Spaceship with authentic rumble and killer entertainment during the long journey.
This is a space ship. However, You may doubt it sometimes. The atmosphere is lukewarm. You get some support to the space ship theory by looking out of the windows. Perhaps the rumble gives a glue.
On the other hand, a nazi eagle on the wall, modern nazi-boxes... hey, we could be in some modern nazi bunker as well.
The map is not original, it looks just like the other space/industrial maps around. There is a difference though. The finishing touches have been taken good care of. There are some errors but You probably won't notice them during the gameplay.
The map has opportunities for sniping and close combats. Sneaking is easy as there is no water or other revealing materials present. The general setup, allowing some strategies, made me play this map again and again.
The map has no real z-axis element. Merely it is the low-aerobic (just stepping, no jumping) version of it.
This is a low poly map. If You have the low end gadget inherited from Your big brother, You can play this map with it.
The poly count never went over 250 the highest being near the shield belt and it generally stays well below 100. The node count is always next to the poly count.
The map has no BSP errors, no HOM effects and it does not surprise players by swallowing them into black magick holes.
The map behaves strangely when started the first time. It keeps the secondary fire on for a while. Usually this means that the pathing contains carbage that is cumulated during the development process.
The pathing is normal quality.
The lone ambushpoint has the sniping set to true but it lacks the distance view triggering which would have made it harder to surprise the bot. As it is now, the bot is a sitting duck. Also, the place of this ambushpoint is questionable, as the bot is camping, it is cruel to guide him to take a position where his back is uncovered.
The map would also have benefited from additional ambush points here and there. The bots like to take these positions when fighting.
There is a pathing error near the window covered tunnel opening. The bots will not go uphill because the path line is too high from the ground. Some of the pathnodes near the stairs are way too high in the air.
The path network coverage is incomplete. It was easy to hide away even from the godlike bots. This makes LMS camping a little bit too easy.
There are several semisolid brushes (boxes) that make the bots shoot at them if You are lurking behind them. Lucky enough, the pathing is designed to go around them.
The bots have access to every item, including the shield belt.
The map flows very well. That's it.
The armament suits well to the layout. The weapons are all placed on well detectable places so You should have no trouble in finding them. The sniper rifle is placed in the neighbourhood of the lone ambushpoint which encourages the bots to snipe.
Ammo is always somewhere in the vicinity of the weapon itself. Propably this is the best tradeoff between littered and cramped ammo.
The map has only 6 med boxes which may become scarce with consumption. They are accompanied with 10 health vials grouped is groups of five.
There is one armor and one pair of thigh pads. The placement of armor is ingenious as it lures the bots to take more health vials than they usually do.
The shield belt is located in a place that I was not able to get into without TL. I know it can be reached with hammer jumping but I only succeeded to commit several suicides banging my head on the ceiling.
Most of the textures come from the SGtech package, which is not needed as the textures are embedded in the MyLevel package (the map itself).
Alignment and stretching is elaborate. However, the spiral stairs look bad as the checkerboard texture used over the floor is impossible to align with them. There are also some alignment errors on the floor bevel of the tunnel. That tunnel has also it's ceiling lights misaligned. Other than that the textures were perfectly on place.
The lights are sourced but somehow the light sources seemed to be in the dim side when compared to the light produced. Also, the ceiling construction over the RL in the center alley had no light source look. The same texture on the other hand is used as light source in the very same place. Looked like someone had turned the lights off leaving the light itself on.
The ambient sounds are there the dominating sound being the spacey-rumble. Some of the corridors had a sound of their own. The electric hum is understandable but printer sound without printer... The ambient sounds being probably the weakest thing in this map.
Music track is Course from original UT CD.
The architecture is peculiar. Semisolids are used in many colliding brushes. This will impact the bot behaviour a lot.
I also suspect that Gareth has tried to solve some BSP errors by making many of the stairs semisolid. This way they don't send BSP cuts over the level but they bring in some nasty side-effects some of which are platform dependant (MAC/PC).
Other than the liberal use of semisolids the architecture is excellent and is supporting the overlaying textures.
The map is definitely worth the 1.29 MB download and I recommend it for public server rotation.