Central Bunker Remake - Dunkelschwamm
This is, of course, a remake of another map by the same name. While it does offer many improvements over the original it also has an unfortunate area that we had to cheat past.
Author: GiGaBiTe
Date of release: 2016
Maps in package: 1
Map review of Central Bunker Remake
(originally posted on SCMapDB)
by dunkelschwamm | October 9, 2023 | 4758 characters
Central Bunker: Remake is a ground-up remake of Central Bunker, which we have previously reviewed. How does this hold up?
This plays almost exactly like I remember Central Bunker playing, but without the lag. The short narrative of gameplay is: you start outside, with far too few weapons and ammo fight your way through a lobby full of Barnabus/Ottos and ceiling turrets, grab some new weapons, go down an obnoxious elevator, fight a great battle with aliens and grunts beside an electrified pool of water, work your way through many more grunts until you find a big railway bunker full of shock troopers and pit drones. Move through a slightly mazy tunnel system to find the power to the rail, shut that off, swim across the no-longer-electrified water (fight a kingpin on the way), clear out more grunts, navigate a frankly ridiculous fan puzzle, and fight a gargantua after destroying his power crystals. Mazel tov, you beat the map.
We'll come back to that frankly ridiculous fan puzzle in a moment.
This map looks great. The outdoor area looks immaculate, the indoor areas look as good as anything in Half-Life did. Some great standouts include the room with the electrified water (which just has a really neat look to it), the big power generator for the rail, and the tunnels which contribute some nice spooky atmosphere. There's a puddle with water dripping in it that's a real nice touch, but frankly the texture for the water looks like static and it was something I made at least two jokes about while playing.
The combat is fantastic. Each grunt encounter was a blast, and we felt really well equipped to deal with them, unlike the original. The start was rough since we only had starting equipment and a 357 with a single respawning ammo pickup, but as soon as the initial lobby was cleared, we had MP5s and shotguns. Equipment was rarely a problem after that, especially when halfway through we got a SAW and some great weapons. Also, there are tons of HEV and health chargers on the walls which helps us from being quickly liquified during the grandiose battle scenes.
So, the fan. The original map had a cosmetic fan in a vent that was blocked by some bars which you quickly move around, late in the map. In this remake, the fan pulls players into it and kills them. There is a visible fuse box, but after hitting it with every type of weapon and trying to use it a bunch, we came to the conclusion that the fuse box was a solid world brush. This was, as far as my teammate and I were able to tell, an unsolvable puzzle. The current from the fan is too strong to crawl against, and you cannot stand to move faster in the vent. Because of this, the map seemed to be totally broken. The switch to disable the fan is on the other side of the obstacle, and there is no way to reach it without noclipping, and it isn't triggered by damaging it with thrown explosives or whatever. I looked up the only video I could find of somebody else playing this, and they noclipped around it as well.
Edit: Upon further questioning in the SCMapDB discord, SV Boy and Meryilla revealed to me that spamming use on the fusebox will very temporarily disable the fan for roughly one second, giving players time to proceed. Big thanks to those two for their help, especially SV Boy who grabbed footage for me to confirm. Before this revelation, I had given the map a 4.7/10 for being broken. Instead, I'm going to have to chock this up as a hard-to-read and highly annoying puzzle that mostly adds confusion and frustration. For what it's worth, SV Boy also demonstrated a way to simply bunnyhop past it, but that's definitely more of an exploit rather than a proper solution.
It's a shame. This map is, almost in every way, just a better version of Central Bunker. I recommend it, but keep in mind the solution to the fan puzzle to not mistake the map for being unwinnably broken.
Pros:
- Beautiful map
- Great combat scenes
- Great equipment
- Fun secrets and shortcuts that open over time
- Great variety of scenes that naturally flow together
Cons:
- The fan puzzle's interactivity was so nonresponsive and hard to read that we gave up on beating it fairly and presumed the map broken.
