Resident Evil: Directors Cut - Dunkelschwamm

  

    This is the second and probably final Resident Evil map made by James Smith, following his previous map, Aftermath. The map is very similar to the first, keeping with a recreation of the Resident Evil mansion, but it is very much improved.

SCMapDB page

Author: James Smith

Date of final release: 2008

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Resident Evil: Directors Cut

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | September 3, 2022 | 6027 characters

    Resident Evil: Director's Cut is a map for Sven Co-op map which replicates, at a very base level, the cheap outermost layers of a Resident Evil game, much like its predecessor Resident Evil: Aftermath does. However, unlike Resident Evil: Aftermath, this map is competently produced.

    First of all, I think the presentation of this map is a large improvement from Resident Evil: Aftermath. The furniture is all lovely, and there's a few nice atmospheric touches like rain outside the windows and some lovely candelabras. The hallways have one drawn-out theme which gets stale by the end of the map, but before getting stale it is rather nice looking. There's a sewer later on that is fine for a sewer. What I think this map does best with its presentation is when puzzles slowly open a part of a wall or something. In those moments, the mansion comes alive and the map actually sells me on a horror mystery game in a spooky zombie mansion run by mad scientists.

    Now, that's not to say the presentation is great: there's a great big central hub that's pretty nice this time around, but still is mostly ditched once again in favor of a long hallway which must be traversed up and down from the dining room over and over to accomplish the mission. There are a handful of rooms accessible from doorways across from the doors which lead to the dining room, but those are mostly for visiting very briefly before returning to the dining room. You move through the dining room to access all of the additional weapons to the inventory (that we found- there may have been a shotgun somewhere we didn't see), to access the underground sewer area, and even to wrap around to other doors in the hub area. Must like in Resident Evil: Aftermath, the architecture is all nonsense, but it's far less obvious about it this time around. I don't know if it's something about the greater abundance of nonsense doors and benches that makes it feel more like a sensical livable space. I couldn't tell you.

    The combat of this map is also pretty tight for the most part. There's a mean ambush early in the sewers that contributed our first deaths which requires that the players crawl through a space that enemies can run through easily. However, aside from that, most of it is clearing rooms, hallways, and hidden spaces of hordes of zombies who all satisfying feign death and have just enough health to take a beating without being a huge drain on ammo. Later there are hunters, which were surprisingly effective, and some zorks which where a pain in the ass but overall worked. There's also a battle with Nemesis that is so easy to cheese that it really does the Nemesis name a disservice. There's enough weapons to make fights satisfying, while not piling on so many as to undermine the horror aesthetic. It knows exactly where to draw the line, much like the original Resident Evil did. Ammo doesn't respawn, which becomes a problem late in and I can't imagine would work on a server with a bunch of people, but it is what it is.

    The nature of the puzzles themselves is a bit of a nuisance. The thing is, it's a scavenger hunt map that requires you find obscure keys to obscure locks which are mostly located in a big slowly unveiling ring. Traversing this ring takes the form of running down hallways full of doors, some of which might or might not be the ones you've recently unlocked. Now, I think this map does attempt to make important doors stand out via positioning MOSTLY, but you still have to do some guesswork to find the important ones on your first try. The thing is, most of the map is just traveling back and forth so it can tell you you're allowed to continue forward. Even the last bit of the map is just a fetch quest. We walked all the way back to where we were tasked with finding the item we had retrieved, and a door opened deeper into the mysterious lair and the map ended. I threw up my hands. The combat is fine, but it's fun gameplay sprinkled on a pretty tedious format which fails to benefit at all from the mansion layout format with a central hub that Resident Evil provides. To the map's credit, it utilizes a metroidvania-y style of opening a new shortcut to the next area to shorten travel distance some of the time, and it's appreciated where it happens.

    That said, there's a really clever puzzle early on that stumped my comrade and myself so hard that we ended up sequence breaking around it by boosting. Once we realized the solution I had a bit of a laugh about it. I think it's clever bit on how to get through one of the doors in the aforementioned dining room hallway. There's another one later which requires grenades to get through which my comrade was keen to figuring out before I would have guessed that was the solution. These are good puzzles. The map definitely could have used more of these.

    Overall, I think this is a map with some pretty decent highs and mostly middling lows. It definitely doesn't respect the player's time, but it does accomplish a lot of atmosphere and fun zombie exterminating. It doesn't deliver what I think somebody would want if they're really trying to satiate a Resident Evil-y hankering, but it does deliver a knock-off brand Halloween costume version of Resident Evil that I think works fine on its own.

    Play it with friends, put it on a server. I recommend.

Pros:

• Fun combat with just the right amount of dakka for it
• Atmospheric map
• Fun zombie models which feign their deaths as a hurt animation
• A couple good puzzles
• I liked when grabbing an item usually came with unlocking a shortcut to the next spot

Cons:

• Most of this map is in scouring a hallway for a door that might open
• Ammo not respawning becomes a bit of a quality of life problem
• The puzzles being a bunch of boring fetch quests really deflates the experience

Score: 6.8 / 10