Zombie Darkness-4 Dust Survive Map-1 - Dunkelschwamm

  

    This map's name is a mouthful. It is essentially a monster hunt map. The arena uses the de_dust textures to create a new area highly reminiscent of de_dust. Four monsters with high health and interesting models from Counter-Strike: Nexon are scattered around for players to hunt.

SCMapDB page

Author: Patrick

Date of final release: 2017

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Zombie Darkness-4 Dust Survive Map-1

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | January 28, 2022 | 4714 characters

    Zombie Darkness 4 Dust Survival, or Z4_Dust for short, is a megamonster map wherein you play as trendy chicks using wacky guns to invest large quantities of lead in zombie flesh. The map is in the style of a dust map, though the layout is generally unfamiliar to me. The map takes place at night and the objective is to kill a megazombie called "Hide". There are three other zombies, though they are technically superfluous to the map's success.

    Fighting the zombies in this map is a lot like playing a clicker game. You just mash all of these bullets into these zombies with thousands of health, and none of them are a threat because you can just scramble up onto a crate where they can't get you whenever you need to. The zombies are melee only and aren't nearly as dangerous as, say, a gonome. Evading their attacks is dirt simple, especially if you're fighting the zombies one at a time.

    You have a variety of weapons for taking down the zombies, and only the automatic weapons are of any significant use. There are three types of pistols which deal shit damage and two of them are missing their spent casing model and thus eject 3d red error text as you fire your guns. There's a sniper rifle which is completely useless against the zombies because their heads bob around too much to get a headshot, and none of it matters anyway because they have so much health the only sufficient model for dealing necessary damage is spamming the dual MP5s in its face, and then dying to replenish your ammo.

    There are four zombies you will face: Normal, Humpback, Light Scare, and Hide. Normal is in a bombzone looking area surrounded by crates if you turn right out of the spawnzone. If you turn left you will find another bombzone with Humpback. Adjacent to where Humpback is there is Light Scare in a well-lit area. A building near Normal contains Hide. These zombies have 20,000, 30,000, and 25,000 hp respectively, with Hide carrying a whopping 200,000. We had to die to regain our weapons a couple times to have enough ammo to take down the first three zombies, and then had to die a couple times more to have enough ammo to take down Hide. This ridiculous amount of health doesn't make the zombies difficult to fight outside of the endurance of will it takes to sit through their draining health. In fact, with health so high it doesn't take long before they take so much damage they begin fleeing, allowing players to bully them harder and get more hits in.

    Killing Hide ends the map. It's difficult to get to Hide without first fighting Normal, but it can be done. Humpback and Light Scare are very easy to dodge if you know where to find Hide first thing. Hide isn't any harder than the rest of the monsters outside of having more health than God. He tends to run for cover if he's being overwhelmed, so it was easy to keep him corralled in the room he spawns in and unload automatic weapons into his face at point blank. Eventually he does lash out, but like with the other zombies it's pathetically easy to dodge. We tried this map a second time to test if Hide is the only zombie you need to kill to end the map (he is) and ended up spending several Impulse 101 sets of heavy weaponry to even put a dent in him.

    I don't know where the models for the zombies, weapons, and players came from. They seem high enough quality. The guns have some really fun animations. These models look more far more detailed than the usual Goldsrc fare.

    Maybe this map is meant to be played by dozens of people at once, I don't know. I could imagine this being a fine chill map if you just want to talk to your friends while shooting overpowered zombies. At the same time, I don't ever want to play it again.

    If you have a big group of people playing, it might be worth a once-through while you all talk over it. If you're running a server, I'd say keep this off the rotation. If I saw your server was running this map I'd think your server is going to be boring.

Pros:

• The models look good, wherever those are from
• I like the idea of just clearing out what is basically a counter-strike map full of zombies

Cons:

• Fighting the zombies is really boring and tedious and stupid and dumb and bad
• Most of these weapons feel super non-optimal for the job of hunting these particular zombies
• 3/4 of the map's enemies are superfluous
• All of the zombies have too much health, but the boss just really has way too much health
• You definitely need to die to have enough ammo to end this map

Score: 3 / 10