Sven Co-op Map Reviews

      The map description really says it all: " Nobody knows what this map is about, or why it is called g-man". It's a strange, early map made by an unknown author that found its way onto the map database and now it's getting reviewed. SCMapDB page Author: Unknown Date of release: 2000 Maps in package: 1 Map review of G-man (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | July 27, 2023 | 1248 characters      The map description sums up this map pretty well. We start off in some sort of canyon with a tunnel in front of us, there are weapons on the ground including an rpg. We go through a bend and fight some human grunts as we cross a bridge past a room with a ton of supplies. Then we fight female assassins and turrets. The map has no end.      I started noclipping around just to see if there was anything else I should see, there is a lot of Z-fighting when seen from above and I also saw a wall stretched to infinity, something happened to this...

      The map is a bridge covered in turrets and infinitely repsawning human grunts. There is a target at the far end we have to shoot in order to end the map. That's about it for the map description. SCMapDB page Author: Hezus Date of release: 2001 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Bridge (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | May 18, 2023 | 3065 characters      The goal of Bridge is to cross the bridge. A whole swarm of human grunts, a plethora of turrets both sentry and ceiling mounted, and an apache stand in our way and all but the turrets respawn endlessly. Players have a shotgun and mp5 in addition to standard crowbar, glock, and medkit. It's a simple concept that I spent about 30 seconds in before deciding it sucked and turning cheats on.      I first spawn in and I am getting shot. The map has an upper part where we cross the top of the bridge and a lower part where we can climb up some rocks to the other side. E...

      Welcome back to Black Mesa where the scientists are now extra big! This is a very short mod that's been dropped into Sven Co-op to fend for itself. SCMapDB page Original map author: Wil5on Conversion author: Newbai1045 Date of original mod release: 2003 Date of final Sven Map release: 2017 Maps in package:10 Map review of Big Scientists (originally posted on SCMapDB)  by GrandmasterJ | February 19, 2023 | 5248 characters      By now I've played a lot of maps. I've played plenty of conversions as well. Most conversions have a minimum of care put in place to ensure a smoother experience for more players, this one does not. It has all the problems of a Half-Life mod being dropped into Sven Co-op as-is on top of the problem of not being a very good mod in the first place.      We start off in a helicopter with a bunch of scientists. These are normal sized scientists, very disappointing. We can look out the door of the helic...

      Don't jump down! Or do because besides hunting for hidden weapons all the gameplay is at the bottom of a pit. There is no end game trigger so this map is best for sightseeing.  SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2006 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Splatter 3 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 1, 2023 | 1702 characters      I spawned in front of a sign that says "Don't jump down!", which is the same as what is written in the map description. In order to progress in the map you have to jump down.      There isn't a lot to this map, players spawn in a large, cavernous room that looks like a cavern. A deep pit exposes respawning enemies, most notably a gargantua. There are plenty of weapons scattered around the room but none of them really help in getting through the bottom of the pit, the enemies spawn too fast and the best garg killing weapon is a crossbow. There is a door down there tha...

      One can be forgiven for reading the title of the map and thinking they are in immediate danger of learning something. I can assure you this map has only the barest connection to things newsworthy in 2017. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of final release: 2017 Maps in package: 1 Map review of BBC World Service (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | November 19, 2022 | 5629 characters      Going off the map title and description I thought this map was going to be political or at least make a statement. Instead what I get is a weird mish mash of stuff with the thinnest veneer of politics over it. The map was made in 2017 and has references like a group of friendly soldiers named 'Rohingya Refugees' that get slaughtered by enemy soldiers, a pair of big mommas named 'Russian Hacker', an isolated group of firnedly soldiers named 'Starving Yemen Refugees', and at the end players find pieces of a submarine that went missing and was found wrecked...

       Imagine a large expanse of white and black tiles floating in the void. Fight enemies in one big leak. There is a secret area and the entrance there is invisible and out of the way. SCMapDB page Author: Pastacake Date of final release: 2019 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Battle Mania (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | October 22, 2022 | 1673 characters      Battle Mania is an arena map where you battle waves of enemies on a checkerboard brush in the void. Not a void, *the* void. There is no lighting, as the entire map is a leak.      Press a button, open a door, battle alongside a gorilla against zombies, a robot with too much health, two invincible headcrabs, a xenomorph (with too much health), and Richard Boderman (with an amount of health I think might be excessive). Players are equipped to deal with this via a shotgun, mp5, handgun, 357, crowbar, and medkit with nowhere near enough ammo. As the gonome enemies b...

