Dukemap - GrandmasterJ

 

    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 GrandmasterJ | May 27, 2022 | 5930 characters

    I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Dukemap, made by DukeN, is inspired by Duke Nukem 3D. Duke jumps down from a ship in the first level of Duke 3D and players jump down from a flying saucer in this map. The gameplay diverges pretty differently here, it's not a remake but just feels inspired by Duke Nukem.

    Players spawn in a space ship with these green bars rising out of the floor, these are HEV chargers. I didn't realize this until my teammate started sucking up that sweet armor. There is a door at the bottom of the ship that opens when two players press two buttons simultaneously. Once its open players fall through to land painlessly on a shallow pool of water on the roof of a building.

    This roof gives us our first taste of how combat goes in this map, players land in the open with enemies all around and start getting hit immediately. At this point we don't have weapons (we landed on a .357 but I didn't realize that at the time) so I have to jump out of the pool of water and run to the pile of mp5s in the middle of the roof.

    The next area is accessible via a very small ledge on the side of the building that I managed to miss twice, thus killing me via kill brush midway to the ground. I should mention that the edges of the roof have a lip but not big enough to stop the player, so players treat it like a step and even if you are careful as errant movement can catapult players off the roof and into the kill trigger. Once on the ledge players are at the mercy of the enemies in the window. Inside the apartment kitchen there is a shotgun hidden inside a breakable trash can. There is a light switch here that players have to flick to open up a window four tiny ledges away on the side of the building. Be careful, the third ledge in your journey will break on touch and then you will fall to your death. Also the door is on a timer so hurry up.

    Once inside the building I ran forward killing all in my path until a scripted sequence dropped a wall on my head and killed me instantly. This meant I had to jump back down to the tiny ledge, hit the switch and then platform back quickly before getting back to the action. Along the way I never really remembered to grab the shotgun until I was past it so I pretty much never had a shotgun for the rest of the map.

    Eventually we dropped down into a water tank full of ichthyosaurs which was fairly unpleasant and had to kill them all before opening a path to street level. Here a bunch of enemies spawned in and we killed them. Any death would mean traveling through the ledge platforming and the building and the stupid water tank again just to get back to where we were. After both my teammate and I finished such an arduous trek we triggered a shortcut to the roof via a vent. I am so grateful for these shortcuts but this could have come way sooner. It would have been real nice if the shotgun could have been in the shortcut, I want to reiterate that I never picked up the shotgun again and this shortcut definitely did not help.

    On the street there is a large fissure in the street. Do not jump into that. There is also a small fissure here too, jump into that one. There is nothing to indicate you need to jump into a bottomless pit, its just kind of there and that is how you progress the map. At the bottom of the fissure is hell. Players falling into hell land on a bullsquid, its awkward and funny. Hell is platforming over lava and having enemies spawn around you on a platform surrounded by lava. The author first dumps two alien grunts on the player on the first platform, two gonomes on the second platform, Tor on the third, and a kingpin on the fourth. The combat here is all about trolling the players and getting them killed. Personally I can't platform to save my life so I could progress no further. I fell off a platform right at the end and simply could never jump back to where I was. I watched as my teammate had to jump across some stepping stones and having two thirds of the stones break as soon as he touched them. I am glad I sat this section out.

    Eventually my teammate hit another checkpoint. This one opens up a third fissure in the street that drops players onto the boss fight. The boss is a Gargantua that has loads of health with an entourage of alien controllers. The arena is yet another platform over lava, much bigger than the previous platforms, but not nearly big enough to host a fight against a gargantua. I died from splash damage from my own rockets and falling off the platform, but I don't think the garg ever got credited for a kill on me. After the fight a door opened up and stepping through it ended the map.

    I went into this map expecting Duke 3D, the map started off really promising in that department. I would say that clearing out the building was fun too. But the constant trips through tedious platforming and a timed door button was a real drag, shortcuts become available too late to alleviate this problem. The second half of the map, the lava platforming, was malicious and if it weren't for my teammate I would have stopped playing right there. The garg fight was a final slap in the face before the map made it's long awaited exit.

Pros:

• players get plenty of HEV right in the spawn area
• The combat inside the building was pretty solid
• shortcuts opened up, even if they were a little too late

Cons:

• players are constantly thrown into the middle of combat, enemies spawn around players
• Respawning players have to run through the platforming and door/button sequence
• I got killed by scenery and I am personally really mad about that
• The lava platforming sequence is very annoying and not fun
• the final boss fight is designed to suck

Score: 4 / 10