Diabolik gives us a DM map that he feels is worthy of release. His Readme file mentions some BSP errors, but I could not find any, except at a masked texture. It seems that he is not new to mapping, and with a little more experience, could turn out some nice work. He says that this can be a one-on-one map, but this would get a little boring for most fraggers. Six to eight players seemed to keep the body parts flying at a reasonable rate. You be the judge.

The design of this map is mainly cubes and cylinders, with some stairs thrown in here and there. I really didn't notice anything in the way of 2D shape editing. Still, Diabolik squeezed quite a bit out of these basic shapes, and provided good connectivity. The frame rates were nice, with poly counts remaining well under 100 most of the time; Not too bad considering the vertical fighting options. Jump pads with water textures were used, which was a little weird, but they worked. One jump pad propels you through a masked hole in the ceiling onto another pad that is placed on the floor of the room above it. Bots use the jump pads, but I did notice one playing trampoline for ten seconds until he was gibbed.

Item placement needed some work: The armored vest and the shieldbelt were way too easy to acquire. The thighpads were harder to get to than these were. But this map doesn't have many places that are difficult to reach, other than some boxes. Perhaps if the armor and the sheildbelt were placed on the boxes instead of the thighpads and bioammo, it would make things more interesting. Other weapons seemed to be placed without much thought, except for the health, which was adjusted quite well to make things interesting.

The bots explored most of the square footage, only shying away from a couple of places. I notice this with a lot of maps, though; bots seem to find a place to congregate. Adjusting 'Player Starts' is about the easiest way to help this situation. Path nodes were overly done, with twice as many as needed.

The texturing was believable, but could have used some alignment on the floors. I would, also, have liked to seen the textures aligned differently on the rectangular tunnels, which takes you to the lowest room where many pickups were located. The textures run with the angle of the slant, and rotating them to the horizontal would make them appear more as they do in real life.

Lighting helped make this level nice to play. There was a good level of light/dark contrast and some good color usage at what appears to be some power generators. Light fixtures were Unlit, which help them appear as real lights which are turned on, except for a few areas. I am not sure if the author decided to do this to give his lights a subtle glow, or just forgot to make them unlit. If the 'subtle glow' technique was what he was after, perhaps making them 'Special Lit' and adding extra lights would have produced better results. This would keep the lights from being too dull looking. Cylindrical fixtures were also used to throw light straight down. This is a nice technique, but some adjustments should have been made: The lights shined nicely on the floor in one spot, but the inside of the fixture was dark. This seemed unnatural. Some additional 'Special Lit' techniques could have been utilized to remedy this. Some lens flares were also placed in these fixtures, but their 'DrawScale' was set too large. At least the flares weren't visible until you stood directly under the lights.

The fast-paced 'Run' CD soundtrack was selected for our listening pleasure, along with some ambient sound around the power generators. Diabolik made a common mistake of cranking up the ambient sound level to maximum so it could be heard over the weapon's fire and music. Usually a mapper has their music setting up too high when they create their map, and they turn up the ambient sounds so they can be heard over the tunes. Having to max anything out should give you a red flag. Sometimes less is more.