OK, I’ve finished running around the map and here goes my little review.
From what I see, forge is a cbble with another route to B added, in an attempt to take the advanage away from the CT’s. This is how it turned out:
We now have four chokepoints instead of the old three, two at each bombsite. The entrances are placed somewhat symmetrical, which makes for some boring gameplay. You can either hit A or B using two routes simultaneously, there’s no “middle area” from which you could sense out the enemy’s position and do a quick fake attack. All the routes, especially the new ones at B are quite long and take a lot of time to pass through. This is not good, neither for T’s nor for the CT’s. It separates the defense, cutting them in half, and limiting the rotation between the spots, as neither is theoretically “easy to hold” now. It’s gonna be boring, you’ll see, with CT holding the spots tight till the bomb is planted, and T’s commiting to one side of the map each round, since fake attacks won’t be successful.
A map should be tight, you should be able to move quickly between the chokepoints to make for interesting gameplay, and this is not the case with forge.
As for the technical aspects. The geometry is nice enough, varied and smooth. But the lighting and texturing on it is horrible. There’s a lot of contrast, each wall has a different colour, the light is mad white and falls almost vertically from the sky. It reminds me of the 1.6 inferno, where all the atmosphere has been taken away in favour of high-res textures. It’s the same here: the textures are nice individually, but they don’t make for a good set. To cut it short: my eyes are hurting when i run around this map. The author used lots of textures and models made by other people, yet i can’t see any credit given to them. The urban setting is overdone, and ripping off the cbble layout is not original either.
- it’s a ripoff
- it’s uglier than original de_cbble
- adding a route is not always enough to make tense gameplay
There are maps better than this one, yet CEVO decides to add such as this. This is because people go for what sounds and feels familiar to them, instead of what is GOOD.