       Welcome to the most evil map of Sven Co-op. Enter the big chompy mouth and then attempt to explore. SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2005 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Satanic Dark Wrath Castle (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | October 9, 2022 | 1673 characters      Satanic Dark Wrath Castle is a map by robootto to, I presume, show off some esoteric brushwork ideas. The map begins with the players outside of the titular castle, which is entered either through a chomper trap front door or a higher up entrance that players ascent blocks to reach. Once inside, the map is dark save for some intense colored lighting and some strobes. The inside and the outside of the castle, alike, are mostly nonsensical structures which are a bit interesting to look at, the way geometric shapes tend to be from time to time, but drenched in eye-searing strobe.      Players can find doors that open to the word "Hel...

      It seems that making a map in an hour is something of a trend among Sven Co-op mappers. This one is from Robootto, an infamous author known for making strange and unplayable maps. Thankfully this map is, as the map description says, almost playable. SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2005 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Robo's 1 Hour Map (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | September 17, 2022 | 3651 characters      For a map made in one hour, this is pretty terrible. I played this map from the Big Robootto Map Pack, and that version was fullbright, I then downloaded the map off the map's page and reinstalled from that, the map's lighting was fixed. So if you have the big map pack you'll want to use this one instead, not that it matters much, you probably shouldn't play this map.      When the map starts I am already being eaten by headcrabs. This is a good start. There are weapons and ammo strewn about the...

      These Barneys do not attack, even if they did they can not hurt players. This is an old map back when Sven Co-op worked differently and Barneys could hurt the player, so the main gimmick of this map can no longer be realized. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of final release: 2000 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barney Attack (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | July 28, 2022 | 1785 characters      This map is a room with some destructible barrels (some float in midair), some basic sandbag barricades and military crates, and Barneys. There are grenades, HEV batteries, snarks, and some ammo on the crates. After a little while the first wave of Barneys spawns in. They are not hostile and they actually can not hurt players. Snarks do not target them and are completely useless in this map. According to the comments it seems like friendly Barneys used to be able to damage players and that was changed in later versions of Sven Co-op.   ...

       This map only has one room, or two if you count unreachable rooms, with a giant pyramid and a bunch of weapons and ammo scattered around. The only enemies are zombies that fall out of the sky forever. SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2006 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Red Pyramide (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | July 21, 2022 | 2455 characters      Robootto does it again. red-pyramide is a baffling experiential digital space. Players may arm themselves as they find themselves encased with a red pyramid(e?) within a large silo of some sort, shallow liquid permeating the featureless base of it. A suspended walkway surrounds the very tip of the pyramid(e?) and extend bridges to meet in a circle around said tip. Up above, a shaft to the outside world directly above the pyramid(e?)'s tip drops freshly spawned zombies down into the tip. Players can use weapons from the surrounding area to combat these zombies i...

       The map description simply reads "The average sven player cannot beat this." The map is a room with a box and a button, what mysteries does this map hold? SCMapDB page Author: GAMESABA Date of final release: 2008 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Area 491 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | June 5, 2022 | 1754 characters      Area 491 is a map that I don't understand, but can beat. You begin in a room with a box and a button. If you press the button you will explode, but if you break the box and then press the button you will not explode and you will complete the map. The box takes quite a few hits to destroy, but with teamwork it doesn't have to take long.      The map itself is pretty boring looking. Little effort is put into beautification, and if I had to describe the aesthetic it would be "debug room". The button gives no indication that it will explode, I'm guessing for troll reasons, and the box which must be d...

       Zombie Pit is one of those maps where the name really says it all. Maybe the name left out the lava and the fact that there is a teleporter out of the pit but that's about all that the name leaves out. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of final release: 2000 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Zombie Pit (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | May 14, 2022 | 1001 characters      Zombie Pit is an early map out of Keen, and it shows. As is the soft, early prodding of what a playable map can look like. Some beveled brushes loosely imitating naturalistic rock formations suspend freshly spawned players over a fractured earthen arena half-sunk in deadly, glowing, one-hit-kill pasta (or lava, idk). In the lower area the player will find headcrabs, zombies, and a teleporter back up. After moments of play, the zombies and headcrabs fall into the pasta/lava and the action grinds to a halt.      This is a clear example of an early jab at...

      This is a one room map with infinitely spawning enemies coming down a slope. Really, never has a map screenshot encapsulated an entire gameplay experience more than the above. SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2005 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Spynzlersplatter (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | April 17, 2022 | 1709 characters      This map consists of a spawn area with a couple miniguns and three piles of grenades and on the other side of an instant kill wall is a steep slope with enemy spawners at the top. This is not enough for more than two players to massacre these monsters at once. The monster spawners drop a bullsquid and a zombie along with a ton of headcrabs. It is a little more difficult to hit the headcrabs with the minigun, but the slop stops grenades in their tracks and it is fun and easy to explode all the monsters. The map description says the wall will kill most of the monsters and it does, only one...

