Mostwanted - GrandmasterJ

 

    After Gordon Freeman finishes up his work at Black Mesa he goes home to his rental. His neighborhood is quite terrible and mobs of police, alien, and criminal wake him up.

SCMapDB page

Author: Mr_InSaNe

Date of final release: 2002

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Mostwanted

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | January 23, 2022 | 3284 characters

    Most Wanted is an old map, made circa 2003, and it has no reviews, no stars, and no comments. I feel like I have unearthed a forgotten relic. One of the main reasons I wanted to play this particular map is that the description states that "After surviving the ordeal at Black Mesa, Gordon returns to his rental for a night of sleep." I found it incredibly funny that after the end of Half-Life 1 Gordon just goes on home. "Oh man, what a day at work, time to go home and sleep."

    The map opens up with players spawning in Gordon's rental, a claustrophobic two story house with barely enough room for players, much less two beds and a staircase. There is a pushable table downstairs that is in the way of the stairs so players get to fumble with that on their way out. The entire house is surrounded by respawning Barnies. They seem like they respawn infinitely, but late in the map they do stop. But there are so many and there are so many for a long time. The best way to escape this situation is to jump out a second story window and jump to an adjacent roof. The windows are different sizes and not all of them are big enough for Gordon to jump out of. Once on this roof players can get a real good look at Gordon's wonky neighborhood.

    The map doesn't look good. It has a certain early Sven charm to it, but overall the level design is crowded, with excessive hallways. Everything is really small, buildings are only big enough to hold a few hallways or rooms. Only the bank was big, the apparent objective of this map. Stairs have no rails, they are all steep floating steps up to rectangle cut outs on the floor above, also with no rails. In the bank, some stairs are right next to windows.

    The map description states a vague goal, meet a scientist and get some documents. In the actual map itself players have to break a power generator on top of the bank building in order to unlock a security door on the bottom floor. The middle floor has a scientist that tells you 'the keycard is in the vault'. The keycard is behind the security door on the bottom floor, picking it up seemingly does nothing. This is where the map seems to end. Since the map is so old and is apparently untouched by time, it's probably broken. I tried talking to the scientist again, and cheated my way through the entire map twice, to no avail.

    The map is jam packed full of enemies, some interestingly wonky architecture that can get hard to navigate (especially Gordon's rental), a mission objective that is broken as best as I can tell, and some scattered weapons and supplies. It comes together in a kind of fever dream horde map with a fake mission objective. Eventually we killed enough enemies or we triggered them somehow to stop spawning and we had only token resistance at the end.

Pros:

• The enemies don't spawn forever

Cons:

• the architecture is badly proportioned and is hard to navigate. Overall ugly look
• objective is completely unclear, possibly broken
• player is thrown into incredibly harsh combat right off the bat with no pacing or respite

Score: 3.5 / 10