's timed because there was no button or anything to press to progress the map. After running around the swarm of enemies an Orc Boss (alien grunt) appeared and we had to kill it. We had the crossbow at this point and the crossbow bolts explode so this battle went pretty well. Eventually it died, we hear an ominous roar, and the ceiling shook. This indicated that a small door at the far end of the wall slid open.

    On the other side of the door is a room that both my teammate and I call 'the weird cliff' room. There is a cliff and two rock walls with doors the player must traverse, and the rest of the room is black void. It gives the impression of being outside in space rather than the subterranean setting it was meant to evoke. There is an offering of weapons here on a stone slab, this area becomes a new spawn point for players.

    After this room is the stair room, if you've played the map or recently seen these movies you should know what i am talking about. There is a steep set of stairs hanging over a bottomless pit. In the map there are infinitely respawning shock troops that can devastate players. The best course of action is to run through, you can't kill them all and there are too many. There are vortigaunts at the bottom of the stairs and running to the door will spawn another alien grunt. I thought it was going to be a pain to fight this new miniboss since the shock troopers were still taking potshots at us and throwing grenades. But I nailed him with a crossbow bolt and knocked him off the edge, killing him. It was great, I bet he would have been a pain had I not managed to do that.

    The next room is a big all with flames everywhere. A bunch more vortigaunts start spawning here endlessly. There is a narrow bridge at one end of the wall and a big door at the other, neither are accessible right off the bat. Eventually a Balrog (gargantua) shows up and players hafe to empty their crossbows and then resort to using pipe wrenches to kill it. Its worth noting that the spawn point updates again to the bottom of the stairs. Spawning here means players have to run forward or risk being hit by shock troopers, there is another offering of weapons here so players can walk straight forward to the Balrog fight. The Balgro is a pain to take down but after it is dead the narrow bridge becomes passable.

    To end the map simply walk over the bridge, up some stairs, and go through a doorway. Except vortigaunts are spawning on both sides of the bridge, and shock troopers and pit drones are spawning on the far end of the bridge. It took my teammate and I quite a few tries just to get over. Ultimately what we ended up doing was I tried luring the mass of enemies away from my teammate and the bridge while he sprinted across. I tried following him but one vortigaun on the bridge stopped my progress and I got hit by a multitude of attacks all at once. He went through the door and a message popped up saying "the fellowship has escaped!". Yep, the whole fellowship escaped.

    A map like Moria is a great way to remind yourself that your favorite mapper is human and not above making annoying as shit slogfests that look nice and play terribly. I had some fun with this map but I'm glad it was real short.

Pros:

• Map design looked great, rooms in the map looked just like rooms from the movie
• updating spawns complete with weapon resupply

Cons:

• Not only do enemies swarm the beginning spawn area, but they also infinitely appear here as well
• Enemies infinitely spawn everywhere, in every room, at all times
• The boss fights always came down to melee and always had swarms of enemies around

Score: 5.5 / 10