All Is Dust (xj202_entsoy) provides a fascinating location and some great atmosphere, but rather spoils it with ridiculously too-hard combats where you find yourself repeatedly fighting zombie hordes without explosives while in single-digit health. In the end I shrugged and god-moded through a couple of the more ludicrous parts. Shame — it was nearly outstanding.
6755b682db4d2fcd3e92dee61b7975468a2807abc2a93f29051835e7e33aec69
overall_rating
4.369565217391305
46
Nice and simple in Ghadamons pit (xj2020_dfl), where you have to climb your way up to the top of a cubic open area, fighting along the way. Perhaps relies a bit too much on monsters spawning in, but it’s always pleasant to see the jump-boots put in an appearance.
We Can All Fly (xj2020_chrisholden) is interestingly different, a science base with only 12 enemies, all robotic, which must be avoided on an unarmed climb to the top where a weapon is found. Only then can they be eliminated, and the exit found. Doesn’t take long to play, but it’s fun while it lasts.
What a marvellous piece of invention is Eternal Return (xj2020_bal) — a map taking place in a 1024 cube, which is nevertheless infinite in extent. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and the execution of the wrapping architecture is flawless. Of course, nothing comes for free, and monsters and items can suddenly vanish and reappear as you pass the boundaries, but that if anything adds to the eerie atmosphere of this bizarre floating city. Great stuff.
Igneous (xj2020_artistical) is perfectly competent, but short and honestly a bit lacking in inspiration. The ssslllooowww prologue adds nothing, and the ending is anticlimactic. Sorry.
Lovely work in I Climb the Stairs, Wearing My Best (xj2020_strideh), and excellent demonstration that a map can be small but still memorable. It takes place around a huge drill which you must sabotage, fighting with only the plasma gun. Progression is largely vertical, with small waves of enemies warping in when you perform elements of the sabotage. Really fun to play, and lovely to look at.
From the moment of entering Village of Claws (xj2020_ shades) I was stuck by how lovely it was to look at, and looked forward to exploring this beautiful environment. How deeply disappointing, then, to find that it’s merely an intense and tactically vacuous arena fight surrounded by invisible walls.
I just god-moded. And as the combats escalated into ever more ludicrous overmatching, I’ve never been more glad to have done so. A ridiculous waste of architecture.
Gay kisses for Christmas (xj2020_quasiotter) is all kinds of weird. I enjoyed the theme of helping the Quake-world denizens for once, instead of killing them, but I would gave preferred less out-there textures, so that the maze of rooms, ramps and passages felt more navigable. It was too easy to get lost — though the map is small enough that it wasn’t too hard to just wander around until I re-found (say) the silver-key door. Anyway, refreshingly different. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la Quake!
I loved all the exploration and rooftop climbing of Removing Canyon Invaders (xj2020_qmaster1), though the combats felt a bit mundane my comparison. My only real complaint is that, having obtained the gold key, the rest of the level was anticlimactic, with no further enemies. A bit of repopulation would really have helped. Oh, and the skybox! Beautiful!
There is an astonishing amount of gameplay packed into Pentori Aurum (xj2020_qalten): four differently themed sub-quests that can be taken in any order, one final quest, and a coda, all making up a story of sorts. How all that fits into the 1024^3 cube is amazing — each of the individual quests twists and turns, and at various points on any given quest you see glimpses of the others through windows and breaks in the walls. At 120 kills (including a little bit of spawning) there is plenty of combat, and there’s also a lot of variation between one fight and the next. The whole thing took me 35 minutes to complete, which is pretty amazing for a cube-map.
So far, so outstanding. What stops this short of being among the very very best maps is the ugliness of the build: both architecture and lighting are poor, perhaps because of the limited timeframe to get the map done in time for the jam. But those cosmetic problems are easy to forgive in light of the sheer amount of stuff here.
Market Cube (xj2020_pinchy) is lovely to look at, but disappointing to play. The bulk of the game happens in an underground flooded area, and results in your obtaining the gold key. Then you have to snipe your way to safety from the cover of the gold-key shed, and then … that’s it. I thought the gold key would take me to the next area, but instead the map just ended. It left me wanting to visit all the areas I could see.
And so to Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting (xj2020_naitelveni). This is just a very very long and very chaotic arena battle which I admit I got bored of trying to survive legitimately, and instead god-moded through. I feel like there are big difficulty issues here.
A Door-Key Level (xj2020_mux) seems to be the last level available from the main hub, and what a great one to end on. It’s a beautifully inventive floating castle, half ruined and full of secrets and surprising paths. Very well balanced diffculty meant I was often low on health or ammo, without ever feeling it reached the point of taking the fun out of it. And I loved the super-secret climax, where you get the joy of the rocket launcher in exchange for the curse of the scrag-mother. An absolutely marvellous achievement in 1024^3.
Sorry, I meant xj2020_muk, not xj2020_mux!
Is there a legitimate way to get to xj2020_qmaster2? I see it in the maps directory, but no portal to it from the start map.
I had a blast with most of the maps in this pack! It’s way past Christmas time, but ho, ho, ho to all you Merry Mappers who contributed.
There were definitely some five-star maps there! Thank you all!
Unregistered user “smeetooie3” posted:
@MikeTaylor - it is a secret that you can get to (I think from Removing Canyon Invaders)
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]