      ApacheCo is a symmetrical map with two sides, a day side and a night side. Each side has its own Apache and the map will end and declare that one side is the winner once one of the Apaches go down. This gimmick would work better if the map had weapons. SCMapDB page Author: Fourth Letter Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of ApacheCo (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | April 17, 2022 | 4129 characters      ApacheCo is your standard "kill the apache" fare found in most maps with 'apache' in their name, but this one has some twists. The first twist is that the map has two sides to it, a daytime section and a nighttime section. The other twists are that there are no weapons, there are swarms of respawning human grunts, and the outside area has a ton of other enemies running around. It's hard to do much of anything.      When I appeared in the spawn room I first noticed the detail in making the reflective ...

      This is the most culturally respectful map on the database. The phrase 'Allahu akbar' literally translates to 'God is great'. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of final release: 2016 Maps in package: 2 Map review of Allahu Ackbar (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | March 19, 2022 | 2396 characters      I did not expect great things from this map. Thankfully, it was short. The map is also broken, right in the map description it says the goal is to get into the white zone, as far as I can tell the door to the white zone does not open and the path is covered by neverending explosions that kill you anyway. So the map is impossible to beat.      There are two maps here. Both maps start out with the player in a rough underground room, there is a wide dark hallways leading down at a slope. Human grunts will attack up through here. Players start off with a nice wide variety of weapons, but not too much ammo. My favorite here is the SA...

      Alien fight is a map about fighting xenomorphs, the aliens from the famous movie franchise Alien. Players go from room to room fighting them in waves. SCMapDB page Author: Original Prankster Date of final release: 2002 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Alien Fight (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | March 11, 2022 | 4581 characters      The map starts players off in a rough looking spaceship with a nice view of space and four perfectly lined up alien controllers. There is a mounted gun here that is controlled by one half of the nearby terminal, it's a little funky to use. There are three ways to go here, on the left side of the stretched out credits texture is an infantry class teleporter and on the right are demolitions and medic. The way the classes work is that players spawn with nothing, or at least they should, sometimes I or my teammate would spawn with a medkit, but that disappeared for me. The teleporters put players in a room with...

      This map is a series of rooms with two doors to choose. One path leads to death and the other leads to the next room. There are 5 rooms. SCMapDB Page Original mod authors: The Hunter Conversion authors: CubicVirtuoso Date of original mod release: 2005 Date of final Sven Map release: 2008 Maps in package: 1 Map review of 5 Ways to Die (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | December 4, 2021 | 1171 characters      The idea behind this map is not very good. You have a series of five binary choices (left or right) and choosing wrong kills you. The map description is accurate, it's pure luck, unless you go left, left, right, left, right, then you've cheated to the end. The puzzle at the end is throwing a grenade at Barney.      Overall, I didn't like it. Living or dying is arbitrary and the final puzzle is finding a way to detonate explosives, something Half-life and Sven players should know how to do at this point. The map ends aft...

       Looking at the screenshots one can easily think this map is just a bad remake of the first Mario game. That is exactly what it is, a poor recreation of a side scrolling level in a first person shooter. SCMapDB page Author: Sultan William Date of final release: 2010 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adventure 1 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | February 5, 2022 | 2236 characters      Adventure is a map by Sultan William. At the time of writing this review his biography simply reads "Lulz." on this page.      Adventure is a remake of level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. The players begin in a spawn room with lots of ammo for the pistol you'll have moving forward. The side-view world exists in a large, open skybox room which you can easily fall off the sides of and die. Goombas are replaced by headcrabs and turtles are replaced by zombies. Mushrooms and coins are replaced by nothing because they aren't there. There's ? blo...

      Looking at the screenshots one can easily think this map is just a bad remake of the first Mario game. That is exactly what it is, a poor recreation of a side scrolling level in a first person shooter. SCMapDB page Author: Sultan William Date of final release: 2010 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adventure 1 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | February 5, 2022 | 1704 characters      Adventure 1 is a bad remake of the first Mario level. Gordon can't jump as high as Mario so most of the platforms are unreachable without player stacks or cheats. Thankfully there is room to go around most of these obstacles, otherwise the pipes would block the players' paths and the map would be unwinnable. Watch out though, you can fall off the sides of the map and you will die. The enemies are annoying headcrabs. The map ends after players pass the flag.      There is the original Mario music in this map. It speeds up at one point, I thought...

      Putki is a kz map, which stands for Kreedz Climbing. There is a long and arduous platforming section that leads to the goal, which is nothing. SCMapDB page Author: Robootto Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Putki (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 29, 2022 | 1386 characters      This map is very simple, players start out next to health chargers and access to a glass tube filled with platforms. Players must jump up increasingly difficult and complex platforms high up into the tube until they finally reach a ladder up to a small empty house at the top.      The platforming is ridiculously hard, I failed at the easy stuff and my teammate got almost to the end before he fell off and decided to noclip back to where he was instead of climbing. I don't blame him. I am not a fan of first person platforming and I was very annoyed at the platforming in this map. My teammate didn't like it either. ...