short, but some interesting ideas.

I thought this was a very cool map, I had fun playing it. The cut scene stuff was great, I loved how it told a story within just this one map. Here's a video I made for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcRPveQ3HvM

This is from 1997!? Excellent creativity and fun Little map.

Nice effect, but a little annoying (cameras should be used with care!) and a bit buggy (for some reason I got strange error when tried to restart map after got killed, although, I can't repeat this bug).

Anyway, for '97 it was a fresh sight.
+1 for included sources.

I think this is an excellent map. It has some really nice combat and an awesome story, told by semi-cutscenes. The detail on the environment could be better, but the visuals certainly aren't bad. It's a very cinematic level, and I admire that, especially for 1997. There are only two secrets, but they're pretty well done. One other thing I like a lot about this map is that it has a mixed theme, you'll fight grunts/enforcers as well as fantasy creatures. I definitely recommend this to everybody.

I rated this a 5 taking into consideration its time of release. It is a little buggy around the edges but its only real flaw as far as I'm concerned is that there's not more of it!

It feels like a real adventure rather than just another "shoot all the baddies" map. There's motivation behind the player character and there's pay off at the end.

Loved every second of it. Highly recommended.

It's funny how people nowadays frown upon constant cutscenes that interrupt gameplay and ruin the flow, but back in 1997 this was new and novel; something different from the mindless carnage of Doom and Quake, which contained little to no narrative.

So when judging this map without the novelty factor of cutscenes, I do think that they're kind of abrupt and break the flow, maybe even making me feel less immersed? I still enjoyed them and the experience as a whole, and if I want to replay the map without the cutscenes, thankfully the author had implemented a way to skip them.

But overall, since the short duration of the map is arguably the only real flaw of the map, I think the map deserves a high rating for being quite groundbreaking and paving the way for a more cinematic FPS experience. I'll leave the debate on whether that's a good thing or not for another day. ;D

Forgot to mention that I was actually able to save my buddies, since I was playing the map on nightmare difficulty. That poor shambler just kept attempting to blast them with lightning which kept hitting the edge of the holding pen! xD

And as I escaped the base I was wondering why the author hadn't included an alternate endgame text congratulating me for saving my teammates. xD

I suppose there is a certain technical achievement in providing cut-scenes. But there are good reasons why they've been so nearly universally omitted from Quake maps. They always slow the action and break immersion, and they never compensate for that by looking any better than the actual game. And in this case, the actual map is both small and The Wrong Kind Of Hard (arbitrary ambushes, shortage of ammo). All in all, not an experience I would recommend.

I enjoyed this small quake map from 1997 and it demonstrates how level designers can use cutscenes within the quake engine to tell a story to the player while providing an entertaining map for the player to play through. This was a well done map and i would highly recommend playing this classic map. I would give this map a four out of five rating.

Short but nifty, especially in the context of a 97 map.

I guess this is the same Darin McNeil who went on to work on a ton of id-engine games?