Dukemap - Dunkelschwamm

  

    This is something like a recreation of the first level of Duke Nukem 3d. Most of the map does its own thing but for the most part it kind of feels like Duke Nukem.

SCMapDB page

Author: DukeN

Date of final release: 2014

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Dukemap

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | May 28, 2022 | 4713 characters

    "I'm waiting for the reviews to improve my maps" -DukeN in the Additional Info section of dukemap2. 8 years late, but this one's for you, DukeN.

    Dukemap2 (listed on scmapdb as Dukemap) is the sequel to an as-of-yet unreleased (possibly cancelled) prequel map. I suppose that will explain the strange circumstances surrounding the spawn area of this map.

    The map begins with players in a UFO where they charge their HEV (if you're gonna let em do it at spawn in a cramped spawn area, why not just start them with full HEV?) and a teleporter which drops them out of the UFO and onto a conspicuous reservoir atop a tower facing another with a city block far below. From here, players battle frequently spawning enemy ambushes which repopulate previous areas to harry folks making the walk of shame after a respawn.

    Along the way, there is platforming and silly door-switch puzzles- including one of which I think doesn't work, where a message informed me explosives may help open a door so I used the only satchel charge I found in the whole map on it and there was no effect. There's another puzzle where you're in a room full of crates, and only a specific stack of two crates can be destroyed despite looking identical to other crates which are indestructible- and destroying them is necessary to complete a puzzle. The only puzzles I kinda like, like a puzzle where the player must platform from one window to another under a time limit, are ruined by things like an unmarked collapsing platform of doom or having to repeat it often until the first shortcut is eventually unlocked. One of the later puzzles comes after a lengthy platforming segment over death pit lava, and it is a luck-of-the-draw crumbling platform puzzle (ala the penultimate game in Squid Game), thus requiring the player to repeat those platforming segments based on random chance repeatedly. I guess on a server with lots and lots of people, I can see this flying, but that's only because a map doesn't need to do anything right for an avalanche of people to comfortably crawl through it.

    The combat itself is pretty thoughtlessly thrown together by the feeling of it. Players are often given little cover against intense waves of ranged enemies, or are dropped into rooms full of enemies (to die of alcohol poisoning, take a drink every time you drop into water from a height as a room transition).

    The final boss is a battle with a gargantua wherein you are given the rocket launcher for the first time (after being dropped from a height into a body of water) on a very small arena with the gargantua over a death pit of lava. Good luck suiciding against it repeatedly as if getting out of splash damage range from a galloping and angry garg is consistently possible. Once the garg dies, the map shortly ends.

    Bobby King himself once said, "You don't want a game that's got no lava." When I saw the lava in the screenshots I was enamored. Now I understand this wasn't quite was I had hoped. While some of the map has interesting environment, it only gets blander as it goes on. Even as the subject matter is more interesting- the players descend into hell through cracks in a wartorn street- it looks clunky and blocky and uninteresting compared to how rooms full of crates are rendered earlier on, and even those aren't that great. I think overall, this map tries a lot of things which is great, but it doesn't do any of them particularly well or thoughtfully, and sabotages the best attempts it does make with trollish traps and mean design.

    I liked that the player starts in a UFO, I liked the accumulation of weapons through the map, and I liked that it took some risks to explore multiple fun environment types. I think with some more thoughtful development and some rethinking of gameplay priorities, the prequel could maybe be better.

Dukemap has a ton of action, and if you don't mind some clunky, trollish, and tedious gameplay you should check it out. If you're looking for maps to populate your action server and you get a lot of traffic, throw this on there and I'm sure folks will have some fun with it.

Pros:

• Lots of action
• Lots of guns with a really nice steady accumulation of power
• Shortcuts
• I like the UFO spawner

Cons:

• The puzzles and traps are tedious and annoying
• The map starts with mediocre brushwork and only degrades over the course of the map
• The garg battle is just a really poorly pieced together setpiece
• It takes far too long to get to the first shortcut

Score: 5 / 10