The Vigil

Content - Quake - Quake Levels - Quake Single Player

Author: Wright Bagwell | Rating: 6.83 | Download: vigil.zip

The Vigil gives you the task of defending the tomb of a fallen comrade from the assault of Quake’s minions. You can’t find an exit or walk to some other place, simply stay until you’ve killed’em all.

The map architecture is very simple: all the level is centered on a square room, with a corridor all around it. There are two doors that will open when you meet a specified kill amount, and that will lead to two small underground areas. Stop. Nothing more, the only challenge is survive, and this will not be a simple one, as monsters that will appear will be progressively powerful, until you have to face two Shamblers or three Vores at a time, along with many smaller ones.

The map has a very different gameplay as you’ll be always surrounded by enemies, so you’ll have to think fast and hit hard if you don’t want to find yorself cornered and slayed. The use of lots of powerful monsters makes this map one of the hardest I’ve ever played, thus it’s never frustating, unless you’re a newbie. I’ve re-played it prior to write this review and I’ve seen the end-game congratulations screen before dying ten times, but at the time when it was released (it was 1997 and I was still playing using keyboard only) I wasn’t able to complete it without cheating…

The architecture is very simple, with some detail, but never true eyecandy. There are some new textures and some from two official Mission Packs but I think that the map could look better. This is not a big fault but the author could have placed some more details to look at.

The map also sports some new QuakeC to improve playability of this add-on. The Axe does more damage and the grunts drop double shells, as the risk of goin’ short of ammo is a bit higher than in other maps, also, due to the very high number of enemies in a restricted area the dead bodies are removed after 45″ so they don’t bog down frame rate. This means that the author has intelligently planned his work and some good playtesting has been done before releasing this map.

A final word about the score. I think this map could get an half point more for its originality, but I wanted to keep it lower than Charmhood score. The map by [KONA] (that I think was inspired by The Vigil in designing it) is superior both in aesthetic and in gameplay. With many beautiful and unsettingly architecture to look at. A better balanced difficulty and a more articulated layout, with many unlocking areas as the game proceed.

- Zero G.