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7163676fa0cfbb5e74f3a8d1e829335c660062f67bb78c2cef5235088faee8fd
overall_rating
4.225609756097561
41
Very cool maps, it also felt like a rollercoaster of features, nostalgia and variety.
My favorite map in this pool is The Satisfyer by Zigi. Hands down, very bonkers with the quad metal pacing (kudos to Markie Music) \m/ \m/
Azure Drippings by Qmaster: I really enjoyed the beautiful polygon landscape it offered. As much as you might hate it, reminds me of a special Mass Effect Andromeda landscape (which is also dark blue), and also reminds me when I used Unreal Engine 4’s scaled pebbles to make mountains and similar shapes. :0
Tears & Gold by DragonsForLunch: Loved the crystaline lamps and the fullbright gold details. The general use of textures blew me away. I almost felt like I was in a different game rather than different dimension. :o
Inhumed Sinopis by Ish: Impressive Millennium Falcon design, and the Gug was flying and delivering at the gate like a badass. Nice work!
The Color Burns by Chris Holden: A fresh new tileset. We need maps more like this, but longer and packed with more monsters! Still it felt like playing Amid Evil, which is more about the visuals. Very cool concept. 
Towering Terror by Mista Heita: Felt like revisiting the Quake 3 map “Terminal Heights”, but for monster hunting. Very nice approach.
Icemecha Dojo by Pinchy: The tileset reminds me of some maps from Star Wars SOTE and Perfect Dark, while underground also gave me Deus Ex’s Area 51 vibes. Cool stuff. 
DarkLand Citadel by ShadesMaster: Beautiful views of the houses and dead vegetation, almost makes me want to repeat christmas all over again. Gameplay-wise? a mix of Heretic’s 3rd episode and a bit of Doom. Nostalgic in that sense, which kept entertaining me on that front :0
There’s no edit option here, so… Regarding the Mass Effect Andromeda comment (for Qmaster), people may dislike the comparison I did. I personally loved what you did in there.
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Alcazar Azul (bm_greenwood) is a great start: a multi-level blue stone castle well populated with enough tough enemies to make progression satisfyingly difficult. I did get a bit lost once or twice, despite the small size of the map, due to the areas all looking so similar, but overall it was a fine blast.
Tears & Gold (bm_dfl) is also really well calibrated to be properly difficult — I was down to single-digit health at one point, and spent much of the map below 50 — and presents plenty of territory to explore. Beautiful interpretation of the “blue” theme, and lots to do. My only quibble with this one would be sense that it felt more like a gauntlet to run than it did like an actual place.
Inhumed Sinopis (bm_ish) is interestingly different, with a sci-fi setting and an impressively Millennium Falcon-like ship that abandons you early on. I enjoyed that it made good use of the plasma rifle, but as usual didn’t much enjoy the vermis — especially as it ate almost all my ammo. The ending is strange: there is no exit and as far as I can make out, you exit the level by killing a certain number of monsters, but not all. I found that unsatisfying.
The Satisfyer (bm_zigi) does exactly what it sets out to do, and and does it well, but it’s just not the kind of thing I enjoy. I’m all about methodical exploration and discovery, so the long sequence of horde combats just didn’t tickle my itch.
Celestine Cistern (bm_gnemeth) is excellent, an ominous fortress with lots of overlooks and intricate retracing of steps, culminating a big fight that’s you’d really better have the found the (easy) quad secret for.
I really enjoyed Blue Bricks and Dark Skies (bm_bmfbr), a classic castle with plenty of exploration and several nice secrets. It was let down only by the very ending, where invisible barriers — a pet hate of mine — surrounded the combat arena.
Lots to explore and do in Azure Drippings (bm_qmaster), and some satisfying uses of the plasma rifle. Features vorelings and those green floaty things that phase in and out of visibility, but somehow they’re not as annoying here as the usually are. All very satisfying until the end, when I didn’t understand how I was supposed to exit until I did it by trial and error. A teleport texture floating abve the underwater area would have helped!
The Color Burns (bm_chrisholden) sure is beautiful, but the gameplay doesn’t really match up to the visuals. Symmetric maps often feel padded, and the quest to kill two vermes (plural of vermis, right) was actually pretty trivial given the vast amount of ammo and the good cover. It was fun, but not in a deep way.
Towering Terror (bm_mh) begins as a Coagula-style void map, but just it’s getting going it drops you into arena battle with a gug, a gaunt and a couple of knights, and then … that’s it. A nice start, but it feels more like the opening section of a big map than it does like a complete small map. (Also, I am beginning to think I may have seen enough gugs for now.)
I am running out of patience with maps like Museum of Blue (bm_quasiotter). I respect that Quasiotter is trying to do something different — I just don’t find it interesting. Sorry.
Icemecha Dojo (bm_pinchy) is a strange experience. it begins with a wide open base area, populated by difficult monsters (plasma enforcers and scorpions) that can snipe at you from range, and is under-provisioned, so it’s very difficult to stay alive — but, honestly, not the fun kind of difficulty.
Once you survive to the point of making your way underground, ammo and health both become much more plentiful, and I was just starting to really get into it when the map ended. I had not even taken, or used, the silver key: the gold-key door leads to a corridor which out of nowhere turns out to be the exit.
Happily, I had a saved game from near the end, so I went back, picked up the silver key, and searched around until I found the silver-key door — right back at the start. Inside was an area with few more enemies, but even after breaking through to the secret area accessible from the walkway I still ended up with only 79 or 93 kills, despite having all four secrets. I have no idea where the other 14 bad-guys might be hiding.
All in all, it’s a bit unsatisfactory — and all the more so because there are the bones of much better map here. All the hard work is done: it just needs better monster selection, more careful balancing, and repositioning the gold key somewhere in the silver key area.
Darkland Citadel (bm_shades) is rather a strange choice of name for a map that is set in a village rather than a citadel, and rather a charming one at that. It’s fun, though, with it’s little radiant-quest hub that lets you choose which order to take the three silver-key door areas.
I didn’t really enjoy Raped (bm_raped). Perhaps i was primed by the very distasteful title, but I found the sequence of random-seeming combats, the teleporting-in bad-guys, the plunges from darkness into death and the arbitrary and bitwise progression all unsatisfactory.