Alien Die - Dunkelschwamm

  

    This is one of those maps that is meant for fun, the whole map consists of monsters in traps. While some monsters do wander out of the traps overall it's not dangerous.

SCMapDB page

Author: LordSlayer

Date of final release: 1999

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Alien Die

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | March 11, 2022 | 2949 characters

    This is a simple entity playground wherein you can use crushers, explosion generators, lasers, and NPC in-fighting to kill lazily respawning enemies. These Machiavellian devices are operated via buttons with misaligned textures.

    While playing, I thought a lot about this game I made in middle school where you pick up a little sprite guy and throw him into spikes, or drop him to his death, or use weapons to crush him. It wasn't an interesting game at all, but I entertained myself and my friends with it. While I was playing this, I just became nostalgic for that game and wanted to go back to it. I don't tell you this in this review to be self-indulgent, but to make the point that the utterly uninteresting game I made when I was a kid and this map have a lot in common: they were made for the person who made it, they probably had the most fun with it, and playing anything like it made by somebody else isn't the same indulgence. It's just a toybox full of very clunky, vaguely interesting tools of pretend death and mayhem. Since enemies usually just gib when they're killed by anything in the environment or a great force, most of this map would be just easily emulated by creating a button which spawns a bunch of gibs. In fact, there is a button that just spawns a bunch of gibs and shoots them out of a chute. I think that was probably my favorite part of the map.

    Overall, the map has a boring look which comes with the brutalist, concrete look of Half-Life textures and none of the charming or impressive geometry. Killing the enemies isn't terribly exciting and is pretty samey. I think that whatever the goal was with this map, it was definitely accomplished- just sloppily so, and in service to a goal I can't say I find entertaining for more than one entire second. I think there's a lot of creativity that went into coming up with some of these concepts, but it's all just kinda janky and weird and blunt and clunky. Even the power trip of killing totally helpless boxed-in enemies -if that was the goal- is a bit muddied with zombies which wander the walkable area.

    If killing several helpless enemies over and over again sounds like your bag, you might find this fun. I can't imagine any reason you would put this on a server rotation. I personally don't recommend it overall.

Pros:

• Some creative and strange ideas
• I'm sure this was a lot of fun to the person who made it
• Crushing the ichthyosaur was fun

Cons:

• I don't think gibbing enemies in boxes over and over again is an entertaining concept
• The whole map is pretty blandly put together, if not outright sloppy
• Not all of the machines work very well, and enemies slowly respawning on a timer isn't a great system for a monster grinder

Score: 4.1 / 10