Attack - Dunkelschwamm

 

    Attack aliens in the courtyard, behind the building, and sometimes in spawn if they can manage to walk through the front door. This is a small map with plenty of combat.

SCMapDB page

Author: Hterag

Date of final release: 2005

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Attack

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | August 11, 2022 | 3851 characters

    Attack is a short garg map with vortigaunts, zombies, and shock troopers respawning in endlessly to add variety and spice. Given that this is post-the shockroach update, I ended up abusing the shockroaches to do some damage to the gargs.

    The map takes place in a building surrounded by fences. Players spawn in the building, and running out and to the back makes the first garg spawn in front of the building. There's a side area that can be broken into to retrieve a crossbow, and in the back there are grenades. Once players obtain explosives they can blow up a door in the spawn area to reveal a shelf full of the boiler plate weapons (MP5, shotgun) as well as a sniper as a rocket launcher. Opening this cache spawns an even giganticker garg that players must fight (alongside the first garg if they haven't taken care of it yet). Far off the map there's also a secret with snarks in it that's essentially useless.

    The brushwork of this map, overall, is fine. It's boring boilerplate Half-Life 1 textures and simple areas. The ladder which takes players to the top of the map functions well, the explodable door is a bit of an issue at first (it said any small explosion will open it but it took a few grenades to budge it). I think the outdoor area looks a bit worse than outdoor desert areas usually do in Half-Life, but not by much.

    If I were to identify something about this map as a particularly glaring issue it would be that the gargs don't work very well. They are constantly clipping into the building, attacking the players through walls, or creating opportunities for the players to camp on the rocket launcher and shoot the garg as it stands in a corner. This is especially bad with the gigantic garg, who can be standing almost halfway inside of a building, unleashing flames on the players while being situated outside. It reminds me of that Madness Combat cartoon where the clown just comes out of walls and appears in random places and delivers devastating attacks and the characters just kinda recoil and recover and move on because there's no way to predict something like that. That's how it feels when the garg randomly incinerates you through a wall- like some dumb shit happened that you had no say in.

    Overall, I think the gameflow of the map isn't great either. A lot of it is just wading through enemies to get weapons to deal with a bigger enemy, and by the time you get good weapons for wading through enemies to go get those weapons to deal with the bigger enemy you also get a weapon for the bigger enemy in the same place and it's safest to just stay there and attack the monster because trying to traverse the map at any point risks the garg just clipping straight through the walls and incinerating me. I think it's fine, and it's probably more fun with tons of people, but it's not really my thing.

    If you're looking for a fun action map to play with a bunch of players or on a server, go for attack.

Pros:

• I like the idea of basing the progression of a defend map around gaining access to increasingly powerful weapons
• Getting a handle on the shock troops and vortigaunts at some points felt pretty satisfying
• Brushwork is servicable
• Map progresses naturally as players explore and ends shortly after it's made its point

Cons:

• Gargs clipping is jankwonk and dominates much of the gameplay for me
• Wading through the monsters to get a pittance of ammo every time was a bit of a bummer
• Once the players get a more appropriate arsenal there's little reason to use most of it
• Most of the fun I derived from this was from fucking with the ways new Sven features borked the map

Score: 5 / 10