Underworldfan's Single Player Map Reviews

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## Reviews: 5th March 2006, review 2 [Reviewed by Tronyn]

SUMMARY
Game - QUAKE
Map - trincasp1: Escape
by - Trinca
Download - trincasp1.zip
Overall Verdict: A small, basic and straight-forward castle level.

FULL REVIEW:
Trinca's first released Q1SP map is a small and fairly basic castle. You begin inside the castle, which is runic in theme, and wind your way up to the top floor, and then off the battlements into an outdoor endgate, which you must access by first visiting an underground graveyard. Most of the areas in the map are quite plain and basic, and the interior suffers from being made up almost solely of square rooms and hallways.
However, there are some pillars and lights, as well as skylights casting shadows into the rooms, to break up the monotony. You fight mainly knights and hellknights here, which are well placed behind the pillars so that you can't snipe them off before entering the room. If you run into a corner, you may find enemies you weren't aware of boxing you in!

On the second floor the story is much the same, with several square rooms, and you also visit the open-air ramparts. Combat against ogres placed on top of castle walls is fun and challenging - you can't stand around here and expect to survive. You will eventually find yourself on top of the castle overlooking a courtyard which includes a moat. I jumped down immediately and was met with some combat against a ton of rottweilers (a great monster in packs, which is often underused) and a fiend. This area was, for me, the gameplay highlight of the map, trying to shoot down a lot of things with teeth before they got close enough to cause major harm. After this, you visit one last area, gib some zombies, and that's it for the map.
Overall, the architecture is very basic and elementary in this map. It is, however, saved from being a mere "rooms-and-hallways" map by the correspondence between indoor areas and outdoor areas (that is, actual buildings in an outdoor environment), a type of design I have a soft spot for. There are also a few good touches to make the visuals more interesting, such as tombstones and a coffin. Gameplay is not really challenging, but there are a couple of spots where you are forced to maneuver quite a bit to survive (the aforementioned ogre bombing and rottweiler massacre being two such). It is a very small and unpretentious map, and it is worth downloading provided that you are expecting a beginner's map.

Overall Score: 10/20