Sven Co-op Map Reviews

      Battle exactly one boss in an well made arena using barnacles to fly around the arena and summon bombs. The map ends when the one boss is dead. SCMapDB page Author: Streamfox Date of release: 2017 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Bossbattle (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | April 24, 2023 | 3350 characters      Bossbattle is a battle against a boss. Which boss? Why, the gargantua, of course! How are you going to fight the gargantua? Why, with a barnacle and timebombs, of course!      The setup is pretty simple: a big indoor arena sizeable enough for a player to maneuver around a gargantua, complete with grapple points for the player-held barnacle. Press buttons on ceiling-bound grapple points when they highlight to place bombs directly beneath, then lure into gargantua into said bombs when they go off. The buttons are chosen seemingly at random, at which point it's up to the players to grapple up to it and press it. This can be a chaotic frenzy as t

      Battle exactly one boss in an well made arena using barnacles to fly around the arena and summon bombs. The map ends when the one boss is dead. SCMapDB page Author: Streamfox Date of release: 2017 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Bossbattle (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | April 24, 2023 | 2817 characters      The entirety of this map is one boss battle in a fancy arena. Players have barnacles only and must press buttons on the ceiling to summon bombs, and then lure the gargantua boss into the bomb. It's a really short map with only one thing going on, but it is done really well.      Players get dumped in a spawn zone with a little rack filled with barnacles, not the enemy, but animated models that actually grant us barnacles. A lives meter is on one wall and the gargantua's health is displayed on the other, there are also boss health meters inside the arena. Floating health symbols of various colors (showing various amounts of health regained) l

      This map is a beta and ends abruptly. It also doesn't really have a story. However, it does contain eye gouging amounts of blue and some fun gameplay. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of release: 2007 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Bluecell Puzzle (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | January 28, 2023 | 2766 characters     Bluecell Puzzle is a Sven Co-op puzzle map seemingly abandoned by Keen. Much of navigation is based around using the barnacle, and the setting is wacky and neodadaist.      Worth mentioning that if you don't get the fixed bsp, this map is outright broken.      Bright, colorful, wacky corridors littered with crystals and corpses holding valuable weapons to pick up- that is what makes up most of Bluecell Puzzle. The environment has a lot of charm to it, even if it looks like MSPaint vomit with clipart crystals additive-moded into the scenery. That's one of the strengths of picking any Keen map- you'll always get interesting, strikin

      This map is a beta and ends abruptly. It also doesn't really have a story. However, it does contain eye gouging amounts of blue and some fun gameplay. SCMapDB page Author: Keen Date of release: 2007 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Bluecell Puzzle (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 28, 2023 | 3923 characters      Here is an old abandoned map that plays pretty well for being unfinished. Of course looking at the map description I see that the original map's spawn is broken and when we tried the map we died immediately on spawn and had a message telling us "no spawn points available". So if you want to play this map you HAVE to get the fixed bsp. Maybe this map will get repacked one day and people won't have to deal with the confusion.      Players start off right in front of a barnacle and a deep pit into water. You could just jump down or you can grapple up and get a gauss gun. While the barnacle is not the focus on the map you do need i

       Barnacle Flight 2 is a map based around a quirk of barnacle grappling your fellow player, causing everybody to fly (glitch around) in the air. This is a sequel to a map that doesn't exist, the other Barnacle Flight map was made after this one and is unrelated even though it is the same concept. SCMapDB page Author: Naigel Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Flight 2 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | September 24, 2022 | 2251 characters      Barnacle Flight 2 is a map that shows off a silly Barnacle Glitch that makes players fly around. It's hard to do with a few players, and can't speak much to how well the glitch works with a bunch of players. But, I'm not really here to review the glitch, I'm here to review the map itself.      The map is a huge rectangular prism where players can fall a great distance to the bottom, without fall damage, then take a central teleporter back to where we spawn- the top of a fly

      Barnacle Flight 2 is a map based around a quirk of barnacle grappling your fellow player, causing everybody to fly (glitch around) in the air. This is a sequel to a map that doesn't exist, the other Barnacle Flight map was made after this one and is unrelated even though it is the same concept. SCMapDB page Author: Naigel Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Flight 2 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | September 24, 2022 | 2461 characters      So I tried this map after I tried "Barnacle Flight". Funny story, according to map descriptions when Barnacle Flight 2 came out there was no Barnacle Flight 1, then Barnacle Flight came out a couple years later inspired by the original map. Anyway, the map started up and I looked around, we were in a big grey box with big blocky instruction signs around us. "Oh," I say to my teammate "this is just worse Barnacle Flight." Then I fall down the long shaft to the bo

