Resident Evil: The Awakening - GrandmasterJ

 

    There are many Resident Evil maps in the Sven map database, but this is the first and has the highest score (of the time of writing this paragraph). Players are Bravo squad, the lost and dead STARS member seen at the beginning of the first Resident Evil, can we overturn canon and survive?

SCMapDB page

Author: mrfranswa

Date of final release: 2003

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Resident Evil: The Awakening

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | October 9, 2022 | 7304 characters

    This map has me so confused. So I dipped my toes into the Sven Co-op Resident Evil maps by doing the ones with the lowest STARS ratings first, now we are jumping to the map with the highest rating. It's certainly better, but it is essentially a big maze with an item hunt while players have to deal with ammo and guns that don't respawn and some limiting character classes.

    Players start off in a big metal box with some buttons, the problems start early as the difficulty buttons seem bugged. The leftmost button reads "wussy, less enemies", the rightmost button reads "Extra, Hard but with more surprises". The middle two buttons each say "INSANE!", one of the two insane buttons must be medium or hard difficulty, but we could not tell so we played on 'Extra, Hard with surprises." After that is a set of holograms featuring lesser known Resident Evil characters (named corpses in the games) Forrest, Kenneth, and Richard. These are the character classes, Forrest has a knife and armor, Richard has a gun and armor, and Kenneth has a gun, knife, and medkit. I see no reason why anybody would play a character other than Kenneth. The character classes are a joke, if we felt like it we could have dumped all our items on the ground and suicide to stock up.

    Through the character class hole puts players next to Bravo team's downed helicopter (I think) and another huge problem for me, rope ladders. I hate rope ladders and there are lots of rope ladders, players have to go down one here and take a trip in caves to get to the mansion. We went underground to go through the forest, it was not fun.

    Inside the mansion we see that the layout is not anything like the original Resident Evil. It is a big maze with some papers that will display long winded files to the player who used it and a bunch of locked doors that need keys to open. Some doors require C4 and a detonator, some doors require piano music, so on and so forth. The map layout is pretty mazey, it's got unique rooms and landmarks to make navigation easier, but the twisty hallways and constant running back and forth across the map to unlock doors leads to lots of time lost. About halfway through the map I was at a locked door, ran across the map to unlock another door and grab a key, ran back to the door I was just at and unlock it to find another objective near where I just grabbed the key, It was an exhausting back and forth.

    Then we get to the sewers. Past two more awful rope ladders is a big and boring sewer section. So my teammate and I died sparingly in this map, losing the one of a kind weapons we had. Each time we died we would have to pick our class and go underground just to end up in the lobby again. That trek is annoying enough, I have to go through a rope ladder and a tunnel just to ge to the lobby of where I need to be, players are dropped into the level via a teleport, why not cut out the extra steps? So late game in the sewers we died a lot, which meant we had to go through a rope ladder, the underground, down another rope ladder in the basement (I didn't mention this, but there is a rope ladder in an elevator shaft with gaps on the side where players can fall to their deaths, this claimed me twice in my long trip back to the sewers), sewers and another rope ladder. It's an exhausting trek and there are no checkpoints in the whole game. Sometimes doors unlock into shortcuts but it's really not enough.

    The sewers themselves are a different kind of suck. We have to follow a mazey layout again in waist deep water, sometimes there are monsters and I've been surprised and killed by one I'm sure spawned in directly behind me. We have to climb up a ladder to get to a lip on the wall, where we once again have to navigate the maze but now from up top, we jump behind a fence and eventually end up fighting a massive bullsquid with thousands of health. It was clearly a gimmick fight that we could not win with our weapons so we ran around and found a room with a complicated laser. One player had to go press a button in another room and start a 10 second laser windup. The other player had to lure the bullsquid into the laser. The laser is very thin and the bullsquid rarely stays still, it was a huge pain. Every time we died we had to go through three rope ladders and two underground tunnels. After the squid was dead we could not find a way out of the sewers, the rope ladder into the sewer did not reach the ground and we could not climb back up it. We had to suicide to get out. Is that seriously the answer to this problem?

    After we killed the squid a door opened, yes, that was our reward for killing the squid, a door opened. We get a book, put it on a shelf, and activated the next door which revealed a key card. Dynamic gameplay. At a certain point we were looking around for a place to use this newest key when I hear Chris Redfield, who we left hanging out in the main hall of the mansion the whole time, cry out in pain and presumably die. The map then ended. Did we win? Did we lose because Chris died? How did Chris die? Did the map spawn enemies on Chris while we were away? What the hell? We chose to claim victory and put this map to rest.

    I didn't mention the custom models yet. The map had custom models. Some were pretty good, like all the weapon models. The zombies were all taken from They Hunger (sound effects included), and there were some bad looking models for the Tyrants. Hunters were deformed cartoon monsters that looked like trash. There was also music but I don't remember it much, it was all right I guess.

    Well, from playing the two worst Resident Evil maps to playing the highest rated I thought I would see more of a difference. The difficulty levels in spawn don't display correctly and the class selection is a joke. The map layout is mazey and inconvenient, with long walks from spawn to the mansion and even longer through the maze to explore the rooms. The map looks good enough and it has some custom models but the Tyrants and Hunters looked bad. The objectives were endlessly going back and forth across the map unlocking doors to get keys to unlock doors. The big squid fight sucked, the map ended abruptly under uncertain circumstances, and when the dust settles I'm not left with a feeling of satisfaction. I feel a touch of anger at having the map end like this and a massive feeling of relief that I no longer have to play this map.

Pros:

• There was real effort put into the map, custom models, sounds, decent brushwork
• the map did display a lot of objectives and tried to be clear in what to do
• the files were fun, if a little long winded

Cons:

• Difficulty selection descriptions are bugged and class selection is unbalanced
• the rope ladders suck
• the key hunt gameplay in a maze-like mansion sucks
• the squid boss fight was annoying and afterwards we were trapped in the sewers and had to suicide
• no checkpoints, long walks from spawn to where we need to go, trek to sewers was extra terrible
• The map ended with a whimper. I don't care if we suddenly lost, I'm not going back to win.

Score: 4.5 / 10