BMTCoop - Dunkelschwamm
BMTCoop, a cooperative map (hence the coop) made by BMT (hence the
BMT). It's a rather short shooty experience in good ol' Black Mesa.
Author: BMT
Date of release: 2001
Maps in package: 1
Map review of BMTCoop
(originally posted on SCMapDB)
BMTCoop is an old silly Sven Co-op walkthrough action map. If you're looking for oldschool Sven Co-op action, this really houses it. An obtuse switch puzzle toward the beginning, enemies spawning in over and over again in oddly stilted timeframes as you hope the waves will eventually end and a door will open (don't worry, it will!), a bizarre choice of weaponry borne of 2001 naivete when approaching the Half-Life arsenal, and an absolute cluster of enemies thrown at the players with little thought of the balancing whatsoever.
In some ways, BMTCoop plays almost like a late Serious Sam map shortly after (and immediately preceding) the first (and only) real Co-op puzzle. The rest of the map consists largely of blasting away aliens as they spawn in. There's a bit of vent crawling, and some different rooms you visit, but this map is about blasting away aliens who spawn in. Early on it's a lot of vorts and alien controllers with xen wildlife (houndeyes, bullsquids), but soon you'll find yourself facing lots of alien grunts. The map caps with a stealth climax as one of the alien spawning chambers drops a gonarch on you which ends the map upon its defeat. There's also a cute G-man cutscene where the blending effect makes him look really funny with the current Sven Co-op G-man model because his eyes glow through his head.
There's a really neat room with tripmines that was fun to navigate. Real quality tripmine room.
Graphically, the map holds up alright. It's lit mostly with moody lights, which helps with the proficient but boring brush/texturework. This somewhat goes out the window in the final chamber, which is lit quite sunny. I was shocked to find it was the final arena when the map suddenly ended, as it did not give climax vibes. I do wish there were some more consistency with interactives, though, as some breakables are inconsistent yet the player can only experiment with weapons which require ammo as there are no melee weapons
Combat-wise, they give you lots of HEV which helps loads with the tons of aliens it drops on you. At first you're armed only with a 357, which sorta blows for large groups of aliens, but you also get a shotgun later which helps even things out. The enemies sorta drip in slowly and boringly once you clear out the first group, so it becomes a game of shooting people out of the air like in Looper (a movie which, if you haven't seen it, oh man I give a great review of it in my review of Blastcorpse http://scmapdb.wikidot.com/review:683 GJ Edit: You can also see it on the blog!). It's boring just sitting around waiting for guys to appear, and then your buddy and you shooting two of them instantly and then the third one squirrels around for a second and the overall damage is slightly reduced HEV. About halfway through the map the combat takes a turn and becomes a bit better, but still suffers with the dripfeeding monster spawns by the final battle.
Overall, if you're looking for a super short action map to play with friends, you likely could have played it in shorter time than it took to read this. Give it a shot, it's not terrible.
Pros:
- Always love lots of HEV
- I like how the ammo for the weapons is handled in this map
- Really quality tripmine puzzle
- The lighting makes this map look pretty good
Cons:
- Bad slow-spawn-monsters combat much of the time
- Weird weapon combination and no melee
- Abrupt ending/weird pacing I guess
- Inconsistent breakables (which you have to guess with ammo, because there are no melee weapons)
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