Baohu - GrandmasterJ

 

    A front-doorless fort with a scientist glued to the center, a courtyard, and a button that spawns waves of enemies, the goal is to protect the scientist. Except enemies don't target the scientist so it is hard to lose this map.

SCMapDB page

Author: Ice Box

Date of final release: 2011

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Baohu

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | September 18, 2022 | 3108 characters

    The map is simple, players start in a small fort and outside the front gate is a big field where enemies spawn in waves. There is a scientist in the middle of the fort stuck in place, if he dies then the game is lost. Now I thought this map was going to suck because it was going to be hard keeping the scientist alive, this is not the case. The scientist has 15000 health and can be healed, takes no damage from players, and enemies don't target him. We were careful about him at first but near the end we would bury him under satchel charges and blow him up.

    The fort has plenty of satchel charges and trip mines, some grenades, and a load of weapons including mp5, shotgun, dual uzis, SAW, rocket launcher, and sniper rifle along with two respawning miniguns. Important to note is that there is no ammo for any of these guns, so suicide is necessary to restock on ammo. There is a mounted turret up top that can really deal some damage to enemies. Once players are ready, there is a button marked 'go' that makes the map go.

    Each wave gets a small cutscene overview of the arena, a description of enemy type along with health and quantity, and a countdown timer. Waves start with weak zombies and ramp up through barney zombies, alien slaves, alien grunts, bullsquids, a gonome boss, human grunts with mp5s, humans with shotguns, male assassin snipers, female assassins, and then a Heavy Weapons grunt boss. With two players we managed to get as far as the male assassin snipers. I think enemies are set to invade the spawn area, because the moment they appear they make right for spawn. At a certain point we started cheating and stayed outside the spawn area, and about half the enemies would go towards us and the other half would run in the spawn area. This means every wave inevitably ends up in spawn. So when we got to the male assassin sniper wave we started to die half a second into spawning. It was about five minutes of getting about three crowbar hits on 48 snipers until I decided we weren't winning this and needed to cheat.

    Maybe with more players we could have beaten the map, if we had one more player we probably could have crowbarred some breathing room from the snipers and eventually killed them all. But it became real tedious. Since the scientist isn't really in danger of dying the stakes are very low, this was less a defense map and more of a 'kill x number of high health enemies to proceed' gameplay loop. At a certain point in the map I was just over it completely, I think it may have been the alien grunt wave.

Pros:

• Thank the lord the scientist was durable and immune to friendly fire
• the wave announcements and cutscenes were nice
• lots of explosives

Cons:

• no ammo
• all enemies beeline towards spawn, spawn killing is the map
• with less than two players there is a real danger of getting soft-locked
• gameplay just gets tedious after a while

Score: 4 / 10