Adventure - Dunkelschwamm

  

    When a map has a name as simple and powerful as 'Adventure' it better live up to it. This is a walkthrough map where the gimmick is that each room is thematically unrelated to the last.

SCMapDB page

Author: Acky

Date of final release: 2002

Maps in package: 3

Map review of Adventure

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | January 30, 2022 | 5051 characters

    Adventure is a 3-part action mapset that is as straight-forward as it is jampacked with action. The setup is simple: grab a bunch of weapons from the arsenal room, and then room after room, the players fight soldiers, aliens, and turrets in lightly segmented battles.

    The first map is the roughest of the bunch. It begins with a strange, clearly broken mechanic where you are, I think, inside of a ventilation room where the air current is pressing you against the ceiling. Bullsquids within this room were also pushed against the ceiling- so hard, in fact, that they moved upwards into the ceiling and out of the bounds of the level. From within there the bullsquids haunted our every movement, the sound of acid spit ever just above our heads. In an attempt to end the madness by throwing a banana grenade, decimating whatever powered this movement. The bullsquids, however, remained.

    This map also includes some baffling rooms, such as one where buttons in the center of a room open corresponding doors, beginning waves of respawning enemies until the players open the correct door and press a yellow button within.

    Another notable area is an elevator in the third map which elevates up what I can only describe as a tunnel whose texture is vibrating. There's not much to say about this area other than that it's hard to look at the walls in this elevator because it looks like the textures are vibrating.

    Most of the fights throughout the map are rooms that you walk into full of enemies, you clear them out, and then maybe more enemies spawn in. There's heavy use of headcrabs, bullsquids, HECU grunts, female assassins, and turrets. Enemies will spawn in in massive waves, sometimes surrounding you in a coverless corridor, and it's clunky as hell. Thankfully the player is usually equipped for this much mayhem, so quick thinking can get players out of this kind of ambush fast. It reminds me of how enemies teleport in all around you in Serious Sam, except that game at least gives you the courtesy of a sound and a teleport sprite so you know new enemies are upon you before they are already tearing your guts out. Overall, the combat is clunky and thoughtless, but giving the players lots of weapons to approach each battle with allows for some experimentation and chaotic battles which I think ultimately worked in the sense that I had fun with it. It handled encounters very unsophisticatedly, almost like a beginner's Doom mod might, but never to a point that I was annoyed or felt like things were tedious. At times, it was even tense.

    The conceit of the level being based around a room with teleporters was a cute attempt at continuity that ultimately just felt weird. It's a three part map, and only two maps use the teleporters in the teleporter chamber, but there are four teleporters, and only one is ever used at a time by the map in question? This isn't really a criticism, as much as just my being confused by the layout and the expectations that it created but never fulfilled.

    There's a nifty boss fight at the end which I don't think we were really fully equipped to handle, but we managed to scrape by with literally the last of the ammo I could use to win.

    Overall, I had fun with Adventure. It has a lot of the hallmarks of beginners' maps, such as wonky proportions, or bizarre and disjointed room connections. Many of the rooms have really interesting props to look at which I suspect may come from prefab packs based on no evidence other than that they really SEEM like that's where they came from. There's plenty of this map that's memorable, even if the most memorable parts of the combat are how clunky and weird it got. I think it just gets better as it goes, and the weird experimental stuff that's being tried along the way is charming most of the time.

    If you're looking for an action mapset to play with friends, you can do worse than Adventure. I'd recommend checking it out, even. If you're looking for some b-tier action maps to put in as filler for your server rotation, Adventure's a good choice.

Pros:

• Lots of action which the player is usually lots of equipped for
• The maps try a lot of things along the way, which makes it memorable and charming
• There was some really fun brushwork, props, and triggers which feel like prefabs because they're so out of place in the context but they're fun anyway
• Lots of weapons to experiment with in each battle
• A variety of settings throughout the mapset

Cons:

• The battles feel like they're held together by duct-tape, usually involving enemies being spawned in on top of a big open location
• Some of the things the map tries are kind of broken, baffling, or not well thought out
• The map has bugs, not the least of which are enemies floating upwards through the ceiling
• Weapons took too long to respawn in the armories

Score: 6.9 / 10