Sven Co-op Map Reviews

       Welcome to the Tomb of Death, where you will die a lot. The map has a heavy emphasis on traps and each trap is a unique delight, which is not usually how trap themed Sven maps usually feel. SCMapDB page Authors: generic Date of release: 2008 Maps in package: 6 Map review of The Tomb of Death (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | December 16, 2023 | 6784 characters      Tomb of Death! I remember playing this a long time ago and thinking it was kind of clunky and mediocre. Boy, am I glad I revisited it! This mapset captures a lot of the spirit of what I love about Sven Co-op, and is a truly inspiring exercise in creativity.      This mapset is long, so I'm going to go down the maps one by one and give overall impressions.      The first map gives a lot of what the title implies: a tomb full of fun traps and monster teases. There's a couple puzzle-like areas, including a platforming bit over some toxic sand...

      Welcome to the Tomb of Death, where you will die a lot. The map has a heavy emphasis on traps and each trap is a unique delight, which is not usually how trap themed Sven maps usually feel. SCMapDB page Authors: generic Date of release: 2008 Maps in package: 6 Map review of The Tomb of Death (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | December 16, 2023 | 5082 characters      The Tomb of Death is a very fun and cheeky map where players go through lots and lots of hallways. We get a token story attached and told through the messages of the day, there are six maps by the way. We encounter some really faint beams of light that trigger traps and at first we were doing our best to avoid them, but then we hit a point where we see a trap that has already been sprung and we try springing a trap ourselves. The vast majority of traps are one time only, we get to see a brick in the wall dissolve and then projectiles fly out and get stuck in the wall. It is r...

       Sitting somewhere between a whole new experience and just being Black Mesa but monochrome, this map brings a much needed unique visual style to Sven Co-op. From monsters to lights, everything is either black or white. SCMapDB page Author: BuGi Date of release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Black & White (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | January 28, 2023 | 4261 characters      For clarity's sake, I am reviewing the July 21, 2019 update (by SC-Dynamite) of BuGi's Black White map. My understanding is that it's the most up-to-date fix with the least overwrought changes.      Black White is a stylish walkthrough map. It falls into the kind of surrealistic kaizo-action you might think of when you think of the Half-Quake series. Things are largely black and white, you mostly fight vortigaunts using boilerplate weaponry, and the map trolls the players with hidden traps and minor inconveniences. It feels a bi...

       Sitting somewhere between a whole new experience and just being Black Mesa but monochrome, this map brings a much needed unique visual style to Sven Co-op. From monsters to lights, everything is either black or white. SCMapDB page Author: BuGi Date of release: 2004 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Black & White (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 28, 2023 | 3592 characters      Black and White is a tricky map where the solution to the puzzle is not always straightforward. All the visuals are simplistic monochrome black and white textures. Standard Half-Life textures are remade in this style but there is also plenty checkerboard as well. Enemies are reskinned to be black and white but blood is not, so red and yellow is the only splash of color you'll see besides sprays.      The map really reminds me of Half-Quake, the whole thing is designed to mess with your head. The first puzzle is pressing a button in ...

       Artifact is a custom map converted to Sven from Team Fortress Classic. It's a hard as nails platforming map that has me questioning if there is an important change in player movement across games that makes the map harder than it should be. SCMapDB page Original map author: Kami Conversion authors: AdamR Date of original mod release: 2003 Date of final Sven Map release: 2020 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Artifact (originally posted on SCMapDB)  by dunkelschwamm | July 24, 2022 | 4815 characters      Artifact is a map that, much like the hidden temples in Indiana Jones, hides peril lurking beneath great beauty. The foliage, the textures for the stone reliefs, the models for the key objects, the waterfalls and giant trees- they all look fantastic. But within, trap brushes swiftly kill players and require hard jumps back to spawn and the backtracking that comes with that.      Let me just be up front: I didn't beat a single o...

