Underworldfan's Single Player Map Reviews

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## Reviews: 26th October 2002; Review 1 (please scroll down for more reviews today)

SUMMARY
Game - CUBE
Map - sp_infidel: Infidel
by - Martin "LapSkauS" Schultz
Download - sp_infidel.zip (right click and choose save as)
Overall Verdict - This is a excellent cube single player map, with decent architecture and good gameplay, and a good challenge.

FULL REVIEW:
Infidel, is the first cube map by Martin "LapSkauS" Schultz, also known as "disturbed". At the start of the map, the player progresses through a large open area full of pillars and enemies (which must be returned to near the end of the level). After that the layout is pretty standard, consisting of a number of cube shaped (DOH!) rooms, interlinked by various hallways and corridors. The author makes good use of the "carrot" triggers in CUBE to open up new areas and corridors, this is probably the best use of triggers I have seen yet in a cube SP map. Hence, some map-crawling and backtracking is required, although this is fairly minimal and not so excessive that it becomes boring.
Gameplay is reasonably challenging, nothing too difficult, but good use of the bigger cube monsters, such as the ratamahatta, slith and bauul. Ammo and Health are well balanced, this is the sign of good play-testing; everytime you start running low on Health, and the tension starts increasing, some more health is *usually* found around the next corner. Fighting escalates towards a big finish with the Quad Power up and lots of Ogros. The final arena is a large room with a moderate number of enemies in, but as there are 4 carrot triggers I kept expecting more monsters to appear and they didn't; slightly anti-climatic.
Still, overall this was a very enjoyable map featuring well-balanced gameplay and is highly recommended for all cube SP fanatics. Lets hope the author decides to make some more CUBE sp maps =).

Overall Score: 17/20

## Reviews: 26th October 2002; Review 2

SUMMARY
Game - CUBE
Map - sm/dc: Simple Mecha:Demon City
by - Bill Spencer
Download - on this webpage: demoncity.zip
Overall Verdict - This is an interesting experiment in Cube gameplay but the map design is too basic.

FULL REVIEW:
This is a map where the author has slightly modified the basic gameplay of Cube. This is a good thing and the author should be praised for having many original ideas. You are *supposed* to be inside a giant "mech" bot patrolling an urban city and killing the other monsters there. As a result the gameplay is slightly slower than normal, more on this later. The Author has also added some custom sounds and music to the map which are quite good.
Architecture and map design is slightly basic, simply consisting of one big plain with skyscrapers, roads and few car models scattered around, the layout could have been improved by having more varying heights in the city , and more variaton in buildings layouts etc rather than just one huge open "box map", this does not encourage an immersive atmosphere, instead you are very aware you are inside a "map". (Rather than really believing you are in a city). Still its a novel idea for Cube anyway.
Gameplay is slightly repetitve (and slow, as allready mentioned), as its all simply strafing behind skyscrapers or circle-strafing aorund monsters, with a wide-open playfield, without corridors, hallways, (e.g. proper architecture) there is no chance for strategy, ducking, sniping etc in the players tactics. A few triggers set off more monsters as the player progresses but this is essentially a quick map which should take only a few minutes on default skill (level 3) to be completed by most players.
Overall I encourage the author to make more cube SP maps and continue his experiments with Cube Gameplay, but he should try to have less of the "one big huge open space" syndrome in his next map.

Overall Score: 11/20