Search N Destroy - GrandmasterJ

 

    There are a lot of really cool and interesting things done in this map that are not found in other maps like having an open world, player classes, and non-linear objectives. Some mechanics work better than others but it all comes together to make a truly unique map.

SCMapDB page

Author: Hezus

Date of final release: 2020

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Search N Destroy

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | January 9, 2022 | 5763 characters

    I like the idea of this map. Players start in a military base on the outskirts of a large middle eastern town. There are 6 piles of crates to destroy and four areas you have to capture. The gameplay is a scavenger hunt to find the objectives and also the four unlockable weapons.

    When the map first starts out players spawn in a room with instructions and difficulty voting buttons. Any difficulty higher than the lowest has a cap on respawns and let me say I can not imagine playing this map without infinite respawns. There is an enemy strength multiplier based on how many players are on the map, which is really cool. With two people we had a %62 enemy strength modifier. After voting players are pushed into a desert military base.

    Players spawn with no weapons or medkits, instead players must choose from one of four equipment loadouts, medkit and desert eagle, M16, shotgun, and MP5. There are crates with pictures of the four unlockable weapons, uzi, revolver, rocket launcher, and sniper rifle, bringing them back to base unlocks them here and players with any loadout can pick them up. Dropping weapons is disabled.

    When this map first started my teammate spotted an osprey in the distance over the town and he insisted we kill it. We had no other weapons unlocked at this time so we brought it down with the M16 and it took quite a while to do. Another osprey spawned in while we were doing it and after the first osprey went down it came back a little while later. Later an apache spawned it. That's two ospreys and one apache in the level and they will respawn if you kill them. There was a point in time that I didn't think we were going to finish this map.

    Finding the objectives was tricky. The town is sprawling and labyrinthine with scattered snipers on rooftops, two ospreys dropping off troops, and an apache. Destroying caches was easy if a little tedious. It requires a player have C4, and if a player uses up C4 they must go back to base and pick up another one. Capturing sectors was even trickier because it took a player 10 seconds of standing in the open to take but was retaken immediately the moment an enemy set foot inside. Enemies will spawn the first time a point is taken (we think) and combined with the ospreys there could be a lot of troops moving around at once. We took two control points only to have them both immediately retaken. After a while our strategy was to ignore the control points since we couldn't hold them and focus on getting all the caches, we also desperately needed to find and unlock the rocket launcher to take care of the helicopters.

    We finally found the rocket launcher after destroying every cache and unlocking everything else. With that taking out the helicopters was a thousand times easier and eventually we were able to take all the control points without them being retaken. After this the map demands you wipe out any remaining enemies. We were searching the map for quite a while without seeing anybody, and then the objective was complete. Maybe a guy threw a grenade and it killed him, who knows.

    Returning to base is not the final objective. The final objective is to defend the mortar in the middle of the base. The objective reads 'defend the base' so I was down in front shotgunning guys away from the entrance. But then the game scolds us and says "You idiots! You let the enemy walk right into our base!". A single enemy was in front of the mortar and the map ended. I guess I should have seen this coming when I saw the enemies take control points back as soon as they touched those, but I had no idea that an enemy walking into our base would be an instant lose. It was not a great end to an otherwise fun experience.

    The map had plenty of ammo boxes that would spawn the ammunition for your loadout weapons and it had plenty of armor and health pickups. It was never too much but was always easy to find when you need it.

    Overall, I think the difficulty is a tad too high. The difficulty levels clearly state what each level entails. But the easiest difficulty reads 'take control points' and every other one reads 'take and hold control points'. I'm a little confused why that is different in the difficulty descriptions, but in game we still had to hold the control points. It's also recommended for 2 people but early on I didn't think we could do it, and then at the end when victory was near some bullshit happened and we lost. This map is real hard.

    I did like playing this map. There was a lot put into it, the spawn areas are great, I think the weapon restrictions and loadouts work well, bringing back weapons to spawn was fun. There were definitely parts I got annoyed, running around looking for the rocket launcher so we could finally do away with these infernal helicopters and capture the control points so we could be done with this map was not very fun.

Pros:

• Interesting and well thought out spawn, map setup, and weapon loadouts
• unlocking weapons was very fun
• lots of action
• plentiful ammo (for loadout weapons)
• objectives were always clear and concise, the HUD even kept track of your objectives

Cons:

• The map can get very labyrinthine and it is easy to get lost
• capturing control points only to have them instantly recapture was not fun
• three respawning helicopters at once and the rocket launcher is the hardest thing to find
• during the last defense part, just one enemy in the wrong spot will instantly lose the map
• had to backtrack to pick up more C4, returning to the action in general took a long time

Score: 7 / 10