LOVE this map

Very enjoyable, especially the first half of the map where it really feels like you're making tangible progress upwards through the city. The progression is clever in that you can always see where you want to be getting to, and it's satisfying to get there.

The second half falls away a bit, becoming a sequence of, as Spirit rightly says, surreal randomness. I almost wonder if the map would be better if the gold-key door was the exit -- it would certainly have a more integrated feel.

Anyway, well worth three 2015-value stars.

I found the gameplay mediocre: progression is choppy, and at a couple points I had no idea how to proceed and needed to waste time wandering around the map.

Nonetheless, I think it's worth four stars for its atmosphere. It lives up to its title, feeling like an ancient city that has been forgotten and has sunk into the earth, abandoned by humans and infested with Quake monsters.

The map uses a bunch of textures that one wouldn't expect to mix well together, but they do, creating a unique aesthetic.

In contrast to the previous commenter, I didn't mind the abrupt changes in texturing and gameplay after the gold-key door. To me, it felt like a natural transition: the player has worked his way out of the city and back up to earth, but he's not completely free.

The map's terracotta architecture, jumping puzzles, and horde combat reminded me a lot of Qmaster's excellent 2013 map Terracity. Admittedly, the implementation here is much cruder, as one would expect from a '90s map.

Michael Cullum released another map in 1997, The Floodgate, that has the same distinctive atmosphere: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/canal3.html

It's not quite as good as The Old City, IMO, but still worth checking out.

Another good '97 map in my opinion. I like it even more than the author's other map, The Floodgate. The map seems highly vertical for its time, and the author exploits it right from the first major area with a rain of grenades and lasers on the player, and a progression right to the top of this abstract city-like structure. (I'm not sure why the author didn't use a sky texture for the "roof" of this city, though.) Personally I didn't find the layout of this map confusing at all, whereas The Floodgate had me scratching my head for a few minutes. The combat is pretty well-balanced on skill 2.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have called the gameplay mediocre--replaying this, now that I'm familiar with the layout, I find that it plays pretty smoothly. Also agree that it deserves credit for being vertical long before that became common in Quake mapping.

Some parts are a little boxy and/or tight, but other parts are brilliant. Great verticality for a map of its time. Pretty good use of dogs & ogres as well. Brushwork is mostly blocky and the texturing is unusual, but it works. Unique and often clever, this is a fun map with longer gameplay than you'd expect for the enemy count.

A true classic - one of the maps that i keep returning to. Too bad that M.C. Only have published this and "The Floodgate" (canal3.zip).

Back in '97 this would have been a '5' - with the development of mapping, it is still a '4'.

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that was pretty cool. fun times. thanx