DM-WolfsCastle
Map Info
	File Name dm-wolfscastle.zip Author acolyte Gametype UT Deathmatch Date Added 04-13-2003 File Version 1.00 File Size 1.37 mb Player Count 6 Map Description None Review Rating 2 User Rating 6 Overall Rating 3.0
Review
Reviewer Frieza Awe Score:  0.5/3 Date 07-26-2003 Build Score:  1.0/3 Review Schema Cast Score:  0.5/3 User Point:  +1 Overall Score:  3.0/10 A small castle in mountains. Beneath castle is alien base with space teleporter like in STAR GATE. This is the description provided by the author, and it’s a correct one. DM-Wolfscastle is a small DM map for about 6-8 players set in two different themes, a medieval castle and a high-tech alien base. Unfortunately it suffers greatly from a lot of flaws. But let’s start with the more positive things. The architecture of this map has been done OK in some parts, but not OK in other parts. Most of the medieval part looks decent, though the texturing is really repetitive in here. Also it contains a basement which is small and cubic, this just doesn’t look very good. And there’s more bad news, it’s all very cramped. All the arches inside the church stand in your way when you’re trying to strafe for incoming rockets. The towers are all very small and you can hardly move in them. The only thing that was pretty good was the skybox, unfortunately it has been stolen from another map. The Alien part on the other hand looks plain ugly. The base is cubic, there is a floating stair?, there is pitchblack mover and some textures are unaligned. Isn’t there anything positive to say about this? Yes there is! The Alien base has a really cool trap that will lock you up at first and then suck you to the ceiling killing you instantly. Still there are some problems here. The part mentioned above lags, and also the bots won’t use the traps unless you accidentally blow them against the button triggering it. The lighting is decent in the medieval part, but again not so great in the alien base part. It’s mostly whites in there. All the lamps have sources but they don’t seem to be on very much. (note to the author: place a cylindrical light with a low radius and a very high brightness close to the light source and check bright corners in the light’s texture properties. The medieval part has purple light cast from the purple skybox, and also has torches, but they don’t seem to cast any light at all. There’s little coronawork to see here. Now we’ve reached the maps big problem: gameplay, flow and item placement. Let’s start with gameplay. Due to the cramped architecture mentioned above it’s hard to manoeuvre around without constantly getting stuck behind something. This is pretty annoying when you’re in the heat of a battle. Positive thing here, the bots will give you some good resistance, they go about everywhere in the map, but don’t activate traps. The bots do have a problem with the elevators in the towers, because they tend to get stuck when they try to get onto an elevator. The flow is another big problem. There are only 2 ways you can go if you want to go to either the medieval or alien base part. A teleporter and a weird tube-like something with an invisible elevator. You have to pass a huge gate to get to the castle, but it’s so darn slow that it totally takes the pace out of the game. There’s a lot of dead ends in this map. All the towers are dead ends, inside the church there’s a dead end, in the basement there are 2 dead ends and inside the alien base there’s another dead end. Also there’s a path around the castle which takes you totally nowhere then back to where you came from. This could’ve been done a lot better. Now we’re getting to the last and horrible point. Ithe item placement is (again) bad. Most of the weapons were placed in the towers, the shock rifle has been placed twice but really close to eachother. There’s A LOT of health in the medieval part but just little health in the alien part. And you can’t find any additional ammo around the level so you’ll have to go back to the place you originally found the weapon (exception for the pulse gun, which has also been placed twice, but this time its been spaced out better). The sound was decent, there are some ambient sounds, but not too many and the map comes with a new music file which is some sort of techno mix of the theme of Das Boot, which gets really annoying after a while and mildly fits the map. Conclusion: The map could’ve been better and you can tell the author knows his way around Ued, but the flaws in flow and gameplay and the mediocre architecture and lighting make this map a good candidate for the trash bin.
Map Comments
paranoid 04-14-2003 12:27 PM MDT Rating: 6   I wasn't really quite sure what to give this map score wise, it has a lot of great ideas and you can tell that if the theme was fleshed out a little more it could be great, but then that isn't the sort of stuff you score maps on is it!?! Personally i found the map too small, inside the tiny castle i felt like the walls were caving in on me!! it's just too small, the sniper towers are also too cramped, and it would be good if perhaps you could just jump out of them rather than having to call up the elevator, which brings me to the other bad thing about the map, flow. Playing it felt a little weird, amybe the inclusion of some uderground caverns linking to the alien area rather than just simple teleporters. But other than that the rest of the level is fine. The textures do the job, cept they are often a little monotonous, lighting is a bit sporadic but it would appear everything is sourced, and i am talking to much hehe the traps are awesome though, i've seen traps like it. it's not bad and i see in your readme it's an old map so well done. . .for back then! Shao 07-27-2003 07:11 PM MDT Rating: 5   yeah yeah whatever.