Buro - GrandmasterJ

 

    Buro is a prologue to a map series that was never made, which is a shame because it is a beautiful map. The map is very nicely designed bank filled with assassins that ends when players enter the vault.

SCMapDB page

Author: Alex546

Date of release: 2010

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Buro

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | June 15, 2023 | 4747 characters

    When my teammate and I first started this map up we both took one look at it and agreed it was beautiful. Then my teammate said "time to give it a bad review!" and I wished upon a star that he was wrong. I haven't decided on a number score yet, but I will say that the map had a lot of good with a little bit of bad.

    After a lengthy and cinematic cutscene my teammate and I are dumped outside a bank. He reads the message of the day which informs us of our mission but I don't bother and instead start poking around spawn. One thing that only became apparent when we started fighting is that starting weapons can very widely with no input form players. There are no weapons on the ground at spawn, instead players will automatically pick up weapons the moment they spawn with different loadouts depending on which spawn they come out of. I have an M16 at one point, mp5 the next, a shotgun with some grenades, and an uzi. Revolvers and Desert Eagles also show up from time to time. There is very little ammo in the level but the combat is paced so that we die shortly after we expend all the fun ammo.

    Combat starts almost the moment we step inside the bank. I should mention we have tons of allies milling about, the scene is set as us police outside the criminal filled bank. Our mission is to find some guy and then gain access to the vault. The enemies aren't too beefy, but they are all male and female assassins so they run around real quick. Don't get comfortable when you kill most of them, they will rappel from the ceiling and pop out from behind locked doors.

    After finding the guy we were supposed to find we now had to open the vault door. There is a keypad. Where is the code? I beat the map and I still don't know, there are plenty of numbers around the level. My teammate and I found numbers on a discarded keycard and some computer screens, but none of them are the number we needed. I found that if I pressed the correct number it would stay on the screen and the incorrect number would instantly reset the keypad. I was able to brute force the lock and I'm going to spoil the code for you right now, it is 1463. I don't know where that code is, I totally guessed it.

    I glossed over the first spawn area, where players have to use a podium to start the intro cutscene and map proper. I think this area was a bit superfluous and caused us to spend some time trying to figure out how to start the map.

    I mentioned before how the map is beautiful, and it totally is. The textures are mostly high resolution, there are lots of posters on the wall and most of them are readable. I think there were only two that were too blurry to read but since they were all some generic early 2000 image macro motivational posters you can safely ignore them. At one point my teammate stopped to admire a coffee pot. I think I was more impressed with the creamer packet model next to it. The level is absolutely covered in details and lots of custom prop models. Some of the architecture is a bit strange looking like the vault door and the intro cutscene had some null textures on full display, but overall the map looks beautiful. Right outside the bank there were cars driving on the roads far in the background. It's just really nice looking.

    After we enter the vault and cover ourselves in money (or use our objective, whichever comes first) the map gives us some text and fades to black. This is supposedly a prologue but there is nothing after this. I think this is a shame, there is a lot of potential here and I'd play a generic map set if it looked as good as this.

    We beat this in about 25 minutes, short and sweet. The intro cutscene was pretty and the map looks really good. Spawning with a random loadout was a drag, some weapons are just more suited to this map than others. Combat was pretty good, enemies were normally healthed and came in reasonable amounts. The map was beautiful and highly detailed. The progression got a little muddy, from trying to start the map itself from the first spawn room to trying to open the vault door without a code but we still managed to beat the map very fast. It's too bad more of this series wasn't made.

Pros:

• Great looking map
• The intro cutscene was nice
• combat was good, felt balanced for the weapons and ammo we had
• really good use of prop models all around.

Cons:

• progression was obscured at times. Where is the vault code?
• spawning with somewhat random loadouts was a strange design choice I don't like
• I'm sad this is all that was made

Score:

7 / 10