Campfire - GrandmasterJ

 

    This is a beautiful map inspired by the famous mod (and map set ported to Sven Co-op) They Hunger. It takes place in a forest filled with derelict buildings, now that I think about it I don't think there is a campfire in this map.

SCMapDB page

Author: cyberdaemon

Date of release: 2003

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Campfire

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | June 19, 2023 | 4517 characters

    Campfire is a map inspired by The Hunger that puts us in a wilderness with some dilapidated buildings, a minefield, and eventually into a mine. It has no story and ends abruptly with no real resolution when a player walks into a wall of tofu. But it maintains this really atmospheric gritty forest vibe that works really well. Enemies are tons of zombies with the occasional gonome and baby garg.

    My teammate an I spawn inside each other inside a burned out house. This map feels pretty big and the house has rooms bigger than what we spawned in, so it feels weird to me that this map has exactly one spawn entity. Anyway, we pop into existence in the same space and then spring out of each other. We have standard loadouts, pistol, crowbar, medkit, and there is ammo in the corner of the room, which is rare in the early part of this map. We are also surrounded by all sorts of zombies. They go down in about two headshots and after we run out of ammo we take turns whacking them with crowbars.

    Things go fairly well until we hit our first baby garg, we have to fight it with crowbars and it does not work well. The ammo situation does get a bit better later in the map and we get the shotgun which will clean up anything on the map. I would say the map does really well balancing combat to our ammo and weapons with the exception of the first baby garg.

    The map is mostly large outdoor hallways with some pretty good cliffs. There were some areas of cliff with evergreen tree sprites sprinkled around and jutting rocks. It wasn't overdone and definitely didn't look realistic but it had just enough detail to consistently look good. My favorite parts of the map were the ruined buildings. More simple geometry with many gaps and holes in the walls but done in a way that totally sells the ruined house look. I'm reminded somewhat of Strife, that old game on the Doom engine that few people played.

    There are some areas with bright red explosive sticks paired with bright red plungers. We find the plunger, detonate the explosives, and proceed to the next area. We start finding wireless plungers and the first one opens up a shortcut to spawn which is neat. It is also really helpful because next up is a minefield.

    Let me just say, I don't know why there is a minefield here. The mines are very small discs that are textured the same as the ground, stepping on one is a surefire way to die instantly most times. We can shoot them and we do, but it is slow going and very annoying. It's really incongruous with the map and I don't like it. Immediately after the minefield I fell into a pitfall trap and died instantly. I would trigger and avoid falling into two more pitfalls after this. This is completely unnecessary and annoying.

    We get to an area with a big wall and lots of explosives, but we don't find any plunger so we shoot at them a whole bunch before jumping over the wall assuming the plunger is back there. But the next plunger I find blows another wall. So my teammate goes back and shoots it once more and it explodes. So the entire map has explosives triggered by plungers and then it switches to ones we have to damage (two of these to be exact) and sets the health high enough that we actually gave up to look for a plunger.

    This map looked really good and had a great atmosphere. The combat felt great with our loadout and limited ammo except for that first baby garg. The level design was clear, we got into a rhythm of opening the next area with plungers and even later in the level when we suddenly have to shoot the explosives instead we could still jump over the obstacle no problem. Shortcuts opened up and the shotgun was found along the path. The minefield and pitfalls sucked though and I don't understand why they were added at all.

Pros:

• Great looking map
• well done shortcuts
• the combat felt balanced well for coop and the limited arsenals we had, except one small area
• the path of progression was clear

Cons:

• we had to fight a baby garg with crowbars, an early hiccup in otherwise great escalating combat
• there was no reason for a minefield to be here and it sucked
• there is no reason for random hidden pitfalls to be here, they suck
• the majority of the level has explosives behaving one way and late in the map they behave differently

Score: 8 / 10