Crood Coop - GrandmasterJ

 

    This is a nice looking map with a mixture of combat, platforming, and puzzles. A lot of the map looks well done and then there are some spots where enemies just get dumped in the level and one terrible platforming section.

SCMapDB page

Author: Headz

Date of release: 2003

Maps in package: 1

Map review of Crood Coop

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | August 19, 2023 | 4582 characters

    This is a fun map with really nice visuals, lots of explosives, and monsters with a lot of health. There are also some interesting puzzles and lots and lots of walking.

    We start in a room with a turret, the map slowly fades in and we get to hear the turret deploy and target us. We are shot before we can really see or do anything and if I was alone that fight would have been ten times harder and more frustrating. We get a shotgun here and enough shells and 9mm to supply one player fully, leaving one of us to wait for it to all respawn. Then we have to fall down a shaft and take fall damage, usually around half our health. It's important to heal up because after some combat is a swimming sequence where we have to start taking damage from drowning. It was common to die here when doing the respawn walk of shame back alone and then have to respawn all over again. It's not a great start to the map.

    While the map does suffer from a really terrible opening and enemies that get haphazardly dumped on us (or us on them) it has a great visual style. There are these electric blue cable textures that animate with electricity and it looks great. It's actually a bit overused in the map, doubling as both a texture for walls and for big cylinders I assume are supposed to be conduits. There are some interesting textures here but they could be utilized better. There were some vents that I got real sick of and they had some strange texture to them, but it didn't rotate with which direction the vent was facing so it looked very off. The map looks interesting but it could look so much better with more love.

    The enemies had lots of health, there were lots of them, and there were explosives in tight spaces which all combined with the mandatory damage taken in places meant we respawned a lot. The map goes a very long time without any sort of shortcut or teleporter. We do eventually get some but weapons are scattered around the map and we have to collect them which means we still waste a lot of time. There is a shortcut at the very beginning that doesn't open up until the end, and might be easily missed due to being in some vents. These were some particularly bad vents as well, they have tiny lips so we have to jump to proceed into the next vent and are really long for the purpose they serve.

    The star of this map is the arsenal, sure our own explosives might have killed us as much as the enemies did but that's half the fun of explosives. We got tons of underbarrel grenades, enough for one and a half people! We got rpgs, grenades, egon guns, at one point I realized I had snarks and didn't even remember picking them up, when it comes to weapons this map is reverse pickpocketing stuff onto players. Later in the map the enemies do come balanced for how well off players are (we have HEV chargers at this point) by having lots of health and coming in large waves. At one point we killed two Big Mommas for three more to show up.

    Unfortunately there is this awful platforming section we had to cheat to get through. Running my own server gives me cheat powers to do what I want like turn off survival mode or nope out of awful platforming sections, so it sometimes clouds my judgement of these maps. So let me be clear, if you have no way of cheating past the abysmal spinning column platforming bit then you should avoid this map like the plague.

    I had a good time with this map. It was dragged down a bit by some design choices and how bad the opening and respawning is but the visual style was really neat to look at and it was fun blowing aliens to smithereens with our rpgs. There was some very annoying shenanigans in the beginning and one box puzzle that was fun at first but then got annoying but I think that fades into the background soon enough to keep the map a mostly enjoyable experience.

Pros:

• Lots of explosives, underbarrel grenades and rpgs in particular
• shortcuts do eventually open up
• really fun visuals
• combat felt balanced for what we had
• HEV later in the map

Cons:

• The map is mostly fine but the spinning column platforming bit is the worst
• turret in spawn that hurts players before they can do anything about it
• respawning is terrible and the shortcuts don't completely alleviate that
• the high health enemies get tedious to chip away at
• mandatory damage in some areas, especially right out of spawn

Score: 6 / 10