       Barnacle Flight is a map based on a quirk of barnacle grappling your fellow player, causing everybody to fly (glitch around) in the air. On the map database it lists the author as g1l but in the map the author is listed as Venomys. Also, there is a map titled 'Barnacle Flight 2' that preceded this map, this map comes after number 2, it's all very confusing. SCMapDB page Author: g1l Date of final release: 2007 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Flight (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | September 22, 2022 | 2144 characters      Barnacle Flight is a gimmick map where players use the barnacle on one another to zip around in the sky above an island. The sky is full of bubbly cloud sprites and some silly looking giant squares of scrolling cloud textures. The island itself is a nice jagged chunk of island in the water (the water does not extend far beyond the coast before hitting skybox) and features both a teleporter to the spawn area and a central la

      Barnacle Flight is a map based on a quirk of barnacle grappling your fellow player, causing everybody to fly (glitch around) in the air. On the map database it lists the author as g1l but in the map the author is listed as Venomys. Also, there is a map titled 'Barnacle Flight 2' that preceded this map, this map comes after number 2, it's all very confusing. SCMapDB page Author: g1l Date of final release: 2007 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Flight (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | September 22, 2022 | 2298 characters      The gimmick here is that players grapple onto each other and sort of hover in the air around the map. Now to be fair I only tried this with two people and the exploit is clearly intended to work with more than that. We attempted the instructions on the floating block in the middle of spawn but with only two people we couldn't really direct ourselves in any direction, maybe that is still a problem with more people, I don&#

       I don't see a lot of maps really use the barnacle to it's full potential, so I was very excited when I saw this map. Then I read the map description, it is abandoned because the author didn't think it was fun, oh well. SCMapDB page Author: TruckStopSantaClaus Date of final release: 2020 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Course (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | September 17, 2022 | 2768 characters      Barnacle Course is an unfinished obstacle course map based around the Barnacle. It was supposedly unfinished because the author did not believe the concept was proving to be fun.      The map is themed like the Half-Life Black Mesa Hazard Course, but with a bit more flare with their use of burning lava in their barnacle test course. Along there way there's some fleshy growths with sideways xen grass which is a lot of fun. None of it really adds up to a good feeling whole, but everything is fine as individual separates. Nothing in this map fee

      I don't see a lot of maps really use the barnacle to it's full potential, so I was very excited when I saw this map. Then I read the map description, it is abandoned because the author didn't think it was fun, oh well. SCMapDB page Author: TruckStopSantaClaus Date of final release: 2020 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Barnacle Course (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | September 17, 2022 | 2818 characters      This map was abandoned due to the author not thinking it was very fun. That is not a very promising sign and after playing the map I have to agree.      The whole map is set up around the barnacle, pretty obvious from the name of the map. The map is pretty standard wide Black Mesa hallways with barnacle grapple points, the first 'puzzles' of the map are just barnacling to platforms in lava down a hallway. The most difficult parts are the vertical sections because if you barnacle straight up then chances are you will just fall straight down

      SEXR is a rats map set in the author's bedroom. It's not meant to have linear progression, the map description clearly states it is meant to be a lobby map. Despite this there are areas that act very much like a linear sequence of objectives. SCMapDB page Author: SharkMan Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of SEXR (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | December 12, 2021 | 3114 characters      I sometimes think that making Sven Co-op maps might have the same appeal as making model railroads- creating a tiny little world and journeying through it. It's this combination of concepts in my mind that makes me a big fan of rats style maps in Counter-Strike and Sven Co-op. Maps in which you play as tiny soldiers in a gigantic version of mundane locations, turning everyday household items into tactical positions for going to war, are just endlessly charming to me. So, how do you mess it up?      Firstly, SEXR misses the mark by throwing spawnp

      SEXR is a rats map set in the author's bedroom. It's not meant to have linear progression, the map description clearly states it is meant to be a lobby map. Despite this there are areas that act very much like a linear sequence of objectives. SCMapDB page Author: SharkMan Date of final release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of SEXR (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | December 12, 2021 | 5209 characters      I really love the rats maps in Counter-Strike so when I was very excited when I saw this map. Overall I liked it but there definitely came a point where I wanted the map to be over. I think we reached the end of the map, there wasn't really an indication of whether we did or not.      The map takes place in a bedroom. Players spawn in all over the room, I spawned on top of a computer desk. On top of different furniture are different weapons. Two major problems with this set up is that there were no ladders to get down from these spawn points. Ther