Resident Evil: The Aftermath - GrandmasterJ

 

    There are a lot of Resident Evil maps for Sven Co-op and they mostly follow the same formula of exploring a mansion. The 'Aftermath' part of the title implies this map is a sequel but it is unclear what the previous map could be.

SCMapDB page

Author: James Smith

Date of final release: 2005

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Resident Evil: The Aftermath

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | September 1, 2022 | 5740 characters

    I've been playing the first Resident Evil lately so my teammate and I decided to try out a Resident Evil map. He remembers the Resident Evil maps being pretty bad and I only remember vague impressions of them. So I thought I would start with the one with the lowest STARS rating.

    The map starts off in a red chamber with a locked door and a hole high up in the wall. I think this is supposed to force at least two players to play but with the climbing mechanic that was added into Sven Co-op later you don't need two players to get through it. After this are class selection holes that my teammate and I were hesitant to jump into, we didn't know what it was. At the bottom are different weapons and a medkit, a class selection of melee, ranged, and healer. A black wall teleports players into the lobby of the mansion. My teammate discovered that he could come through, drop his weapon, suicide, and then pick another class. I highly recommend this exploit.

    Quick note, there is a light switch in the main hall, switch it on to make life easier. I only found it after the map was mostly over, and then we did something that made all the lights shut off and it made me very sad.

    Having just played Resident Evil 1 I have the layout fairly fresh in my head, this map uses about two rooms and then ditches the mansion layout. There are some rooms vaguely around the same areas but the hallways are all wrong. That includes the level design and textures, the map is amateur work with numerous problems. The doors are razor thin, sometimes they overlap with walls and z fight, a few have misaligned origins so they rotate in the middle. The doors also have a bad habit of blocking the narrow hallway and refusing to close. Some walls have clear seams at regular intervals indicating the border of the wall texture. Most rooms are textured the same as the connecting hallways making large parts of the level look flat.

    The combat was tense at first with two players, one as a medic and the other as a knife wielding lunatic. Zombies had fairly high health between 120-400, he would hit and I would heal. We eventually picked up a revolver and traded it back and forth. My teammate accidentally left the game with the revolver, locking it off from us forever. There is a knife later that players can pick up forever, but all guns that appear do not respawn when picked up, which means anybody experiencing connectivity problems should not have a gun (except pistol which is available at spawn). As the map went on we got more tired of hit and running zombies with the knife in narrow hallways and as we got more annoyed with the key hunting we started being more reckless. I feel like there was a solid vision for the gameplay in place but not so much for the level design and the map really suffers for it. Hunting down zombies with high health sounds like old school Sven, but doing so in bland looking narrow hallways with doors that block the way isn't fun.

    The key hunt is as follows, grab a gold key, unlock the gold door, find a lockpick, unlock a locked door, then look for a fire 'extingwisher', to pick up the gold key. My teammate and I noclipped over the entire map multiple times and could not find the extinguisher. I don't know if the map is broken or we are stupid but we didn't finish this map the legal way. There was also a crowbar item (not the default HL1 melee weapon) we needed but I forget when that happened, I remember thinking it was bullshit because I had the knife (which was the crowbar with a different model), and after grabbing the crowbar I knifed the box anyway, why did I need to pick that up? The gold key unlocked a door back to the main hallway, deformed nemesis came out and we killed him, and then the lights went out and the alarm went off, I think. I'm unclear on what happened with the path of progression here but that is roughly what happened. After that is a single lonely shark, some bad ooze, and a locked gate required a security keycard we also could not find anywhere, not that we actually looked that hard because by this point we were pretty fed up. We also noclipped over the entire map many times except for the area beyond this locked door looking for the fire extinguisher and we didn't feel like doing all that again. We noclip through the locked door and the game fades to black. Then pops back into existence and I look around confused for a bit until the map actually ends.

    I always feel uneasy about reviewing maps I didn't finish the intended way. Was there something I missed? But I can attest that I went over the map multiple times and could not find the extinguisher or the key card. But setting that aside, what I did see of the map was fairly unimpressive, starting with the confusing class selection to the uninspired level design and the plodding combat. At the very least I do appreciate a lot of the effort put into the map. The monsters use custom models and so do the weapons, locked doors will announce the required key across the server, and were some nice custom sound effects. This map tried hard, it tried real hard.

Pros:

• Lots of custom content, high effort map.
• the combat is fun if played exactly as intended with a good friend and have no problems
• Displaying a message about what key a locked door needs across a server is very helpful
• I don't like the class selection, but I like exploiting the class selection

Cons:

• The class selection is confusing and easily exploited
• the map looks bad
• the map is designed bad
• weapons can be lost forever easily
• does the map does not have things needed to progress? No extinguisher and no security key card

Score: 4 / 10