Barney the Great - Dunkelschwamm

  


    I don't know why the author thought it was necessary to make this map some weird fanfiction about Barney's family. But I will say none of that matters, simply kill aliens in the map and you win.

SCMapDB page

Author: Tigan

Date of final release: 2006

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Barney The Great

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | October 1, 2022 | 2208 characters

    Barney The Great is a baffling map for how straight forward it is. Navigate 3 poorly brushed, blocky floors in a self-contained building, fighting annoying enemies in cramped spaces with the bare minimum weaponry to do so.

    In the first floor you fight zombies and baby headcrabs in cramped living quarters. According to the story, these are Barney The Great's family members trying to avenge him. This makes absolutely zero sense to me. I don't get this angle at all. It's an annoying battle in an ugly, mostly dark area that you must navigate with only the crowbar and the pistol.

    The second floor gives you a shotgun and sees that you battle vortigaunts and alien grunts. The map description suggests that these are "gang members" and I'm not going to unpack what that's supposed to mean in this review. There's a brief spark of a fun fight here, I think largely on accident due to Sven balancing making vortigaunts revive eachother. There is a rocket launcher on this floor positioned such that a player would likely clear the floor before finding it.

    The third floor has a gargantua. instinct would tell the player to shoot the gargantua from the second floor, but that's a recipe for a quick accidental suicide. It's far better to run up into the third floor and take cover in the crates while taking pot shots with the rocket launcher. The map ends abruptly when the garg dies.

    The map is spartan, blocky, ugly, annoying for the first third, and kinda boring throughout. I don't recommend it unless you're really scraping the bucket on looking to flesh out a very completionist map list. If this was somebody's first map, I hope they kept making maps and learned to make maps with a bit more to them than this.

Pros:

  • Straight-forward action
  • Doesn't overstay its welcome
  • Coherent structure
  • Technically succeeds at being a 3-act action map

Cons:

  • Annoying first floor
  • Blocky, ugly map
  • Minimalist weapon allotment is boring
  • Map generally fails to leave an impression

Score: 3 / 10

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