07/14/2014 - "The Surprise Attack" by Kevin "Waffnuffly" Letz

[UB_]

Map Title: The Surprise Attack
Author: Kevin Letz
From: Attacked!
Filename: Attacked1.unr
Music Files: Kran32.umx, Unreal4.umx





Youtube Playthrough

Sypnosis: What the hell, your ship is ATTACKED. By Skaarj. Your friends are dead, your crew is dead. The best thing you can do might be probably coming up with an escape plan.

Discuss!

[Sat42]

Great level, and a great start for a mappack. This was tense and quite hard, and I got a nasty fright in that room seen in the third (bottom left) screenshot. And fittingly, we get a crazy rush at the end and that
HOLY SHIT
moment when the intermission cuts in!
What's also worth mentioning is that this level (as well as the whole of Attacked! for the most part) achieves awesomeness while being low poly and straight to the point. There'd be an old school feeling to the pack if it weren't for the crazy scripted scenes which really add a lot to the player's experience. Yeah, gameplay awe is through the roof man! I'm sure Waffnuffly would regard this as pretty noobish today, but while from an architectural standpoint one might agree that things here can be pretty plain, hell the novelty and the fun of it all clearly raise the bar light years away from anything "noobish". Hence, while I did play this pack after going through much more esthetic works, I didn't feel this aspect diminished my enjoyment of the pack at all.

PS: in a previous MOTW thread that also dealt with a map from Attacked!, I read that Waffnuffly (aka Bug Horse, now Buff Skeleton) claimed to be only 12-13 when he made this... if that's true, then it's quite amazing if you ask me! and the writing really isn't bad at all! just not always professional, but totally fine for what it aims to achieve.
PPS: personally, I think "Waffnuffly" is the best nickname the author ever had

[Semfry]

Last week I realised I forgot to encode sound on the WebM, so I removed it...

A nice intro map, it throws you into things pretty fast with stuff like Skaarj ambushes in cramped corridors, but it gives you enough equipment to handle it, and there are some extras for exploring too. There's multiple set-pieces that hint at the kind of complex sequences you see later too, including the nice escape sequence. The small cutscene at the end sets up the rest too. It's pretty cramped and doesn't have big visual moments (with the possible exception of the generator room, and I like the colours and reflective floor of the computer room in the bottom-left shot too), but everything else does a good job introducing the style of the pack.