Alien Fight - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Alien fight is a map about fighting xenomorphs, the aliens from the famous movie franchise Alien. Players go from room to room fighting them in waves.

SCMapDB page

Author: Original Prankster

Date of final release: 2002

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Alien Fight

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | March 11, 2022 | 3864 characters

    Alien Fight is a map which lives up to its name: the players fight aliens in it. They fight aliens a lot in it. When you hear "fight aliens" you might be thinking of a lot of games with aliens stalking interesting settings for you to fight in. But: have you ever fight a bunch of alien xenomorph bullsquids in a smallish box room coming out of a spawner until you find your way out into another smallish box room with respawning xenomorph bullsquids by finding the z-fighting on a breakable wall? What about if you did that… four times?!

    I feel like it's very rare that I play an unofficial (or, often, official for that matter) Alien brand games or maps and have fun. They are always based around the idea of pitting players against swarms of these alien enemies, but they never make the xenomorphs something that's fun to fight as a swarm enemy. This map makes them bullsquids, using the xenomorph model which machineguns acid at you, and have them respawn in 3 at a time in a cramped room that qualifies as much as a fun arena as a Denny's restroom. On top of all of that, they have quite a bit of health and are pretty hard to hit thanks to their shape.

    To combat the enemies, players are given a choice of loadouts to play with. I only tried the demolition and infantry, because the third class (medic) did not get any weapons that I found terribly useful against the aliens and fighting aliens was really the only thing that mattered. The infantry got all of the boiler plate weapons (M16, MP5, Shotgun) while the demolitions expert got all of the explosives. As we made out way into later chambers, I used the demolitions expert's grenades and rockets a lot to clear the way.

    Thankfully, after killing way too many of those terrible bullsquids they stop respawning from the same point. Not thankfully, you have to do this with three chambers in a row, then a headcrab (facehugger) chamber, and then a boss battle against a bunch of high-HP xenomorphs who still machinegun acid and take forever to kill. The idea with that battle was that you could man a giant mounted gun which does massive damage, but two bullsquids spawned inside of one another next to it so we had to whittle their massive healthbars down before we could use the big gun which was the only thing that had any chance of dealing significant damage. Once the aliens are killed, the end did not trigger. We sat, silently, in an empty map.

    The look of the map is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, it mostly creates a coherent atmosphere. It does this vaguely, however, as cave rooms are large and square, the initial space station(?) spawn area where you choose your class is really bare and confusing and nonevocative, and it's all kind of poorly brushed and constructed out. The sloppiness goes into the class selection, too, which is just a teleporter into a room with a huge heap of ammo and weapons off to one corner, and another teleporter into the arena. If you're trying to run through this part quickly you might accidentally run by the weapons into the teleporter and spawn into the combat area with no weapons. It's not fun. Throughout the entire map is just frustrating and annoying.

Pros:

• Some interesting ideas, like the class system
• Some new models
• There was a fun mounted-gun minigame in spawn

Cons:

• Gameplay is annoying and bad
• Progression is hidden unless you look for where the map was the most poorly made to proceed
• The final boss was just a big annoying puzzle to see how we could deal as much damage as quickly as possible while also being very annoyed
• Respawning enemies in tiny rooms
• The class system felt mostly unnecessary

Score: 3 / 10