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0fc8f530297f27b1360f05ae59d8facd3a9aedf153ac4d02dc7af882f0b78e1e
overall_rating
4.588235294117648
35
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It’s a pity that Spootnik’s map lacks ammo, as it is a wonderful map otherwise. I could handle it on Nightmare, as I could rush past monsters just to pick up ammo, but on Evil it’s just not fun at all.
Sorry, I take back the above post. Realized that I just have to smash all urns to get sufficient ammo. So then I only have accolades for the map!
I got through Bottom of the barrel scarps (tcj_hcm) with 309/314 and 15 of 19 secrets. I had 100 health and 176 armour, 200 shells and nails, 71 rockets and 51 shells. Normally I wouldn’t bother giving a final accounting like this, but I have to say I am really pleased with myself to have made it through this very very difficult map in such good shape.
This is hard from start to finish with low provision of health at several important points, some absolutely foul ambushes and lots of superbly constructed fights in areas where the numerous high-powered enemies are hard to get a safe shot at. What makes it all work is the sense of fairness: all those super-hard combats have ways to approach them that make the difficulty tractable, and they are all different enough from each other that fatigue never sets in.
All in all, an outstanding and outstandingly brutal map.
Ganymede Type (tcj_ish) is also very difficult — largely due to the lack of ammunition. I had to be extremely parsimonious to get to the end, and I found the very end oddly disappointing, but it was generally a satisfying play.
The introduction of a sokoban-like mechanic was really interesting, though not implemented quite well enough: the crates slide out of control too much, and I found that when I stacked on crate on top of another, I either couldn’t move the lower one at all, or I could push it out from under the top one. I would love to see this refined.
My Dad Owns a Dealership (tcj_nickster) is yet another map that falls into the Tough But Fair category. It makes excellent use of its limited space — single big hall, really, with four side-chapels, all on two levels — to provide multiple crunchy and satisfying combats. I finished with all 209 kills but only one secret — and if I’d not had the nail-piercer secret I really don’t know if I would have survived the closing section. Happily, that secret is cued very early in the map, so if you’re paying attention you should be OK!
Ordered Entropy (tcj_strideh) feels closer to regular difficulty, which I am OK with at this point! It begins atmospherically, introducing a new mechanic (destroying magic skulls to open portals) and deploying it in an area that bring in some nice combats. But it seems to lose interest in this mechanic for the second half of the map, and by the time we’re in an eroded void area, it’s just straight-up combat. Still fun, but less interesting. Finally, it’s nice to finish up by fighting a Chthon that is not invulnerable to weapons for once!
Gift Hunt (tcj_bisquit) has some combat but is mostly about solving mechanism puzzles, and they are puzzles that I enjoyed: not hard enough to be frustrating, but with enough to them that I felt satisfied when I passed one. The mechanism of finding gifts is a nice innovation, but nothing happened as a result: I imagine you need them all to open a secret area which probably contains the last four kills. All in all, nice work.
A Dream For a Nightmare (tcj_iyago) is a facinating and mostly successful experiment — an almost monsterless map with a narrative that leads to a disconcerting and nightmarish maze.
I say mostly successful because it’s not well enough signposted in places. In particular, I thought that going to bed was the end of the level, and that the continuation after that “end of level” display was a bug. A short caption would help: “I wake up refreshed but something’s wrong” or similar.
Angels with Filthy Souls (tcj_spoot) maintains the extremely high quality of this jam, with interesting progression, well-placed monsters, and a side-quest to collect all the candy canes. I missed a few of these (finishing with nine of the twelve secrets), so I noclipped through the megasecret door to enjoy the optional bunfight. And enjoy it I did, as this is where you get both the rocket-launcher and the jumpboots. Good stuff all around!
The hits keep on coming with Krampus Krypt (tcj_idolon), an oldly-named mostly industrial/military level with a lot of satsifyingly brutal and strategic combats. When I think of Arcane Dimensions, I mostly think of swampy maps like The Forgotten Sepulcher and Foggy Bogbottom (and for good reason, because they’re both awesome). But it’s easy to overlook how great AD is for base maps, too, with everything feeling so much chunkier and more powerful than in vanilla Quake. This map makes great use of that quality.
Festive Fortress (tcj_pinchy) may be my favourite map in this pack so far — which, given the excellent quality of pretty much all of them, is really saying something. It’s one of those maps that starts you outdoors and has you going inside a mansion.
Everything is christmas-themed. There are no regular monsters at all. But the map is populated with four special monsters: rocket reindeer, snowmen with nailguns, elves that throw sparkles and the boss — I won’t spoil the surprise. (Also, the regular elves that also crop up in some of the other maps in this pack.) Unlike most custom monsters, these ones really work. They were hard to deal with early on, before I’d figured them out, but that’s OK: the figuring out is part of the game.
I was deeply satisifed to end up with all 250 kills (though only two of five secrets). My only real complaint is that I really would have liked to find explosives along the way — they would have been great for when you’re getting swarmed by lots of low-level elves — but I’m guessing the grenade launcher and rocket launcher are probably not even hidden in secrets, as I never found any rockets for them.
I nearly gave up on Gingerbread Dread (tcj_greenwood) when it seemed that the first proper room was going to be a murder arena, and that the whole map would be wave after wave of spawning monsters. Happily, I pushed on through one more wave and found that it was the last before a trapdoor opened up and I was able to progress to the rest of the map.
The rest is … OK. No, that’s not fair: it’s good. But the rest of the maps in this pack have hit such a high standard that being merely good is only OK. It’s a base map but the layout feels a bit thoughtless, with fairly arbitrary barriers to progress.
One interesting thing is that a vast amount of respawning ammo of every type is provided, so that you just don’t need to think about ammo conservation at all. I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one level it’s liberating, but it does take away some of the challenge when you can just rocket everything from a distance.
I very much enjoyed Frozen Factory (tcj_sze) right up until the ending, where I was once more — for the fourth or fifth time — locked in a room full of monsters, this time powerful enough to make it unenjoyable. I made a few legitimate attempts, then god-moded through to the ending. Shame.
Unholy Night (tcj_magnetbox) brings this outstanding pack to a close, and truth to tell it’s a little on the undistinguished side compared to some of its stablemates. It starts out as a wave-based combat in one area, warps to another and more interesting wave-based combat in another, then takes you to a courtyard with teleports to two self-contained bunfights. From here, two further teleporters let you revisit the first two areas, where you can find gold and silver keys, either one of which gives you access to an exit.
All of it’s fun, but it’s a bit crude (except for the courtyard near the end).
Unless I missed something, then, that’s the whole pack — and what a pack it is! There a numerous stone-cold classics in here as well as several more good-to-excellent maps. Even the weakest ones are good. I’d rate this among the very top rank of Quake releases.