The Tomb of Chak Toh Ich’ak by Trinca

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This is a large map in a somewhat unusual theme: a Mayan city. Using Rogue textures, the map is centered around a courtyard which contains a sort of hollow ziggurat. The rest of the city is basically split up between rather plain hallways, and nicer looking subterranean temple rooms. There are also a couple of side-courtyards. Unfortunately, detail is generally lacking throughout, so that only a few side areas (the aforementioned temple rooms) look really good. Aside from the "lava-torches" (a cool an inventive idea to be sure), almost all the light comes from minlight, so that the many indoor areas are blandly and uniformly lit. There is not a lot of texture diversity either, the end result of all of this being that much of the map looks the same (with the exception of the central courtyard). The architecture is good in places, with curving walls and some use of angles, but on the whole I'd say more trim, variety of colour and style and lighting was needed.

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The layout is better than the looks; it is complex and three dimensional, although with many indoor/underground passages you can't always tell where you are in relation to the rest of the map. More texture diversity, details such as signs or titles for areas ("the tomb of X," "the fountain of Y," etc) might have helped this. There is some tough combat with hordes of hell knights and ogres, but the most dangerous parts are generally the fiend ambushes, which are well done. There are even larger mixed hordes in some of the showdown rooms, where vores make it important to keep moving. The finale is fairly dramatic, so that you are getting a constant challenge. Actually, the whole map is in some ways comparable to the Tower of Dal Gurak, another large-scale map with a constant challenge and a similar reliance on scale over detail.

Definitely worth playing, but in some ways quite limited.

Overall Score: 14/20