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Map review of BBQWITTEHBEAR
by dunkelschwamm | October 6, 2022 | 4501 characters
BBQ Wit Teh Bear is a creative comedy shopping simulator map for Sven Co-op. There's a sense of British humor in it that I'm not entirely familiar with, with lots of seemingly local memes and sensibilities. Despite not really connecting with any of that as an American, it's still very charming, creative, full of character, and fun.
The basic conceit is that you're trying to have a barbeque, but need to go shopping for ingredients. Players hop into func_vehicle buses (which work great, btw), arrive at a super market (which is huge, has a huge parking lot, and opens a teleporter to its location), are given a shopping list, and fetch items as simply anywhere as grabbing them right off of shelves to ordering them and having an NPC retrieve it off a shelf for you to driving down the street to a baker to buy rolls to trade with an employee in the backroom. It's full of fun '90s adventure game stuff like that. At times, it was hard to track progress, and there were quite a few times that we were sure we had every item on the list but still had to complete the necessary missions. However, when the missions are running, big sprites hang over objectives to ensure you can find them. That just doesn't help much when the objective is down the street and you're scouring the massive supermarket to find it. Regardless, once you find all of the items at the supermarket the map ends with a cutscene of the bbq's success.
The map is very blocky, but it's never really ugly. It gives effort to evoke environments in cutesy pastiche-y ways, while heavily injecting humor into every sign, supermarket item, item name listings, prices, and the 2D wobbling NPCs who waddle around between aisles. This map has a lot of fun visual gags to it, and while very little of it looks great on its own it all comes together to create this hilarious cartoon setting that draws a very palpable picture of a certain aspect of a certain society that I have no experience with. It's strangely immersive despite never being convincing, if that makes sense.
One thing that helps a lot of this is that the map is largely explorable, full of destructible, full of surprise func_vehicles, dense with humor, and wide open for wacky hijinks to have room to breathe and get wild. I opened an emergency door, and before a scripted store manager could close it my buddy drove a bus into the supermarket and started crashing through the NPCs. What's incredible is that it really doesn't matter that he did this- nothing broke. This is a very comfortable, child-proofed map where a lot of mayhem can happen but everybody walks away from it smiling. NPCs are squishy to hit but utterly indestructible, vehicles work decently well, everything's explorable, there's secret collectables- the whole map is fun to interact with.
Overall, I think this map is great. Sometimes it being so wide open makes it a slog to traverse, but I think it does everything I could expect from a big map to overcome this and the overall experience is at least 90% funny gag stuff, which is a great percentile compared to even most success Sven comedy maps. Somebody really paid attention to the details where they matter, and I really respect everything that this map ended up being.
I highly recommend you play this, add it to a server, play it with friends. It makes me want to make a map right now.
Pros:
- Full of character, wit, charm, snark, and funny gags
- Very fun NPC models
- Great attention to detail in the store shelves and NPC scripting
- Very successfully executed adventure game style fetch quest
- We got really excited when we found out a bunch of the map is destructible
- Very fun func_vehicles
Cons:
- Some parts of the map are definitely just big, stretched out areas with looping textures and those parts don't look great
- A couple parts of the quests are a bit hard to follow and even made us second guess if the map had an ending
- Ends a bit abruptly. I thought there would be more to do with the bbq, but really the whole map is just about the shopping trip
- Lots of pointless wide open spaces, like the store's roof, which kinda just waste time when the players are expecting more because the map has led them to expect as much
Review originally from https://scmapreviews.blogspot.com/2022/10/bbqwittehbear-dunkelschwamm.html
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