Alley - GrandmasterJ

 

This map follows the proud tradition of not featuring what is in the title, the above picture is the closest to an alley we're going to see in this map. It's a linear map through varied locations and themes and some combat.

SCMapDB page

Author: Vince

Date of final release: 2000

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Alley

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | March 19, 2022 | 4184 characters

    When I first loaded up Alley I immediately thought that this map didn't look like an alley. It starts off in a desert canyon area and then goes into long hallways with your standard Black Mesa textures. The whole map is a series of hallways and rooms with varying themes and enemy composition.

    Players start off in an outdoor desert room with a truck and enemies directly behind the truck, so combat starts right off the bat. Fight some soldiers through linear hallways and find a room witha barney and a shotgun along the way. The shotgun, along with every other weapon on this map, disappears and takes the default amount of time to respawn. With two players it was a pain to resupply when we had to wait for not just the ammo, but our weapons to respawn too.

    Eventually players will come to an outdoor area, a hallway with turrets set in alcoves above. After killing the turrets you have to climb in through a pipe stuck in the ramp below the turrets. This will teleport players to a weird acid pit blue volcano that they have to jump out of and fight vortigaunts. There is a weird puzzle where you have to touch three glowing ball sprites and then you teleport outside to the next area.

    The next area is a large outdoor courtyard with blasted buildings and a gargantua. We had no explosives so I didn't know what to do, but there is a big double door that is slightly open and through there is the gluon gun and a scientist. I died horribly being a distratction and my teammate melted the garg single handedly. There is an uzi here in a burnt out building, I eventually got dual uzis but I don't think I fired them once, the shotgun is best in this map.

    After the enemy garg is a friendly garg, it was very alarming to see. It was fighting HECU and winning, I helped it along , raided a nearby truck for underbarrel grenades, two ammo boxes, and an mp5. Of course when I say I raided the truck I mean I waited for all that to respawn after my teammate cleared it out first. Climb up on the truck to get out of there.

    The final area is an expansive water section underneath a broken elevator. Players have no weapons that can fire underwater, so fighting the bullsquids that are underwater here is annoying. At the start there are floating elevator doors that players can stand on to shoot the first bullsquids. Into the water, through the hallway, turn left and under the door, there is a room with breathable air and crowbars, up until now players have not had crowbars. There is a room here with seemingly nothing going on, the way forward is opposite the room with the air and crowbars, with a door jutting up from the bottom. There are a ton of bullsquids stuck on the other side of this door, I went in and died like a fool, he threw his crowbar and went to the room to grab another one, over and over again. By the time I made the incredibly long trip back he had killed all the bullsquids. Swimming to the end of this water area teleports the player to be surrounded by vortigaunts and then the map ends.

    The map had some uninspired level design, there were a lot of hallways, sparse detail, and the rooms had little connection to each other. I didn't identify anything that could have been seen as an alley and the map description doesn't say much either. It comes across as amatuerish. The map is playable, has nice weapon progression, decent combat pacing, but the simplicity behind it combined with the forgettable design comes together to make it forgettable. Except for the weird blue place the players get inexcplicably teleported to, the friendly garg, and the annoying bullsquid finish, nothing really stands out.

Pros:

• Weapon progression works well, new weapons are supplied periodically with ammo
• decent combat

Cons:

• bland map design, directionless
• no shortcuts or checkpoints
• terrible final area with bullsquids and throwing crowbars
• weapons disappear when picked up, not enough for two people let alone a server full

Score: 4 / 10