Arctic Mission - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Arctic Mission is a fun little romp through things that can vaguely be described as 'Arctic'. It is short and sweet with fun combat in interesting locations.

SCMapDB page

Author: TruckStopSantaClaus

Date of final release: 2019

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Arctic Mission

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by dunkelschwamm | June 5, 2022 | 4478 characters

    Arctic Mission is a map by TruckStopSantaClaus. It's action-centric, with players marching gun muzzles forward through aliens and soldiers, room after room. It covers a few different environments throughout, but a lot of it gives military complex vibes after an initial outdoor area with lots of snowy evergreen and some cavernous bits.

    All of this is done with some moody lighting which I think creates a pleasing atmosphere, and also plays up an interesting theme I see throughout: you begin outdoors at a normal residential home which is bright and pleasing within, then after being lost in the woods you come to a big military complex and work your way from the bottom up to the top offices, then through there bust briefly through some weird alien shit and out into freedom once you finally find a car. Moving from a familiar, homey location through being lost and then confronted with a huge, imposing force which you pick away at all the way up to its highest echelon is done very naturally and feels great.

    This theme of working your way to the top and knocking everything down is further enforced by what may be considered to be some dismally low ammo distribution early on. In the early stages of the game before players naturally come upon ammo in military-heavy locations, weapons and ammo are much harder to come by and running out of ammo for individual guns will be, I think, common if you have only a couple players. It creates a fun challenge, though, I think, and leads well into the map gradually granting the player lots of weaponry until each player is crushing waves of enemies with fully loaded arsenals and armor. It's a good feeling crushing your enemies by the end, moving office to office slaying the hostile militants with ease, after spending the earlier parts of the map pinned into corners. Earning dominance over a foe is hard, but I think this map does it well.

    I think the brushwork in this map is pretty good. Much of the military complex, despite the good lighting, is pretty standard Black Mesa fare and prefabs I've seen tons of times. Still, it looks good, and even some brightly colored environments look great for the detail and care put into them. Seriously, I can talk shit about the use of prefabs, but each environment shows clear signs of the author paying attention to detail, creating sequestered superfluous map bits for the sake of believable environments, and sneaking in tons of references to crap the author's into. This is a 2019 map, but it reminds me a lot of the spirit of maps around 2005, like Nipper's stuff which have a lot of fun environments, pack in random lived-in realistic homes and such with striking decorations, and fit in fun textures to cheaply reference pop culture. It's a good model, it's fun and keeps things light hearted, but also has this living quality to it like an immersive sim- it's a design style that I think disappeared around 2008-2009 in the mainstream and we see flickers of it in retro revivals nowadays, but this map really pulls it off great.

    Overall, despite praising the thematic turn in difficulty, I do think the map is pretty easy throughout, and definitely feels like a pushover by the end. Those looking mostly just for serious action may find it boring by the time you get there. There were plenty of powerful weapons that I didn't ever really feel the need to use, which is a sign things are getting imbalanced. Still, it's a lot of fun, and I think it creates a compelling environment despite using lots of assets and prefabs we've seen before.

    If you're looking for a good action map to play with friends on to rotate on a server, try out Arctic Mission. It's a hoot.

Pros:

• Fun, ever escalating action
• Some really nice outdoor environments
• Decent indoor environments, even in most are pretty boilerplate in areas
• Fun attention to detail

Cons:

• Balance gets a bit loopy by the end, making combat skewed toward the player
• There's some bits that I think perhaps end too quickly, like a sniper challenge where the player is given a sniper rifle to kill just a few snipers and it never really comes up much after that
• Despite being a very fun experience full of fun little setpieces, they do kinda blend together when looking back on them

Score: 8.7 / 10