Diego Land - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Diego Land is an unfinished and abandoned project meant for somebody, I believe it's a youtuber named Diego. The map description says there is supposed to be comedy but I can attest the mapper hasn't added anything like that before abandoning it.

SCMapDB page

Author: Galy Raffo

Date of final release: 2019

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Diego Land

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | June 19, 2022 | 4300 characters

    Diego Land is an action map which paints in huge, broad strokes. Segments of the map are separated into huge cube rooms filled with scattered, strewn about as enemies ranging from bullet sponge levels of HP to full-metal bullet sponge levels of HP attack the player from multiple vantage points. Entrances into these arenas are always through blocky hallways with big vertically sliding doors, so the only way for a player to engage is head-on or by kiting in the doorway.

    Thankfully, Diego Land is stocked heavily with lots of weapons- namely the explosives. On top of the boilerplate Uzi, Shotgun, and MP5, there's also the M16 with underbarrel grenades, SAW, miniguns, rocket launchers, and hand grenades. There's also plenty of HEV to go around, which makes each battle feel a bit more fair, even during the more intense bullet sponge arenas. These are often doled out in huge restock rooms which also come complete with Barneys and scientists who get in the way more than anything. Oftentimes we'd accidentally lead enemies back into these restock rooms and they'd quickly dispatch the friendly NPCs.

    Diego Land utilizes a lot of models from various sources, which at times gives the appearance of quality. However, I found the actual geometric makeup of each arena to be nondescript, bland, and so lacking structure that enemies often rushed immediately into the hallways preceding the room, and often that bottleneck turned out more advantageous to us than fighting them in the arena anyway. There's a propensity for Sven maps to balance strangely due to different expectations of player count and player ability, but I definitely felt like this was a map where my friend and I were throwing out bodies at the problem over and over again. I think the beefy enemies, especially some robogrunts in one of the later parts of the level, are to blame.

    The map crescendos in a massive chamber with three street bridges stacked vertically above one another, a pit of dopefish below, a bunch of robogrunts and shock troopers on the streets to the side, and the players exiting from a high wall above the water, with only a small ramp allowing for maneuvering during battle with robots using high explosives. I think we spent something like 20 minutes grinding away at this part of the map, just repeated high explosives delivered directly to our enemies over and over and over again with very little visible progress. Attempting to rush ahead was no good as bullet sponge enemies in the next room would rush ahead and push us back out into the dopefish pond and then take potshots at us. The worst offenders are gonomes using the Richard Bodermann model in swarms. They run forward, sometimes into the water, and begin machinegunning blood blobs at us anywhere in this huge, super-open chamber.

    In any case, the map ends shortly after with an elevator sequence I suspect is unfinished and a map transition to a map that doesn't yet exist. See, the map is currently unfinished and supposedly abandoned. I see in the map description this was dedicated to somebody. Oof, not a good look to abandon and stop caring about a publicly declared dedication to a person in your life, but you do you. Since it's not finished, take my review as a review of an unfinished product, and presume incomplete work should you decide to try this with a friend. As stated, it has no ending, so I recommend not putting it on a server rotation.

Pros:

• Great action facilitated by lots of enemies and lots of player resources
• The ammo re-stash rooms are great
• This map had some of the larger scale battles I've seen
• A good combination of a hodgepodge of models

Cons:

• Battles go on due to spongey enemies, and sometimes feel as though no progress is being made
• Maps are lazily thrown together, with little rhyme or reason to chunks of barely functional cover that has to serve as the player's only cover other than the door they came in through
• Map is unfinished and abandoned
• Despite reappropriating some real nice assets, I feel like this map is pretty ugly and poorly put tgoether.

Score: 6.2 / 10