Beach Experience - GrandmasterJ

 

    Hot sand, cool waves, a Mai Tai and/or Piña Colada, these are things that would complete a fun experience at the beach. This map is loosely themed on the Normandy beach landings of World War II and for some reason feature lots of closed off hallways.

SCMapDB page

Author: MysticMDT

Date of release: 2004

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Beach Experience

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | January 14, 2023 | 2677 characters

    Beach Experience is supposed to be a World War II themed map loosely designed around a certain famous beach landing. It had a beach in the first section but the rest was some winding mineshaft style hallways and a couple of bunkers.

    Players are dropped off into a room with some class selection doorways around. We have Sniper, Medic, Soldier, Demoman. All players start with 5 grenades and a crowbar, the medic and demoman get the uzi and shotgun for weapons while the sniper gets a crossbow and the soldier gets an M16, mp5, and rocket launcher. This is not the full extent of what each class gets but that is the rough outline.

    The first beach really sucks. There are random mortars dropping every so often killing us randomly. This gets real annoying very fast. Then there are some mounted machineguns with high health soldiers manning them that take a lot of damage before going down. This is the end of beaches and the beginning of hallway combat. The main gimmick of the map is hunting down secret documents and blowing up big turrets that open up doors. Most of the time the door that opens up is right there, but later on in the map doors open up and we don't know where which leads to having to go over the whole map again. There was a spawn point update early on in the map which was much appreciated.

    It should be noted that almost all of the weapons have been reskinned, not quite World War II era weapons as the mp5 is some sort of M16 derivative with a scope. The enemies are also reskinned to have big swastikas on them to clearly mark them as Nazis. There are also some nice posters that look vaguely like things you would see on the wall of a Nazi position.

    I like this map but I feel it's bogged down by a meandering and confusing design. It is not obvious which triggers are opening which doors and most of the scenery is long underground tunnels, the map was advertised as a Beach Experience, not mineshaft fighting. The combat itself was fine but never varied much and there were lots of high health enemies that were not fun to fight and drained out limited ammo.

Pros:

•     I'm not a fan of class based maps but I will say this map's classes were well armed
•     updating spawn point

Cons:

•     The random mortar fire on the beach was not fun to run through over and over again
•     most of the map was uninteresting long hallways
•     the doors and their triggers were not apparent forcing players to scavenge the map for the next area

Score:     6 / 10