Blastcorpse - Dunkelschwamm
How the tables have turned! Play as a captured alien and escape the human holding facility. This short walkthrough map leads players through holding pens to freedom.
Author: John Cable
Date of release: 2001
Maps in package:1
Map review of Blastcorpse
(originally posted on SCMapDB)
by dunkelschwamm | March 25, 2023 | 4584 characters
Blastcorpse is an action walkthrough map for Sven Co-op which takes players through an outdoor skirmish with soldiers.
Players begin in a strange xen-like spawn area, presumedly the "alien preserve" from the description, where they can get uzis which they use to mow down the soldiers just outside. Break out and cross a bridge which is immediately bombed, navigate some ichthyosaurs and a friendly vortigaunt, fight a bunch of teleporting-in soldiers, blow up some equipment to open doors, blow up an apache. Make your escape!
Much of the map revolves around entering an area, and then soldiers spawn in or turrets attack. Often the soldiers spawn in front of and behind you at the same time, and don't take many hits. It becomes a sort of whack-a-mole shooting gallery thing where you wait for the soldiers to drop out of thin air in the same spot they keep doing so, then you use one of the weapons provided (optimally the revolver, as it one-shots any HECU in the map, but anything will do easily) to put them down before they barely get a shot off. With two people this map was dirt easy, with only a couple deaths to account for our sloppy playstyle, and that's including a cheap kill early on when a trigger blew up part of the environment with me on it. It's fun, and I like seeing soldiers go down when a revolver shot blasts through them as it offers a lot of feedback, but it's also dreadfully easy. If this map weren't quite short it may have overstayed its welcome and become boring. Thankfully, since it's pretty short, by the time I started feeling like the grunt spawners were wearing thin it threw an apache at us and the map ended.
The players start with uzis, but quickly pick up a crossbow, then a revolver. You've also got a crowbar, which is great because a lot of this map involves breaking things in the environment to progress- like breaking walls, or breaking a fence, or breaking a lock mechanism on a door. I like touches like that, and I think this simple loadout worked just fine considering how easy the battles were. We definitely didn't need more guns, though at moments a grenade would have probably made some battles more dynamic.
The map itself doesn't look great. It's pretty blocky, but really outdoor environments in Half-Life in 2001 should be expected to be. I think more damningly, the map is unnaturally lain out, proportioned, and flatly lit. There's some custom textures here and there which make cute little gags, and the xen area in the beginning sticks out like a sore thumb. It's hard to fully describe what I mean, but the map feels like crumpled up paper, sort of rough and haphazardly shaped around the edges, but the main shape is and throughline are there. Anyway, all that to say that the map doesn't look that great. It gets across what it needs to, though. I don't think progression was super clear all the time, but with minimal investigation the way forward was always found.
Overall, I think blastcorpse feels like a map that's pretty fun despite being a stack of mostly poor design choices. I don't really like shooting HECU soldiers as they spawn in out of the sky, killing them instantly, like I'm a looper from the film Looper (if you haven't seen it, oh man, so in the future it's hard to get away with murder so they send people back in time to these guys called loopers who shoot people who get sent back in time so they just POOF into existence and then get shot and it's a pretty cool concept but the movie's sorta mid, like a mid 6 maybe low 7 out of 10). I don't want to be a looper from the film Looper. That movie's sorta mid. That said, this pulled off some fun bits and doesn't overstay its welcome. Good server list fodder.
Pros:
- Certainly not frustratingly difficult
- Good use of an unorthodox combination of weapons
- An interesting, unique transition between each area
- Doesn't overstay its welcome
- All of the custom textures were cute
Cons:
- Combat is way too easy, and I say that as a guy who played with two people and who likes power fantasy gameplay
- The sequence of events are kinda disjointed and while not hard to follow, not easy to follow either
- Map's sorta on the ugly side of bland
- Some general clunkiness, like a bajillion health fence early on, or the weird looking xen habitat, or the forward progression doors crammed hidden between walls and buildings
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