The Community Map Project - Dunkelschwamm

 

    Featuring 15 authors, 7 years of development (or 12 depending on how you define 'development time'), and 7 individual maps, The Community Map Project is a beast of a map set. Somewhat unrelated, but this post taught me that Blogger has limits to how many labels a post can have, a max of 20, when I was tagging this post I was forced to leave out 'series' and 'Black Mesa'.

SCMapDB page

Authors: al_peggio, Amckern, Aurora, BMT, Dan200, eMTeG, Fortune2, Hezus, Koelzk, Morgan, Nih, PD-KC, Penguin, The_6th_monkey, The-Real-Game

(Due to the number of authors and the page tag limit of 20, not all authors are tagged)

Date of final release: 2009, updated version 2015

Maps in package: 7

Map review of The Community Map Project

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | August 14, 2022 | 11013 characters

    The Community Map Project is a series of maps for Sven Co-op. They play as a mostly walkthrough set which features lots of action, some interesting set pieces, some more exciting than others. Most of it takes place in a Black Mesa setting, which is varying degrees of bland.

-commap1-

    Commap1 starts strong with a fun bit where the players are assisted by a turret. After a small amount of corridor combat with some aliens, the players fall into a sewer from a hole in the wall and then take another hole in the wall to a room with a vent with a hole in it. A lot of this map feels like a series of segues with intermittent combat at this point.

    After these beginning areas the players find themselves in multi-decker office which players must work their way through. Funny enough, most of the offices are full of more contrivances- a radio hunt (which I actually really enjoyed, I'm not knocking the radio scavenger hunt), some are boarded but others have holes in the walls, etc.

    It's at around this point that I realized this map had a really good checkpoint system and shortcut system baked into it. Pretty consistently throughout this map I didn't have any issues with respawn points and felt spoiled, often respawning very near to where I died. The equipment is also very generous, while still putting us in combat situations where I felt we needed to make up for where more obtuse weapons would be helpful.

    At this point we need to rescue some aliens who are our allies, which is hilarious, as the entire beginning of the map (and much of what was to follow) would involve slaughtering aliens. During this segment, however, we are battling blackops.

    After freeing the aliens we go back to the sewer, then fall for an obvious trap into a mines. I really like the mines here. I feel the whole cave is brushed out in a pretty unique way that I think was a lot of fun to see. There's a fun bit involving driving a minecart through a barrier, which I 100% gibbed my teammate with.

    At the end of the mines there's an interesting and unique looking outpost by a subterranean river, where a bunch of pretty annoying firefights with aliens take place. After that it's just battling aliens through some corridors to the end of the map.

    This map is pretty long, and set a grim prognosis for the amount of time it might take another player and myself to complete the whole mapset. I think this map is a great length on its own, and as a result this is where I warn players in short sessions might want to knock out this mapset one map at a time during different sessions.

-commap2-

    The second map begins with a gigantic elevator which takes players down to a parking complex, then from there to a cliffside, and from there to a huge shootout outside of an impressively scaled radar dish. Shootout, after shootout, and one very dramatically lit maintenance stairwell later, players enter a huge concrete complex with some intense battles with soldiers and robots. This last part really grates because the frequent use of underbarrel grenades so we can't gain an angle to fire, and thus have to jump down to where there is no cover and we are immediately liquidated by hitscans. It was far more effective to kite and snipe.

    Moving on we get to what my teammate refers to as the "toonrun monitors" which I think is pretty funny, but I also want to heavily encourage the use of funny monitor shapes in maps. Players battle a bunch of soldiers, including HW guys, and then blow up the monitors to move on. Shortly after, players find a barnacle and lower themselves into the next map.

-commap3-

    Commap 3 is a pretty, if mostly uninspired, underground complex complete with parking, a topside complex full of puzzles requiring breaking windows and climbing around, and then a bunch of concrete corridors. Most of this map is corridors. There's some interesting bits here and there, like the giant wheel early on which spews headcrabs, but this map mostly looks pretty but plays like long corridors full of enemies more than interesting firefights.

    Early on you clear out a tunnel full of voltigores, and then robogrunts. Then take an elevator up to topside where there is barely any cover from Blackops everywhere. Solve the topside puzzles, exterminate blackops in the tons of concrete hallways, fight through a cargo hold, and go to the next map.

-commap4-

    Commap4 starts the player off in a lab taken over by xenians and race x, but quickly moves into large pipes. These large pipes look great, but are host to one of the worst bits in the map- after the water floods in, a bunch of ichthyosaurs remodeled to be archer fish appear and are just fucking ridiculous. They're glitchy, insane to fight, healthy beyond means which feel fair to battle them- it's a mess. My teammate seemed to think they respawn- regardless of if they do, we swam past and hated every moment.

