Bank Robbery - Dunkelschwamm

 

    Players start in a grey boxy building and outside are tons of enemies. The boxy grey building is the bank, you are the robbery, and the enemies are the cops.

SCMapDB page

Author: halfliferyan

Date of final release: 2005

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Bank Robbery

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | September 24, 2022 | 3734 characters

    Bank Robbery is a funny little action map where the players start in a big box within a huge box and must fight the enemies who are within the huge box but not within the big box (unless they run inside). The huge box may be called the "exterior" to some, but let's be real it's just a huge box.

    The big box has a few hostages, a bunch of weapons and HEV and some medkits and a scant bit of ammo for 9mm and the sniper. This is where you spawn. There's a barricade that provides excellent cover from which you can easily decimate enemy forces, but the barricade does shatter after some punishment.

    The huge box is full of hostile hgrunts, Barnies, Otises, sentry turrets, hwgrunts, and snipers. There's a helicopter for good measure. Things aren't all doom and gloom, as the exterior is also littered with more ammo, a pickup for a rocket launcher, and a mounted machinegun that deals massive damage (and is almost impossible to remount if you rotate it and unmount it). Taking out these enemies wasn't terribly difficult for me, aside from a few enemies who were hidden behind the draw distance who still fired on my teammate and I from atop buildings. It took a lot of damage and investigating before we were even in a place where we could see they were up there and able to see up there at the same time. Conventional wisdom would say that the further back you are when you look the better perspective you'll have to see on top of a building, but that is not the case here.

    Within the huge box there is an alcove where a female assassin with a pretty chunky mass of health stands as the boss behind a sandbag barricade. In a way much mimicking our experience in the big box earlier, the assassin has an easy time taking pot shots from behind her cover before it is destroyed and she has to run out into the greater huge box landscape. Out there my teammate and I were able to punish her repeatedly with sniper rounds and rockets until the map ended abruptly with her death.

    This map is pretty fun for being basically a big scattered mess of enemies with players in the middle of it. That said, I haven't mentioned yet that this map is dirt ugly. There's a reason I call it a box within a box- it is meant to represent a bank within a city square of sorts, but resembles nothing of the sort. It resembles a big box within a huge box. I give this a D- in the visual department- it's not an F, as I think there are some truly offensively bad maps out there, but this rather showed too little effort to really be admonished so harshly.

    If you're looking for a quick and dumb action map that's kinda fun, I'd recommend this for a quick treat. If visuals or memorability are important to you, give this a pass.

Pros:

• Fast paced balls to the wall action that didn't feel like bullshit
• Lots of decent equipment that isn't overpowered but allows players to stay on top of the chaos
• Sometimes simplicity is just better
• I like the way if players want ammo they need to venture into the war zone to find it
• The barricades for both the player in the beginning and the boss at the end are really nice thematic bookends and are lots of fun

Cons:

• This map has the production value of a cardboard box fort
• The draw distance makes some NPC vs player standoffs unfair and frustrating
• Nothing about this map really screams "bank robbery" to me. Usually when somebody robs a bank they don't wage war on the local law enforcement until nobody is left standing
• The fun mounted turret breaks immediately on use

Score: 6.8 / 10