City Rush - GrandmasterJ

    Drop into a blocky city and start killing hordes of monsters. Eventually through some arcane invocations (breaking the right stuff) the enemies will cease to appear.

SCMapDB page

Authors: Agent Zero the Koraa Hunter

Date of release: 2018

Maps in package: 1

Map review of City Rush

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | October 16, 2023 | 3543 characters

    City Rush is a map that focuses heavily on a zombie horde, of the too-much-health variety. The map explicitly tells us to break a window and it takes a lot of damage and we were doubting what the map was telling us. But an early word of advice, keep hitting those windows. After that we faced a huge swarm of enemies that eventually petered out.

    On map start my teammate and I ran in different directions, he tripped a cutscene that I had to watch and then shortly after I tripped a cutscene that he had to watch. I'm glad these scenes are over quickly and before zombies get here because that would be the worst during combat. Both cutscenes are showcasing the map's weapon selection. In one building we have an uzi and crossbow along with a pile of ammo for both and in the building with breakable windows with too much health is a shotgun, revolver and a deagle, mp5, plus loads of ammo (including underbarrel grenades with no M16). Armor is provided via body armor hanging on the wall, I didn't realize it was a pick-up at first but I thought it was very clever. There are also some sniper rifles on top of a couple of buildings that don't respawn.

    Once enemies kick in they really kick in. Gonomes on top of buildings throw guts at us and a swarm of zombies fills the streets, all of them have insane health. The next area is a button that tells us to clear out the monsters, the first time we pressed it a baby garg showed up so I figured if I kill that I can go to the next area. After the garg was dead I pressed the button to find the same message and a voltigore showed up. After that the button was still locked and we had to eliminate all the zombies and gonomes to process, I don't know if there was always a limit or if they stopped spawning after we killed the two boss monsters, they certainly felt never-ending to me.

    The map looks decent overall, but certain details stick out. The roads were raised brushes, which looked a bit like cardboard or thin plywood. All the buildings were had square perimeters and were about the same size, walls cut off the path for seemingly no reason, everything was very chunky. The map looks off, things were communicated well with good details and fun cutscenes, but it was clunky.

    The map was fun, although I still feel annoyed at how much health the windows had and breaking them ended up being integral to the map. We also found glowing uzis behind a building, was that important? I also felt unsure of if I was playing the map right when I was trying to mow down the zombies at all, I felt they were never-ending so after the boss monsters were gone and I still had enemies I was at a loss of what to do next. Overall I had fun with the map, but there were definitely parts were I experienced unnecessary frustration at something that could have been easily tweaked.

Pros:

• Good weapon selection and ammo
• lots of armor too
• the cutscenes were fun and did point out very important parts of the map
• the map gave hints and stated objectives

Cons:

• a mass of enemies with incredibly high health that appear never-ending but we have to kill them all
• map looks a bit strange, almost like a liminal space, something put together wrong
• despite objectives being clear, the huge health of the breakable windows had us lost for a while
• enemies have too much health

Score: 6 / 10