HostileZone.net

My second official map review. This time taking on a somewhat smaller map but still immensely lacking in any kind of mapping skill. This map isn’t in fact on the fortwars server anymore due to lua error spammage, so yah, this map sounds pretty bad. Let’s take a look…

Brushwork

The use of carve is incredibly obvious wherever you look, the guy must have used it to cut out every single hole he made, the result is a complete mess of unnecessary brushes littering the walls. There’s a small attempt at making the area seem less blocky by putting slopes on almost all the edges but alas, it still looks incredibly bland. The two pipes at the spawn look really not-round. They each have only 8 sides, it would be much preferable to have 16 for this large a tube, it would look far smoother, better yet make a subdivided tube of displacements for it to be extra smooth. Now I take a moment to /facepalm. There’s a hollow box around the entire map. This means that the excessive carving resulted in a leak and, being too incompetent to fix it he simply covered the whole thing in a box to stop the leaking, Fool!



Texturing

It’s a complete nightmare. Every single texture in this god-forsaken map is stretched and distorted out of proportion. It’s like the mapper pressed the ‘fit’ button for every face of the map and left it like that (the fit button makes the texture expand in both directions to stretch over the face it’s on). There is also quite a lack of cubemaps which are kinda needed for this map since it uses a lot of reflective metal textures. So instead we are left with this orange horizon sky reflection all over a completely indoor map.



Lighting

Is pretty lazy. To light the spawn area he used a texture light and lined it along the edges of the ceiling. Both the tunnels underneath and the vents are just randomly spammed with light entities. Both these areas use only completely white lights which make it look really bright and ugly. You should always give your lights even the slightest of tint (unless it’s meant to look kinda weird). There are no light fixtures for these lights making it seem incredibly unrealistic.



Entity work

This ladder is impossible, it’s almost completely broken. Getting to a top is a fight with source’s physics where source is the 10 foot tall school bully and you’re the scrawny little nerd boy.



Verdict

A horribly broken and badly thought out map with atrocious texturing and bland white lighting. Whoever made it seriously needs to rethink the visual design of this map and start again from scratch. This is a mess.
- Evil Scotsman