editor Dave wrote:Id be glad if you could share your experience here!
Haven't played through it yet--I just wanted it fully ready for when I do. Right now I'm doing preliminary surveys of all the packs I have, making sure everything's actually working, so that I can sit down in another couple of weeks or so and just go--you know, sit down to a relaxing hour of gaming in the evening without having to worry that I'm going to run up against some issue that's going to destroy my eagerly-anticipated gametime. Most of us, I'm sure, don't have a whole lot of time to mess around--currently I'm unattached, so I have a couple of hours most nights, but when UT keeps crashing in a certain map, that 2 hours can evaporate in troubleshooting and no real playing gets done. Then you go to bed angry and frustrated because you didn't get to shoot stuff. So I'm getting all my ducks in a row before I try do any serious shooting. This pack is a case in point. It would have been really annoying to start playing it and then run into those resource problems, and sit there flapping in the breeze for several days until I got everything.
I'll tell you my initial impressions of the first map, though, which I've traversed most of. It's clearly a coop run-and-gun endeavor. You can of course play it SP, but the architecture is too vanilla to impress, and although there seems to be an attempt at a story, the English is so bad that it's basically impossible to understand; and my best interpretation is that it's deliberately facetious (when you try to go into the locked door to a fortress, the garbled message says something about the doorman having gone fishing). And visually, it's no better. Utterly generic architecture, worse even than a lot of the maps produced back in the earliest days (first six months or so of Unreal mapping). In this first map there are large, completely flat open spaces sprinkled with nothing but an unrelieved grass texture and a few trees, with a bunch of monsters just sitting around waiting for you to traipse across the plains. Yup, Skaarj squatted down sharpening their wristclaws in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason. And sometimes more monsters simply spawn after you've killed a wave of them. No rationale to it whatsoever. Oh yeah, it's nighttime, and that's a deliberate choice: the map is depending on darkness to hide the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise.
In sum: I'll play this through because I do in fact like me some run n' gun with uber-modded overkill weapons, but that's about all this is good for. Weedrow it ain't. To give you a point of reference, the Csejte Castle HerdCoop Pack, which has no story either and which some folks have criticized for architectural monotony, is still head and shoulders above this pack if the rest follows the precedents set by the first map. (I can't speak to the rest because all I did was make sure they opened--didn't do any exploration on any of the other levels in the pack.)