- Sloppy equipment for starting area
- Until shortcuts open, the elevator in the beginning is a major annoyance
- Some enemies are made to be bosses with just a trivially large amount of health which slowed things down more than ever presenting a decent challenge
- Some progression was not well signposted, especially the wall that must be blown up
Score: 7.6 / 10
This is GiGaBiTe, the mapper.
ReplyDeleteI have a hard time wrapping my head around why people are having a such hard time with the fan in the vent puzzle. There are quite literally dozens and dozens of other maps that use a similar mechanic where you have to spam your use key on something to make an event happen.
There are also other maps that use the same fuse panel texture as a button, so I really am befuddled why people have such a hard time with it.
It's also sad to see that it looks like nobody ever found the two displacer guns. I spent a great deal of time making the logic to have multiple random teleport destinations.
Since it's unlikely someone will, the first displacer gun is in the break room in the cave. Use the right vending machine next to the window buttons and quickly jump over the railing and run into the computer panel on the wall.
The second displacer is in the first red cargo container to the immediate left in the room with the assassins. Jump over and behind the container, there is a small hidden entrance halfway off the box just as you're about to fall to the floor. You'll have to crouch and jump to get in.
This is Dunkelschwamm, the reviewer!
DeleteFirst, thanks for responding and giving us the locations of the displacer! I'll have to try that out the next time I play the map.
To the fan puzzle bit, I can say that I feel the frustration of a puzzle people are so stumped by as to figure it's broken. My first big commercial gig was making a puzzle game, and it can seem astounding what testers miss.
I didn't want to spend the whole review dissecting this puzzle (I mean I wanted to, but I didn't want the review to BE that). But since you asked I think these are the main notes I'd give:
1. At least as I was playing, I did not gather from any interaction in the map that using the fusebox like a button had any effect. Since there seems to be a delay for its action to fire, having another player watch while I pressed the button further misled us into thinking the button was not causing the solution to the problem.
2. You say there are other maps where you have to spam your key to get something to work. This site blog acts as a receipt that I've played hundreds of Sven maps, but I have not played another one with this same mechanic. I can't speak to how these other maps might have used this mechanic, but if players didn't have as much difficulty with those I have to assume the effect of spamming the button was more immediate apparent.
3. Half-Life maps use a lot of textures to denote something is interactive that others don't without much consistency. Sometimes a door that is used in one map to denote a dead-end locked door every time is an automatic sliding door every time in another map. When I see a fuse-box, I think it can be: a button, a destructible, or just a detail of the environment. If interacting with it seems to yield no immediate results, it's easy for me to eliminate the first two possibilities and decide it's a detail of the environment and move on. It's hard to solve a puzzle when the way it's set up convinces the players to eliminate a crucial puzzle piece as even being a part of the puzzle.
4. Consider the optimal solution route for your puzzle as you design it. How does the player learn that the fusebox is part of the solution to the fan? If they experiment with it, what will they learn? How do the players observe everything about this puzzle, analyze it, and put it together? As far as I can tell, the route you were hoping for is that they see these details among many (beautiful map, btw), intuit their importance, and then trust that they have the solution before any experimentation and solve it naturally from there. In other words: they have to occupy the puzzle builder's mindset or get lucky to solve it.
5. If you just look at it logically, I have no idea what the puzzle is supposed to signify is happening. A fusebox is something wherein the components break, ending the electrical current- so interacting with the fusebox does not affect the fan in the way I would think that interacting with a fusebox might solve a fan problem. There is nothing in my knowledge that you do to a fusebox repeatedly to make it briefly powerdown until you cease the activity. Why does mashing a fusebox cause a fan to briefly slow down? That's nowhere near close enough to how fuseboxes or fans work for me to consider it an option while looking for solutions.
If the player got some clearer indication that pressing the button was having an effect on the fan, it'd go a long way. I mean it when I say I think it's really unfortunate that this map ends on such a confusing note, because otherwise I think you did a really fantastic job.
I hope that helps you see the trouble I had here. All of these, I think, are solvable problems and good lessons to learn moving forward.
Thanks again for the comment!
-Dunkelschwamm