Adventure - GrandmasterJ

 

    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 GrandmasterJ | January 30, 2022 | 4348 characters

    This map has a simple premise: adventure. That made me think that I would be fighting through thematically disconnected rooms in some sort of adventurous manner. I would say it fulfilled it's goal.

    The spawn room is a room full of doors, there are four doors with teleporters behind them, one to the level, and another to an armory. The armory is well stocked for one person, but with two people we chronically had the problem that one person would get in first and take everything and the other would be left with a crowbar. Even the weapons disappeared after being taken. The respawn rate for the supplies did seem faster than usual, we kept waiting for a few respawn cycles so we could go off fully equipped. There is also plenty of HEV.

    The teleporters behind doors in the spawn room made me hopeful that there would be checkpoints throughout the map. This is not the case, there are three different maps that each use the same spawn room except a single door is open to a teleporter that takes you to the action. I don't think its a bad design, just a strange decision. Each map's armory is update to include more weapons, but not more ammo.

    The door that leads to the level proper starts us off with a room that sucks. Bullsquids float level with the player, in a room that descends down into what I assume was supposed to be a vent and fan. The brushwork is blocky and the fans don't spin, and the gravity is really low here, evoking a feeling that this setup is probably supposed to emulate the force of a fan and vent in Half-Life. It doesn't work and looks bad, the bullsquids floated up through the ceiling and continuously shot at us. It was annoying and we couldn't kill them. Jumping in this room will send players straight to the top where they will then drift ever so slowly down. My teammate threw a grenade that blew up a button at the bottom and turned the gravity back to normal. I would have probably been trapped there the entire time it took for us to play the map set had he not done that.

    Then there was a vent at the bottom full of headcrabs and water full of leeches before players surface in a small room full of turrets. I didn't like it. All the vents sucked and it was a terrible first impression for the map. The rest of the gameplay in the map was pretty good.

    The map looked ok for the most part. There was some simple but well done brushwork throughout but it still had some strangely proportioned details and there were floating crates at one point. There were also some cool details like a lock that had three bolts sliding back before it unlocked, it was really fun. There were also some mounted guns and what looked like an A-Wing in the map. The diversity in quality of the level details led my teammate to suspect the author was using a bunch of prefabs. There was definitely more good architecture than bad, but it all sort of comes together as 'decent'. Using standard textures and making rooms and situations similar to the original Half-Life certainly does not help matters.

    The end of the map was a fight against a garg. I ran out of explosives real fast but my teammate was hitting the garg hard with rockets and the gluon gun. In the previous room he ran ahead and took all the ammo that was there. This meant I had pretty much no explosives to do any damage to the garg and was useless. He used the last of his supplies to finish it off, if he had not we would have had to die and try again. In the end, due to lack of ammo in the map my contribution was watching him beat the map for us.

    Adventure is a series of mostly interesting situations in a somewhat forgettable atmosphere. The scarce ammo was only a problem in the beginning before the map started giving us more weapons I could use instead, but the last boss fight was definitely a problem.

Pros:

• Very straightforward design, mostly straightforward combat, I never got lost
• Good weapon variety later in the maps
• There were some fun level details

Cons:

• The map series gets off to a very bad start with some janky unfun vent sections
• ammo was scarce throughout the map, especially in the end

Score: 6 / 10