My friend (let's just call him Joe) asked me to review a few of some guy's maps (lets just call him Joe #2) because he's a big part of the advanced mapping forum or something. Oh well, let's just get this done....

The theme is a castle, and I can hear the groaning already; don't worry, this is one of those rare instances where an over-used theme is given a very good treatment; in this case, the castle is mostly open instead of all-indoors, and the main fighting area is outdoors. There are also a few realistic-looking trees scattered around the cliff. Like all the other castle-maps, this castle is on some sort of floating island. Apparently in the future, there won't be any more of those fancy "water-islands". ;)

DM-FourthOrder.zip is big mainly because of the new texture pack and a new .u package. The new textures look like something out of Wheel of Time; hell, maybe they ARE from Wheel of Time. The new textures are all used great, aligned perfectly to every step, wall, etc. The new .u package has two zones included in it. The first is a TidalZone; it pulls players in a certain direction whenever they hit it. In FourthOrder, it's used at the bottom of a pool to pull people inside a death-cavern. Pretty neat, and it suprised me the first time I saw it. :) I'm not sure what the ChainZone does, but I assume it has something to do with the fact that whenever you ghost outside the level, you are automatically killed... no matter what. This made getting a screenshot a little hard, but I got it. :)

As for playability, don't even try to play this thing on any machine slower than a P2-400. That's what I was using, and still struggling. This made it very hard to compete against the excellent bots, although I'm not sure they liked using the upper levels so much... it's a little difficult to get up there, especially with most of the action going on in the courtyard below.

Still, the way the castle is built allows for great flow and plenty of Z-axis fighting (i.e. sniping). Ammo for the sniper rifle is scattered all over to the map, to discourage long-time camping. That's a good idea, but the rest of the item placement isn't so good. I found myself in massive Enforcer/Impact Hammer battles way too often. You don't notice it as much with 10 players, but with 16, I hope you know how to Hammer-jump....