Map Review of arena-fights

by dunkelschwamm | July 1, 2022 | 5627 characters

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Arena Fights is a map which promises fights in arenas, and it delivers some of those. There's some stuff in-between that is what I would call "goldsrc fluff": button puzzles, arbitrarily raising water puzzles, getting around lasers to access teleports- whatever. That's not what we're here for. We're here for some Arena Fights!

Arena Fights delivers three Arena Fights brand arena fights. The first arena fight of the three arena fights is an arena fight fought in an arena rather plain- players file in through a fire door (the only of two in the spawn which respond to touch- though both are identical) into a rectangular prism of a room, clad in all of the blurry brutalism of a Black Mesa warehouse. Some pillars interspersed at equidistant intervals make the statement that this arena wants to break up the wide, uninterestingly shaped arena up- but also doesn't want to be more interesting than a grid. Some spice is added, however, in the form of some sandbags with a very nice looking mounted turret which enemies run to commandeer with such reliability that I was able to abuse this more than a couple times. The arena is littered with HEV and health, which kept me full up at all times by moving around constantly. However, I think my constant juking around caused me to passively slurp up all of the pickups, leaving my teammate with none.

The first part of this arena battle is a bunch of headcrabs. Then things escalate pretty steadily- houndeyes spawn in, then bullsquids, then vortigaunts, then alien grunts. Soon enough you're fighting baby gargs and all hell is breaking loose. Thankfully, this map supplies players with ample armaments- rocket launchers, all of the boilerplate assault weapons (MP5, Shotgun, M16 with underbarrel grenades, crossbow, grenades, satchel charges, tripmines), the vanilla half-life handguns, and a gauss gun. Enemies tend to group up in this map, so I had a lot of fun luring them into satchel charges or explosive crossbow bolts. There's a part of this first arena where a grate above the arena pops open and barnacles are unleashed. This got my friend at first, but the threat was quickly annihilated with an underbarrel grenade taking out the whole batch of barnacles.

After the first arena, the second has a similar progression, only now with more alien grunts and alien controllers, culminating in a gonarch battle. This one had the hilarious issue of having insta-kill lasers implemented into the arena. The moment an enemy decided to flee from us or lost interest and wandered, it would wander straight into the insta-kill lasers and gibify. This happened to the gonarch battle at the end. There's some funky shit in this arena with teleporters that I didn't have the patience for when I was playing and I don't really have the patience to explain now, it was just some superfluous teleporters.

The third arena, past some sewage nonsense, pits the players against another gaggle of enemies, but quickly culminates in a battle with a single gargantua. At this point we'd already fought a gargantua in the second arena, so it felt like a bit of a letdown. The arena this time around doesn't have any really interesting gimmicks, just a bit of a visual style. After killing the garg and playing with some switches, the players flood the room and find the exit to the tiny chamber that is supposed to be the map's "end". The map doesn't actually end, so I can't recommend it for servers unfortunately.

There's few aspects of this map I haven't brought up yet. First of all, while the map is lit fine and leans on default Half-Life stuff, a lot of the scenery is not super well brushed out. Brush entities in particular are all really sloppy- switches are strangely proportioned and with barely aligned textures; doors slide into walls and cause z-fighting; a water brush at the end fills the room but ends abruptly at either exit of the room which lead out from the ground level of the submerged room. It's pretty sloppy, and the lazy dismount at the end makes calling this "sloppy" easy. There's also some allied soldiers in the first two arenas when you start, but they die pretty quickly- usually because they get trapped on the same issues monsters do.

If you're looking for something fun and quick to play with a friend, this is a decent action map for that. It wouldn't be my go-to, and the lack of a map end prevents me from being able to recommend this for a server rotation, but this certainly could have been worse.

Pros:

  • It's a chaotic battle against a bunch of spawning in Half-Life enemies with not-too-spongey of health
  • Good set of weapons for players to use
  • Lots of HEV and Health for player use
  • Though they were useless, the friendly HECUs were appreciated
  • The turret in the first arena awas really neat looking

Cons:

  • The turret in the first arena is also just a major distraction to enemy AI
  • The lasers in the second area are like a bug trap for the enemies we're supposed to be fighting
  • The map gets easier as it goes, with the third arena being totally forgettable
  • No ending
  • Lots of stuff to keep players alive, but no ammo for their vast armaments so eventually you just kinda gotta die
  • The parts between the arenas were annoying gimmicks. They tried, but they were not fun and just made me dread navigating back to an arena after death
Score: 4.5 / 10
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