Ayakashi Banquet - Dunkelschwamm

 

    Ayakashi is the collective name for Yokai (the Japanese term for supernatural beings) that appear over bodies of water. There isn't any water in this map but there are plenty of Yokai with custom models to shoot with fancy new gun models.

SCMapDB page

Author: nekomata, GAMESABA

Date of final release: 2007

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Ayakashi Banquet

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | September 4, 2022 | 3662 characters

    Ayakashi Banquet is a megamonster style map for Sven Co-op with lots of (I'm presuming comical) cutscenes inbetween. I cannot judge the cutscenes as I do not speak Japanese, the language they are written in, but I can speak to the gameplay and presentation.

    I'm going to talk about presentation first. The map's a real mixed bag: it has some really fun enemy models and weapon models. There are zombies with the skeleton model from They Hunger, there's an anime chick assassin boss, and cat houndeyes. There's even a giant skeleton yokai as the first boss. Now, despite these very fun model replacements, the rest of the map is very basic. The majority of it is in open field areas at night surrounded by very flat stretched hedge walls. There are some simple structures which create roofed wells, some fine looking trucks at the beginning, and a charming hut at the end with some lovely scenery as a reward. Aside from that last bit, while having charm, the rest of the map is very basic. I can forgive it, however, as it creates a pretty good setting for what the gameplay is. Also, for what it's worth, I found it pretty memorable despite its minimal detail.

    The gameplay is extremely simple: shoot the megamonsters until they die. As mentioned before, you fight a giant skeleton, then three squads of houndeye cats, and finally two phases of an anime chick assassin. These fights make use of tricks such as speeding up enemies to create new and interesting challenges, and feature ammo and a health-restoring well at each battle to keep things moving along. When you die, there's even a teleporter at spawn that will take you to the current arena. The issue is that these monsters have SO much health that unless you have at least 4 players it's going to take a pretty annoyingly long amount of time to get through their health. It's especially apparent with something like a beefed up female assassin whose main form of attack is mashing players with an accurate hitscan weapon in an open field; I ended up cheesing her by crouching in the healing well and taking pot shots, never taking enough damage to die myself. With only two players each of these battles takes too long, with the possible exception of the first two houndeye fights because they had more reasonable amounts of health (the third houndeye fight overstayed its welcome though).

    At the end, the map just gives the players a funny little area to run around in and reintroduces all of the characters as friendly NPCs. The map doesn't end until a timer runs out, making it a pretty bad map for map rotations.

    I do, however, recommend playing this with a handful of friends. It's pretty fun, even if you can't understand what the characters are saying or what they're about. If you only have two players, you might want to skip this unless you like cheesing overly spongey bosses.

Pros:

• Creative bosses with fun models and gameplay gimmicks
• Really liked the resupply wells and respawn teleporter
• The guns were really cute
• The map generally doesn't overstay its welcome
• The area at the end is really cute

Cons:

• High enemy HP makes playing with only a couple players take forever
• No real map end
• Bullet sponge female assassin is kind of a poor boss battle since there's no good strategy for dealing with her pistol attacks that aren't cheating the AI
• Dual uzis are identical to single uzi with weapon replacements
• Each arena is a big, vacuous, kinda ugly box

Score: 6.4 / 10