Rusted

Content - Quake2 - Quake2 Levels - Quake2 Multiplayer

Author: Shadowdane | Rating: 8.25 | Download: nexus2.zip

The first thing you’ll notice when you first run Rusted, is that it’s absolutely huge! It was built for a 16 player load, although things can get utterly messy at loads that high. I tested it out with a load of 12 bots just to see how well it handled all the traffic, and I must say everything seemed to flow pretty evenly. The problem you reach with a player load that high is that without “weapons_stay” on, you see a lot of blaster battles. Which ends up turning into a massacre when someone grabs a rocket launcher and heads near the center of a blaster battle. Besides that, the only problem I really ran into with this map is getting lost numerous times. It’s just so big, but it doesn’t really feel that big. You’ll turn a corner and all the sudden, you’re some place in the map you haven’t been before. With the high player loads you’ll never notice this though; too much action going on all around you.

Shadowdane shows off some really nice work in this level with excellent use of textures and trim. It’s nothing you really haven’t seen before, but it just has this well polished look about it. Nothing in the map looks like a last second slop together. The lighting is often moody and dark, and can create some nasty hiding places for would be campers. None the less, I really liked the lighting. There’s not much else to say about the actual looks of the map. Like I said, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it just looks well polished like Shadowdane wanted everything to be just absolutely perfect.

The weapon layout is kind of hard to pin down when you have such a big area. You could play for 20 minutes straight and not even touch every corner of the map, and miss a few weapons. Although when you have so many people in the level you don’t really care which weapon you get, just as long as you get one. The hyperblaster you’ll probably never even think to go after as it’s in a pool of water, but next to it is the YA so it’s worth it. The quad, a RL, and a RA seem a wee bit too close for comfort. The Quad’s in the room you see in the screen 1 and involves some box jumping to get at, but it’s still rather easy to nab. The RL is right near the grated floor you see there. The difficult part is by the SG near that room there’s a button that’ll make the floor dropout and land you in a pool of inescapable slime. You might be a bit suprised to find that there is a BFG in this level but it involves a five minute timer switch to grab. You hit the switch, an alarm goes off and you grab the BFG. The switch then disappears for five minutes before the BFG can be reached again. It’s a fancy little touch that definitely helps to control the BFG usage.

All in all Rusted is a pretty nice level, espcially if you’re trying to find a map to hold a ton of people for that upcoming LAN party you’re throwing. It’s nice a clean looking, has moody lighting, it isn’t entirely that ugly brown color that plagues most Q2 maps, and can hold one huge gib spreading extravaganza! What’s not to like?

- f4nt