BBC World Service - Dunkelschwamm

 

    One can be forgiven for reading the title of the map and thinking they are in immediate danger of learning something. I can assure you this map has only the barest connection to things newsworthy in 2017.

SCMapDB page

Author: Keen

Date of final release: 2017

Maps in package: 1

Map review of BBC World Service

(originally posted on SCMapDB)


by dunkelschwamm | November 19, 2022 | 2998 characters

    BBC World Service is a political commentary map by shitpost extraordinaire Keen, with a fitting contribution from regretful, and some of w00tguy123's work utilized in a way that is awfully familiar.

    This map came out in 2017, and I can't claim to have a great memory of international politics 5 years ago, and my attention was probably elsewhere anyway. So, I can't make much of an evaluation of the commentary provided. The map features big tanks, three consoles which spew random segments from BBC new coverage, friendly NPCs coded as Yemen refugees, something about swimming aide across a mine-filled lake, and a submarine at the bottom of said lake. There's tanks, Gonarchs coded as "Russian hackers". I don't know. It all goes over my head, personally.

    What I can comment on, however, is the gameplay and visuals. Both are doo-doo, frankly. This map wholesale lifts w00tguy123's arcade map and shoves it haphazardly into spawn. Half of this map is what I presume are prefabs of some tanks with heavy weaponry that fire at the player endlessly (one can be destroyed). There's some prefabs of some tanks which don't work. There's a tentacle that's just kinda there. The map opens with two gonarchs. The map ends with swimming through hurt brushes. Everything looks fairly bad, with the possible exceptions of the prefabbed tanks. None of what I described is super fun, though the ability to climb all over the ill-conceived map with a bunch of weapons does add a bit to the fun.

    That's a bit I forgot to mention: this map does have halfway decent ammo stashes. So, you can fire on enemies with SAWs and rocket launchers. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of combat in this map after the initial brawl with the gonarchs. At best, you'll spend some time lobbing grenades at the prefabbed tanks to get the two active ones to stop shooting at you.

    Toward the end we're able to swim some boxes of relief supplies up to some Yemen refugees. Like, at least 3 of our boxes ended up flashstepping halfway into walls and then sliding up out of available reach. I got two boxes two them and it didn't make a difference. When we swam to the bottom of the lake (through hurt volumes) and collected all of the pieces of a sunken submarine (that was super topical at the time I'm sure) the map abruptly ends.

    If this map's trying to be funny, I missed it. If this map's trying to be fun, it failed. If this map's trying to look good, I don't believe you. You can give this one a miss.

Pros:

  •     w00tguy123's arcade map is better than this map, and is included (though worse, for how it's crammed in)
  •     Good ammo and equipment
  •     A couple of the tanks work

Cons:

  •     Most of this map is a broken, ugly mess
  •     Carelessly constructed
  •     Abrupt, unfun ending
  •     Red herring pushblock puzzle

Score:     3.9 / 10

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