Robo's 1 Hour Map - Dunkelschwamm

  

    It seems that making a map in an hour is something of a trend among Sven Co-op mappers. This one is from Robootto, an infamous author known for making strange and unplayable maps. Thankfully this map is, as the map description says, almost playable.

SCMapDB page

Author: Robootto

Date of final release: 2005

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Robo's 1 Hour Map

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | September 17, 2022 | 2698 characters

    If "1 hour map" legitimately means Robootto made this map in one hour, it'd explain a lot. Robo's 1 Hour Map is a walkthrough map that is mostly broken and sloppily thrown together. Textures exist where they shouldn't be, level geometry is jank, combat is a mess, the progression is broken, and there is no real map end. I do not recommend.

    It should be noted that this review is primarily of the unlit version of this map. However, I think I've played enough of the version shown here to know that, despite differences in the events, my overall emphatic lack of a recommendation would be the same between both versions.

    The map begins in a room that slowly trickles headcrabs on you like chinese water torture as you search the room full of unintuitive visuals until you find three identical buttons behind a breakable, exactly one of which opens a door (which, if it closes behind you and you have nobody outside to press that button, you must suicide) to a crossbow and one destructible among many identical brushes with a button behind it which lets respawning alien grunts into your spawn. It should be noted that when you first spawn you only have a crowbar out and a handgun and medkit holstered. The player must pick up and equip a shotgun and MP5, or the crossbow from that one room, so prepare to be spawncamped by alien grunts. Thankfully, one of the weird balance-raping changes through Sven's updates includes alien grunts throwing snarks, the explosions from which eventually killed them off in their frenzy to spawncamp us. The map proceeds to drop players down a weird water hole into a weird room with weird puzzles which do weird things, one of which includes opening a door to a battle in which the aliens' attack will certainly break the glass floor which softlocks the map by making the floor insta-kill the players with freeze damage. If you choose to cheat past this inevitable softlock, players will find themselves battling many more headcrabs and vortigaunts until you hit a deadend. If you noclip past the deadend you'll see there's a hallway full of headcrabs which leads to a flooded pair of rooms and a wall textured to look like a website. There is no end.

    There you go. That's all of the map. I don't recommend it.

Pros:

• This is one of those Robootto maps where there's a bit of thrill in seeing if you can actually complete it

Cons:

• Ugly
• Tedious and unfun and unbalanced
• Unintuitive
• Broken
• No ending
• Respawning enemies in player spawn

Score: 0.1 / 10