Arena Hyperion Preserve - GrandmasterJ

 

    This great looking map is made to look just like the game Borderlands. I'm not sure if this is a recreation of a Borderlands map or just inspired by the game, but it looks truly unique.

SCMapDB page

Author: Dr.Abc

Date of final release: 2018

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Arena Hyperion Preserve

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | June 19, 2022 | 6533 characters

    This map uses a lot of Borderlands 2 models and textures to recreate, what I assume to be, a location in Borderlands 2 of a big arena. The map looks great, everything really sells the idea of an arena fight on another planet against waves of aliens.

    The map starts off with players in a black room and a big floating button, pressing it opens the wall up to a short hall and an elevator up to the arena. Once inside the area, which is rolling hills dotted with shipping containers, pipes, tree things, some small streams, and a simple structure. There is a platform with a button and a big symbol over it inviting players to activate the next wave with it. There is also an ammo station off to one side.

    The first wave was headcrabs. We had medkits and revolvers and that is it. No melee weapon, and beyond the ammo I took from the ammo station we only had 12 rounds total. We ran out of ammo and died to the headcrabs. When we respawned we were in a caged area overlooking the arena. At first I thought I was out of the game for good, but that is not the case thankfully. There is a board indicating which round the game is on, one through five plus a bonus round, and a gambling kiosk. Pressing the button will deliver a random item to the player, sometimes ammo, explosives, weapons, health, HEV, or live grenades to damage players. At first this is how we built up our arsenal, it was fun at first but it very quickly got annoying. There are two rooms here, one has two buttons that initiate votes. I think the votes were for adding beneficial areas to the arena like more ammo dumps, but I pressed the button experimentally and was not ready for a vote so I quickly voted no to get out of it, and my teammate pressed the other button while I was in combat so I reflexively hit no. I feel like those would have helped, they never reset so they were lost to us forever. The other room contains unlockable weapons custom scripted to be like guns in borderlands 2. I don't really know how they became unlocked, I kept checking throughout the map but at a certain point my teammate ran in and activated them all, I don't know what was up with that. There are teleporters back into the arena and stairs back down to spawn, the long way to the arena.

    The gambling kiosk became annoying to use so we grabbed the new unlocked weapons and used those in suicide runs trying to do as much damage as possible. Very quickly the action ramps up in round 3 and the lack of supplies is felt. Low ammo means running out and either switching on the fly to something with low ammo or just not having weapons. No HEV means dying very quickly from just how many enemies get spawned at a time. One alien controllers start spawning in keeping track of where enemies are becomes impossible. Their homing projectiles will come out of nowhere and obliterate you. Alien controllers are easily the most dangerous things in this map. Even at the bonus round I when I would teleport into a swarm of enemies the alien controllers would consistently be the ones who killed me.

    I don't think two players is enough, I think maybe ten or so could make do with the severe lack of weapons and I think that would put enough players on the map so some could gamble for weapons while others were in the arena. With just two players we were either together or dead. At the end when we just started doing suicide runs we were dead. I'm not describing the waves because they were pretty chaotic and I don't remember exactly what enemies were in them. After wave 3 or 4 the enemies never stopped coming anyway so it all started to blur together. In round 5 we had a boss fight with a kingpin. I would teleport into the arena and get instantly hit by the kingpin, sometimes dying before my feet had a chance to touch the ground. This is where I stopped having fun with this map, I wasn't about to keep jumping into the arena just to die before I could even touch the ground.

    I hated the bonus round. Houndeyes, alien controllers, and baby voltigores keep spawning in forever. The boss is called the Invincible Tor (we voted for that, there may be other bonus rounds) who is thankfully not actually invincible. He kept spawning in alien grunts who in turn unleashed bees and snarks. The whole arena was a mess and absolutely filled with threats. This is where we could only do suicide runs, grab the custom borderlands 2 revolver, which I think was the only custom weapon worth anything in this map, run up to Tor and shoot him in the face. Sometimes we would die en-route, most times he would launch us straight up in the air and we would land on his head, and sometimes we did manage to get off a good hit. My teammate got all six shots off in his face and took out a third of this health. After a LOT of suicide runs we took him out and the map told us to press the button to end the map. My teammate tried to exterminate the last of the aliens but they still keep respawning so we couldn't.

    Overall I was annoyed for most of the map. It looks great, a lot of helpful and interesting additions are here like the gambling mechanics, new weapons, and helpful teleports. But then the map is incredibly stingy with ammo and it throws huge amounts of very tough enemies at us without giving us much armor. Gambling only goes so far, and sometimes we would get armor and then get a live grenade, prompting us to try to armor again. I didn't care for the enemies spawning between rounds, we would kill most of the enemies and the round would end but there would still be enemies. By the time the bonus round arrived I was done and not having any fun. If we had HEV we could survive walking into the arena, if we had ammo we could actually fight in the arena, and if we had weapons we might actually have fun.

Pros:

• beautiful map
• fun and interesting gambling kiosk
• fun and interesting custom Borderlands 2 weapons
• great teleports, it put us right back in the action

Cons:

• severe lack of ammo
• severe lack of HEV
• the gambling did not make up for being severely underequipped
• the boss will instantly kill players the moment they appear in the arena
• the voting buttons need to be labelled or something, calling votes while fighting causes bad results.
• I don't like the constant stream of enemies between waves, especially the alien controllers

Score: 4.5 / 10