• quarantine02.zip - Quarantine by RickyT23
• Download: quarantine02.zip

Quarantine is a medium-sized idbase map. It begins in a green rock, green grass canyon - very traditional, though there's not much detail. It seems like the outdoor base front itself could have been much better working with just a little more work, although it does have the direct indoor-outdoor correspondence that I like going for it (and you can see in or out of the base through transparent windows). Inside the base, the map's layout is centered around one large atrium where you eventually get the gold key, with plenty of connecting hallways and side rooms. While the map is more or less conventional idbase, it's decent enough to look at, though there's not much more detail indoors than there is outdoors (as usual with base maps, the indoor areas do look better than the outdoor ones). One amusing touch, which I don't know if I've ever seen in a base map before, is that the monsters who patrol and maintain this base, are for once tidy: they actually stacked all the crates flush, for once!

The monster placement is good - a fiend tucked away in a dark corner killed me in an ambush once, and there are a few other amusing surprises if you aren't keeping an eye out. That said, a section involving a large number of ogres in hallways was very frustrating, mostly because there is a serious lack of armour leading up to that section and in general throughout the map. Later on in the map, the Quoth mech-Ogres appear, and are fairly devastating because of this. Ascending through the map and seeing back outside is satisfying, although the very ending (a few simple hallways) feels like it was just tacked on. Overall, this is not a bad map, and people who like idbase will definitely enjoy it, but with some further revisions, added visual detail, better gameplay balancing and a more satisfying finale, this map could have achieved its full potential.

Score: 14/20