      Artifact is a custom map converted to Sven from Team Fortress Classic. It's a hard as nails platforming map that has me questioning if there is an important change in player movement across games that makes the map harder than it should be. SCMapDB page Original map author: Kami Conversion authors: AdamR Date of original mod release: 2003 Date of final Sven Map release: 2020 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Artifact (originally posted on SCMapDB)  by GrandmasterJ | July 24, 2022 | 8431 characters      I feel like every part of this map is engineered to be the most absolute bullshit. This is one of those maps where five minutes into playing it I look at the time limit, see that we have 70 minutes left, and think to myself "we're not going to beat this". My teammate and I used noclip the entire map, there was not one section that we did not cheat to get through. This map was originally made for Team Fortress Classic, I have to think to myself, is t...

      Monsters sit in better mousetraps of varying degrees of creativity and involvement from the player in a gallery of fatal contraptions. SCMapDB page Author: Michael Koeberlein, LordSlayer Date of final release: 1999 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Alien Die 2 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | March 11, 2022 | 3376 characters      The sequel to Alien Die is much better than the first. The concept is the same, a map with a bunch of monsters stuck in traps with buttons players can press to kill them in unique ways.      The map is broken up into three areas, the spawn room, the nextdoor room with a teleporter, and the long room on the other side of the teleporter. The spawn room has a tram between two rows of sandbags. Zombies appear on the tracks in the middle endlessly and there is a button that will make the tram move back and forth, crushing the zombies into gibs, until the button is pressed again. The zombies can someti...

       Monsters sit in better mousetraps of varying degrees of creativity and involvement from the player in a gallery of fatal contraptions. SCMapDB page Author: Michael Koeberlein, LordSlayer Date of final release: 1999 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Alien Die 2 (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | March 11, 2022 | 3709 characters      Alien Die 2, sequel to (in my opinion mediocre) map Alien Die, is a significant improvement on the formula of watching enemies die while placed safely away from the players themselves. This time there are far more interesting contraptions, an overall better aesthetic which gives the map a sense of identity, and better distribution of set pieces. This time, instead of everything being messily placed in a circle around a big death pit, the map is broken up into four sections where each toolbox comes with its own set of fun gimmicks.      I would say one of the biggest improvements that this ...

       This is one of those maps that is meant for fun, the whole map consists of monsters in traps. While some monsters do wander out of the traps overall it's not dangerous. SCMapDB page Author: LordSlayer Date of final release: 1999 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Alien Die (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | March 11, 2022 | 2949 characters      This is a simple entity playground wherein you can use crushers, explosion generators, lasers, and NPC in-fighting to kill lazily respawning enemies. These Machiavellian devices are operated via buttons with misaligned textures.      While playing, I thought a lot about this game I made in middle school where you pick up a little sprite guy and throw him into spikes, or drop him to his death, or use weapons to crush him. It wasn't an interesting game at all, but I entertained myself and my friends with it. While I was playing this, I just became nostalgic for that game and want...

      This is one of those maps that is meant for fun, the whole map consists of monsters in traps. While some monsters do wander out of the traps overall it's not dangerous. SCMapDB page Author: LordSlayer Date of final release: 1999 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Alien Die (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | March 11, 2022 | 2620 characters      Alien Die is a short and simple map where you kill aliens. Most of them are trapped in glass boxes so players can kill them at their leisure. Two zombies and a headcrab spawn on traps that don't trap them in a glass box and they walk right off and can be very annoying wandering around the map slapping me when I am not paying attention to it. There were also three scientists walking around the map but they died real fast to wandering monsters, there may have been more who died before I saw them.      I like the idea this map had, but I'm not so sure about the execution. There was one b...

       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 dunkelschwamm | December 4, 2021 | 1514 characters      I'm not sure I understood the intent of this level. I think it was like, you had a coin-flip chance each room to die depending on your choice. I just happened to choose right each time and survived to the end- left, left, right, left- then you throw a grenade at a barney surrounded by trip mines, jump behind a blast shield, and the level is over. That was the extent of my experience. I believe my friend who made different choices than the ones I made as I went forward was killed by level geometry or something.    ...

      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...

