Aggregate Pain - Dunkelschwamm

  

    

    Aggregate Pain is another conversion of a standalone Half-Life mod. It takes place in Black Mesa and players fight both soldiers and aliens.

SCMapDB page

Original mod authors: Michael Sisk

Conversion authors: Garompa

Date of original mod release: 1999

Date of final Sven Map release: 2017

Maps in package: 3

Map review of Aggregate Pain

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | March 5, 2022 | 1939 characters

    Aggregate Pain means Total Pain.

    That's what the mod's creator seems to indicate on the map description. I guess must have been updated for more recent versions of Sven, as it has modern Sven monsters despite being dated originally for 1999.

    The map follows walk-through format for the most part, with the players moving from room to room clearing out enemies and occasionally dealing with other obstacles. I'm gonna be completely honest, no matter how hard I try I cannot remember most of these maps. I'll tell you what I do remember.

    Enemy flavor was: all over the place. Plenty of grunts, but also alien controllers, vortigaunts, headcrabs, zombies, and gonomes. Art one point you fight an apache and it's kind of a lot. At the end you fight a gargantua and it was fine I guess.

    I forget almost all of the rest of the map. We replayed the first map a bit and found a whole new linear area to progress though that we hadn't seen the first time that didn't accomplish much.

    I wish I had more to say about it, but frankly it's kinda boring. Not super bad, but the bad bits stand out because of how boring it is. Everything looks like standard Black Mesa affair, except very blocky, with low detail or personality, and delivered with terrible lighting and uninspired enemy placement.

    If you're looking for filler action maps, I guess this works for that. I'm falling asleep just thinking about it.

Pros:

  • The map suffices as an action walkthrough set
  • Weird decision to include an entire path in the fisrt map tt doesn't go anywhere.
  • Most things work fine.

Cons:

  • It's really boring and bland
  • The parts that pop out the most in my mind are the ones that annoyed me
  • Map has no identity of its own

Score: 4.9 / 10

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