Well, this is a delightful surprise. I could quibble that some areas are blocky and under-designed, or that the lighting is bland and over-exposed. But what matters here is that Daya (in only his second original map) has created a truly novel and atmospheric setting, an Earth city transposed into a hellish dimension and wrecked in the process. There's a real sense of destruction here, a feeling that something cataclysmically awful has happened.

The setting also lends itself to some novel and difficult combats. Much of the game is spent climbing up inside wrecked area, and most of this is done under a constant aerial bombardment from enemies that are hard to hit. But the supplies are fair (over-fair, really, with regard to health) and the process never becomes too frustrating. (But don't forget to quicksave before starting out on some of the sequences of tricky jumps over laba!)

I have one fairly major complaint: having once been round the sloping fallen skyscraper, and made your way back up to the silver-key-lock area, if you then re-enter that fallen skyscraper you can't finish the map: a bridge that fell the first time through is no longer in place, so you're trapped. In general, I think Quake maps should never let you get yourself into a place that you can't get back out of.

That aside, though, and overlooking my quibbles about blockiness and lighting, this is great. Well worth four stars.

Truly excellent map that brings back old school map exploration.

I really felt like I was in some other-realm, where a sinister force had taken hold. The train station and destroyed city were extraordinary, with very good use of textures that I hadn't seen before.

Some of the fights were a bit annoying and I died a few times whilst trying to climb the cityscape where hellknights were raining down on me.

I really love the cityscape where the line of streetlamps are. What a view!

I like post-atomic ruined city setting !!

I love weird maps but the lighting on this one annoyed me too much.

Yeah, its a beginners map, full of niggles and cringes. I wonder who rated this 5 stars...?

Hey, czg, good to see you here! Are you working on anything new? Your Insomnia remains among my all-time top half-dozen packs, even in these days of mapjams!

It's cool and pretty and well designed, but it just doesn't run well on my laptop. Sure it's got integrated graphics, but running Quake on an i5 shouldn't cause a framerate drop. I wish it didn't NEED Darkplaces to play this. I have better looking games that run smoother and it's pretty annoying that I can't run this on tyr-quake or Fitzquake. I don't need colored lighting or fog. I got maybe halfway through before I gave up because the lag made it unplayable.

No one said you have to use Darkplaces. It works perfectly fine in Quakespasm.

Try DirectQ - it might run a little bit better on your laptop.

Thanks Spirit and negke for the suggestions. DirectQ had issues with unhandled exceptions during initialization, but Quakespasm worked fine.

Having played through the map, it's beautiful and some of the set pieces are really cool, but there are a number of issues which somewhat hurt it. Filling a room with ogres, zombies, and hell knights isn't cool if you're being made to climb a tower on thin beams, and the stairs in that room didn't work as stairs. You had to jump each one individually. The ending also felt a bit unfair. Three shamblers is too much if there's almost no cover and the only escape route disappears. My first try I got on the bridge to try and get some distance, but then realized I'd made it impossible to finish the level. After a few attempts and failures I ended up sneaking past them, which sort of defeated the purpose. Lastly, a lot of the platforming was needlessly frustrating. Lots of platforms which looked perfect to jump from would hit an edge of the gap I was jumping through. Fortunately I have save quick and load quick bound, so it wasn't a huge issue, but it felt a bit cheap dying that way.

So overall, pretty map, most of it was fun, but it got a bit unfair in places.

Atmosphere wise, I find this slightly reminescent of Michael Cullum's 'OldCity' map: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/oldcity.html

correction: that's old_city -->old(underline)city<-- in the URL!

Haven't encountered too many maps using this theme so originally certainly scores it some points.

Very fun to play but a bit too much jumping/fall to your death pieces. Still, I can recommend a play due to its fun use of theme.

A bit rough around the edges indeed, but I still have to give this 5 stars for it's unique atmosphere and well-paced gameplay.

Decent sense of space in design, nice concept adaptation, impressive ambiance - kind of like 'Hell on Earth' and 'Ghostbusters' fusion - albeit, poor gameplay effect. Platforming, especially in terms of excessive application and austere challenge, only gets fun so far. Unclear pathways throughout the map. Rather against-the-odds combat scenarios. "Manhattan's Left-Overs", reveals potential for more and for better.