      Sv Mountain is the first map made by the author, it combines platforming with some combat. Players must scale the outside of a mountain and clear some rooms inside the mountain. SCMapDB page Author: SV BOY Date of final release: 2017 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Sv Mountain (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | February 18, 2022 | 5605 characters      Mountain is a platforming-centric map wherein players climb a mountain, navigate tiny cliff edges, move through vent hell, and fight in a xen arena. Some of it is somewhat effective and charming in a beginner's fashion (this is, apparently, the first map by its author, SV BOY) though most of it is the kind of "challenging" that reminds me a bit of troll games of the '00s and the '10s. This isn't an attitude that is novel in Sven maps, as troll-ish nature is prevalent especially in platforming maps, it's just something to be aware of.      The player ascends a very block-sha...

      Sv Mountain is the first map made by the author, it combines platforming with some combat. Players must scale the outside of a mountain and clear some rooms inside the mountain. SCMapDB page Author: SV BOY Date of final release: 2017 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Sv Mountain (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | February 18, 2022 | 4800 characters      Sv-mountain is a map that focuses heavily on jumping around the exterior of a large rectangular mountain. I'm not a fan of first person platforming so this didn't really appeal to me. I will say up front that I had to cheat my way through the map, my teammate who is much better at platforming than I agreed we had to in order to finish. By the way, what kind of maniac names their bsp file sv-mountain? We use underscores here, not dashes.      The map starts players off in a small blocky encampment next to a big block of rock that stands in for the mountain. Right off the bat ...

       There aren't really any puzzles in this map. The map is all about answering trivia questions. Each room has at least four paths to go and only the one labelled with the answer will allow the player through unharmed. SCMapDB page Author: Adambean Date of final release: 2009 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adam's Puzzles (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | January 29, 2022 | 4345 characters      Adam's Puzzles is a cute high-concept server map, where the concept is multiple choice questions. Room after room, players are treated to an interesting vignette setting and a multiple choice question. By choosing one of the doors, you seal your fate- you either chose correctly and continue to the next question, or you chose incorrectly and fall into a certain death trap. It's very straight-forward in its concept. For winning, players are treated to a lounge area with security cameras for watching other players struggle with answers, a swimm...

      There aren't really any puzzles in this map. The map is all about answering trivia questions. Each room has at least four paths to go and only the one labelled with the answer will allow the player through unharmed. SCMapDB page Author: Adambean Date of final release: 2009 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adam's Puzzles (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 29, 2022 | 4026 characters      The map description reads 'inspired by 5 Ways to Die', this is a map where the player is given five forks and must choose the path that doesn't kill them. This map is that concept, but instead of randomly picking a path there are questions the players must answer. The map is called Adam's Puzzles, but its really just Adam's quiz.      Most of the questions could be solved by a quick google, the last question was a large math problem that both my teammate and I agree the correct answer in the map has a typo that makes it incorrect. Th...

       Adam's Dungeon is a trap and monster filled maze with a boss fight and a difficult platforming room. With two players the map was difficult and took a long time to complete. SCMapDB page Author: Adambean Date of final release: 2009 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adam's Dungeon (originally posted on SCMapDB) by dunkelschwamm | January 28, 2022 | 5867 characters      Adam's Dungeon is a maze map fraught with traps, monsters, and silly platforming bits that are far more aggravating than they need to be.      When first spawning in Adam's Dungeon, you must break into the dungeon proper by breaking down a wall with a crowbar. Once inside, you move through the dungeon and accept that trial-and-error deaths in traps will be part of your experience.      Tunnels throughout the maze contain utterly unmarked deathtraps which are sure-fire murder to whomever triggers them. I think this is the type of thing that's a lot more ...

      Adam's Dungeon is a trap and monster filled maze with a boss fight and a difficult platforming room. With two players the map was difficult and took a long time to complete. SCMapDB page Author: Adambean Date of final release: 2009 Maps in package: 1 Map review of Adam's Dungeon (originally posted on SCMapDB) by GrandmasterJ | January 28, 2022 | 6484 characters      Let me be upfront, I am not a fan of maze maps or first person platforming. This map has both. I wasn't too excited about what I saw on the map's page either so I didn't have high hopes going into it.      The map is a maze. It starts off with a deluge of gonomes and pit drones right off the bat, players could be fooled into thinking it is a combat heavy map. Yes, there is combat and plenty of it. The combat is frenetic and claustrophobic, the whole map is a maze of hallways and running backwards from incredibly fast and powerful enemies while frantically trying to shoot the...