| This map starts with a hilarious series of traps, as the ceiling collapses on you while blocking traps jump up in your way, the walls fire nails at you, and then you get thrown into a lava pit. After this, the map consists of two big outdoor areas with rocks and "trees" (heh, I too have sometimes been guilty of Village-Of-Dream style trees, but even Village of Dread kept the lighting dark). The areas are connected by a cavern, and a canyon containing bridges. In each area, in a pool of swampy water, sits a sizable red-stone fortress, using what I take to be an earlier version of the Conflagrant Rodent texture set. It's clear that ORL improved a great deal between this map and that: Conflagrant Rodent in some ways uses similar design ideas, but has way, way more detail, darker lighting, and less things (like brushwork trees and foliage) that are hard to pull off; the "forest edges" in that map also look better, being a different texture, and under darker lighting conditions. Anyway, I still thought that despite the cheesy aspects of the design here, and the odd or eccentric designs on some parts of the fortresses, both fortresses had a good deal of aesthetic appeal (I'm a sucker for setpieces). The moving bridges was also a cool idea even if the implementation was odd. In terms of gameplay, you just run around blasting medieval monsters: ogres, hell knights, scrags, and fiends, mainly. Eventually you get onto the top of the fortresses, from there you reach a cavern and then there's a final face-off in front of a giant Q symbol of lava. All of this is very oldschool in a cheesy but kind of awesome way; I like to see mappers trying to see what works and what doesn't, and even if all the ideas here weren't carried off all that well, later maps by the same author show that they can be, and this is definitely a fun arcade-style blast (on nightmare it might make a good coop map, as long as the coop spawnspots aren't in the initial roof-crushing zone!). | This map starts with a hilarious series of traps, as the ceiling collapses on you while blocking traps jump up in your way, the walls fire nails at you, and then you get thrown into a lava pit. After this, the map consists of two big outdoor areas with rocks and "trees" (heh, I too have sometimes been guilty of Village-Of-Dream style trees, but even Village of Dread kept the lighting dark). The areas are connected by a cavern, and a canyon containing bridges. In each area, in a pool of swampy water, sits a sizable red-stone fortress, using what I take to be an earlier version of the Conflagrant Rodent texture set. It's clear that ORL improved a great deal between this map and that: [[/reviews/oms2_2.html|Conflagrant Rodent]] in some ways uses similar design ideas, but has way, way more detail, darker lighting, and less things (like brushwork trees and foliage) that are hard to pull off; the "forest edges" in that map also look better, being a different texture, and under darker lighting conditions. Anyway, I still thought that despite the cheesy aspects of the design here, and the odd or eccentric designs on some parts of the fortresses, both fortresses had a good deal of aesthetic appeal (I'm a sucker for setpieces). The moving bridges was also a cool idea even if the implementation was odd. In terms of gameplay, you just run around blasting medieval monsters: ogres, hell knights, scrags, and fiends, mainly. Eventually you get onto the top of the fortresses, from there you reach a cavern and then there's a final face-off in front of a giant Q symbol of lava. All of this is very oldschool in a cheesy but kind of awesome way; I like to see mappers trying to see what works and what doesn't, and even if all the ideas here weren't carried off all that well, later maps by the same author show that they can be, and this is definitely a fun arcade-style blast (on nightmare it might make a good coop map, as long as the coop spawnspots aren't in the initial roof-crushing zone!). |
Easily install and launch Quake maps with the cross-platform