    From here players move through some more office complex and into the next big battle area: the nonsense skybridge. A nonsense skybridge, in the shape of a rigid U, protrudes from the side of a cliff. Players must shoot out windows to engage a helicopter. Eventually we boosted one another out onto the roof of the skybridge, which seems to the intended progression, and a shortcut opened in the form of a ladder which immediately impaled me (I was the booster not the boostee) and I respawned for my trouble. Outside of the skybridge, we get an RPG and fight an alien ambush dropped off by a manta ray as well as some robogrunts. Shooting from within the skybridge and then atop it, but also out of the windows to those atop the skybridge across from us, was a really clunky and strange firefight. I commend its uniqueness, but think it mostly resulted in feeling weird rather than thrilling.

    We make our way to a giant tunnel checkpoint full of HECU and a particularly charming robogrunt. After an intense fight with them, one of the most annoying bits of the map for me begins: a battle with a garg who the players are barely equipped to fight. First of all, we were given one rocket launcher, and it disappeared when the player carrying it died long before this fight. There is a single handgrenade pick before the skybridge, which happens to be where players spawn at this point, but like fuck that right? Doesn't it suck to wait for grenades to respawn to get a full set to chuck at a gargantua because the map doesn't equip you to fight it? Thankfully we got the garg very stuck on a door to the checkpoint area we were in and we could ensure each grenade maximized damage. Still, the process was arduous and not fun. Now, to be fair, you can skip this if you can understand that the patch of metal that looks like it'll open after the garg dies is actually just destructible the whole time. It doesn't look destructible, but it totally is.

    I like the scale on display in the setpieces here. This map looks really nice, and has a brutalist grandiosity to it. The gameplay teeters, however, between wonky and grinding here.

-commap5-

    Commap5 begins early on with an impressive industrial complex and an outdoor firefight which quickly leads to one of the mapset's coolest gimmicks: players ride atop an APC and control a rocketlauncher atop it to fight a tank which is in close pursuit. Utilizing the opening and closing flaps of the APC to create cover against the tank is great, even if interactables are selective in cooperation.

    Players ride the APC to another impressively scaled location- this time a massive bridge with an osprey delivering troops atop it. Players quickly battle these troops and fight their way into a large railway system which again is very interestingly lit and scaled and brushed out. After some intense xen fights on the rail here, players fight through a couple HECU rooms and finish the map out. A lot of the map outside of the initial gimmick is very pretty, but vacuous firefights.

-commap6-

    Commap6 fully embraces the corridors, but there's a definite theme now. Much of this map feels heavily reminiscent of the early areas of Half-Life, especially the anomalous materials processing, despite sporting "Lambda Complex" signs. Much of this feels like if you were to grab parts of the earlier bits of Half-Life and apply it as a wallpaper to several hallways you'd get something like this.

    The second half of this map is, like, nothing but blackops and turrets. There are so many goddamned turrets in this map, and in big open hallways mostly. It gets insanely old insanely quick.

-commap7-

    Commap7 opens early with a very impressive desert area, large in scale with huge boulders and fun brushwork which creates a very naturalistic vibe. An exceptionally well brushed cave leads to an exceptionally well brushed cliff face which players fight across to a helicopter surrounded by blackops. After another heated firefight, players are prompted to bring a barrel of fuel from a building to the helicopter, which prompts a defense segment where players man mounted guns and blow away spawning alien grunts and vortigaunts. This bit is a lot of fun and I had a ton of fun. The helicopter leaves and the game ends.

Final thoughts

    I think this mapset is mired in some areas where the gameplay meanders or feels like a melange of sorta annoying soldiers in big pretty renditions of environments I'd normally find kinda trite and overtrodden. Each map has something interesting going on in it (with the possible exception of commap6) and most maps also have something pretty annoying going on in them. Overall, though, I really like how much equipment we get and I think the maps consistently deliver action and crazy setpieces.

    If you're looking for maps to play with a friend, give these a shot in multiple sittings. If you load these onto a server, I bet people would get a real kick out of them.

Pros:

• Beautiful, gorgeous brushwork most of the way through
• A lot of really interesting firefights
• I think the players are often kept very well equipped to make them not feel starved during battle
• The APC gimmick bit was particularly well executed
• Some really impressive scale in some of these maps
• Lots of content in each map

Cons:

• There are some low moments where the fighting and the maps kinda blur together, especially if you're playing in one sitting
• Some of the firefights are really annoying, or in the case of the garg in commap4, grating in their execution
• Something on some of the early maps caused huge latency issues on our server pretty consistently
• The turret sections overstay their welcome
• Great use of checkpoints early on slowly wears away and is missed dearly later
• Lots of concepts brought up briefly and never expanded on in favor of swarms of enemies in corridors

Score: 7.8 / 10