Deluge - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Deluge is a very atmospheric map made by one of the community's most acclaimed mappers, RNG. This map is very indicative of his style, well detailed moody and oppressive environment, strange monsters, and high levels of interactivity including lots of secrets.

SCMapDB page

Author: RNG

Date of final release: 2014

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Deluge

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | April 9, 2022 | 4625 characters

    Deluge is a map by RNG, which you can assume means it is a quality map. RNG brings style, high-production, and a confusing sense of eldritch nonsense that glues the experience together in a way that makes it feel like something that was summoned from another plane of existence rather than mapped out.

    The map is a classic arcade-style keyhunt level. After choosing a difficulty (I suggest going as hard as possible, as with two players it felt easy) you hop into a gritty world that feels like brutalist, industrial architecture made its way into one of the stranger territories of Hell. Everything is dilapidated, dingy, dramatically lit, and features beautiful textures. Enemies and weapons have fancy new models as well which reinforce the tone and personality of the map.

    Enemies go down pretty easy. There are a few variations: barnies, melee guys, shock troopers, a greater bigger shock trooper, and a voltigore. I think I saw a couple HECU replacements too. Dealing with them, the player is equipped with handguns, an MP5, a shotgun, and eventually a gauss gun which allows players to reach high areas. The player also gets a wrench which is modeled and animated to look like a punch and kick, and the sounds that come with it are a ton of fun. In fact, the sound design in the map in general is fantastic. It all just looks and feels and plays so fun.

    The map is broken into segments which are sorted by key entrance. The hub area features many entrances to many which eventually open to items or branches of the map. Finding keycards opens some of these branches. The red keycard, for example, opens two areas, one of which is simple access to a weapon, and the other is a high necessary area with both the green keycard and the green keycard door in it. Behind the green keycard door is an obstacle course puzzle involving jumping between shifting insta-kill pillars. Thankfully, there aren't terribly high stakes for if the players die on these jumps, so it can be a bit of a relaxer to MXC your way into repeated deaths until the puzzle is solved. A trigger-opened door leads to a large storage area, and obtaining the blue keycard from there leads to the final area where the players get a shotgun and finally the gauss gun after some corridor shooting in a beautifully brushed area with really interesting glass walls. Using the gauss gun to re-explore the map, you find new keycards which slowly open the map further until you fight and defeat the boss and complete the map. It's at that moment that you learn that, even though you've found something like 10 secrets, it's still not enough. Bummer.

    Deluge is an action map through and through and it's a ton of fun for it. Players are glass canons, constantly having to re-arm, but weapons start appearing in more places over time so re-arming becomes less of a problem, but as situations get deadlier and re-arming remains going out of one's way, players have to make the decision whether rearming is worth the time it'll take if they'll be quickly shot to death by Barneys or Shock Troopers anyway. It was interesting to see how often I'd prefer just running into the fray with a handgun if I got killed in an area. Players never get HEV, so they feel like glass canons against enemies who also die very quickly to gunfire.

    Overall, I think Deluge is a really fun, somewhat bloated but in all the good ways map. If you're a fan of old school games like Quake or Doom which had dark, otherworldly tone and keycard hunting, Deluge is certainly for you. Play it with friends, put it in a rotation.

Pros:

• It looks great
• It sounds great
• Brushwork and textures are astonishingly good and stylistic
• Combat has an interesting "glass canon" feel to it with weak character and weak enemies but lots of weapons
• Each area has its own interesting gimmicks and visual style
• It's just stuffed to the brim with content

Cons:

• The generator room puzzle can be a tad annoying. Not enough I'd actually complain about it, but I dunno
• Sometimes the map opens into a room full of Barnies, but because of how Barnies work that's almost assuredly instant death for the player.
• Map's a bit underwhelming by the end.
• Even when it's looking great, and when the map is broken into areas with distinct styles, sometimes the areas within those distinct styles can get pretty samey looking to the point that I lose track of where I am within them.

Score: 9.4 / 10