Bridge - Dunkelschwamm

    The map is a bridge covered in turrets and infinitely repsawning human grunts. There is a target at the far end we have to shoot in order to end the map. That's about it for the map description.

SCMapDB page

Author: Hezus

Date of release: 2001

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Bridge

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | May 18, 2023 | 4227 characters

    Bridge follows the same simple conventions which gave us the Icon of Sin bossfight in Doom 2 back in the '90s: make a target you must shoot at an inconvenient angle, and guard that angle with infinitely respawning enemies. Ladies and gentlemen: Bridge.

    The Bridge features a high road and a low road: both are inundated by turrets and respawning grunts. The low road has some unobvious routes to the higher route, but offers many more advantageous points from which players can deftly remove the turrets from the equation (the only enemies which do not respawn). The players on the topside have a harder time doing this due to the angles at which they have cover, the aggressiveness with which grunts storm the spawn area, and occasionally respawning apaches- not to mention some female assassins at the end of the far end of the bridge, which guard the target which, when shot, will end the map. With support from below to take down the turrets flanking the bridge, those on the top side will have far easier time reaching the rocket launchers which will help in taking down the helicopter, as well as provide covering fire for players going for the target.

    The gameplay is a bit of a mess. The majority of the map is open area with constantly respawning submachinegunners providing suppressing fire for turrets providing suppressing fire for apaches providing suppressing fire for assassins providing suppressing fire for the aforementioned submachinegunners. Most of the time enemies have have free view into your spawn, and where angles provide cover the same enemies lob grenades. There's no safety to be found, so with no quarter you value little your life. The map seems to understand this is what's going to happen, and provides very little ammo so suicide runs are more necessary. You might say "well, this is clearly balanced for more people" but as I said, it feels balanced for these repeated deaths so I believe this is the intentional gameplay loop. My teammate gave up immediately and turned on godmode, which made him mostly useless in my playthrough as he was reduced to only his crowbar in seconds. His immortality had bound him, and my cycle of death and rebirth made me the work mule. That is, before he decided our run was over and smacked the target with a crowbar. I'd say I felt robbed, but it's probably for the best we didn't spend too much more time toiling at the goal with our limited ammunition resources.

    The map overall looks fine. No real complains, other than it's a bit plain and some of the natural areas feel blocky. It definitely feels a bit sloppily thrown together in places where you can see more of the map's seams and odd textures popping through, but it's not distracting. Solid C- effort, presentable as a B with a charitable eye.

    Overall, I think the enemies respawn too fast to be terribly fun. In one run I cheated and noclipped while mashing a button bound to "impulse 101", spamming spores and snarks and egon and banana grenades and we never saw a moment without hgrunts on the screen. It suffers from the problem that a lot of maps with respawning enemies have where instead of feeling like you're engaged in constant battle, you feel like you're in a nonsensical neverending moshpit wherein you have no hope of identifying the situation nearly as well as the AI do. If that's your thing, give this map a go!

Pros:

  • I like the way an errant bullet to the target is all that's necessary to end the map. In a test run I got an assassin to miss a shot and hit the target lmao
  • I liked the idea of picking off turrets as a sign of progression in a hoard map
  • I think it's kinda neat that there's two spawn approaches

Cons:

  • The two spawn approaches are executed really poorly and confusingly
  • Enemies respawn so fast it feels like you're swimming in them rather than fighting
  • Sparse ammo, diemore gameplay
  • Easily impregnated spawn
  • The level geometry was hard to navigate in some areas, especially on the rocks getting out of the lower path
Score: 5.9 / 10

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