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Map review of Resident Evil: The Awakening
by Chimz | December 8, 2025 | 4029 characters
A classic among the Sven community, both for its uniqueness and its notorious design choices.
It's essentially the first half of Resident Evil 1. You get inside the Spenser mansion and must explore and ultimately find and get to the lab underneath the building.
Doors are color coded and you find keys that unlock each color. You slowly unlock more parts of the mansion and face new puzzles. Of course, most of these puzzles are just "find X item" rather than puzzles requiring actual solving and brain power.
All the weapons have been replaced with ones that would resemble the theme and no vanilla npc exists. It's a total conversion.
It's creepy and eerie in a simple way. Not like using subtle things to create the eeriness, just playing some spooky RE background music and placing you in a dimly lit. giant mysterious mansion filled with zombies and experiments.
A pretty cool thing for its time is the difficulty selection. At the start, you can pick from 4 difficulties to run the map. None of these really seem balanced but it's a nice touch.
It also features a survival mode where you try to stay alive in a house and garden while swarms of zombies come in. Nothing groundbreaking, but still a nice little minigame addition.
Overall it's a nice map but there are a few notorious designs that bring it down.
- First one is that there are no checkpoints (updated respawns) so every time you die, you spawn at the beginning and must walk a full minute to reach the mansion, then spend another 2 minutes picking up guns that are spread across the mansion.
- There's a section where you must walk along the edge of the roof to reach another part of the building, all while being pushed by an invisible trigger to the edge. While it does induce good stress, there's the glaring issue that when you fall down, you have nowhere to go. There's a room next to you that is inaccessible until the last part of the map and there's no way to get back up. So, you're essentially soft-locked there and must suicide to spawn at the beginning again.
- There are monsters that are reskinned headcrabs. Cool to see and frightening, but they have such high damage (50 damage for each jump on easy) that they're just brokenly unbalanced. You'll fight multiple simultaneously at a point which is an instant death. If their damage was reduced to something like 25, it would have been a much nicer experience.
- Some key items are easy to miss due to their poor visibility. An example would be a key model that is brown (an easy color to miss in the environment) placed on a bed with a checkered pattern and no light shining on it. Had a friend check the room and not see it at all. I found it cause we were stuck and re-checking all areas to find something.
- Ammo doesn't respawn. Once you pick it up, it's gone forever. Since the map does have its fair share of combat which gets more difficult the further you get, ammo becomes an issue. You only ever have an extra clip and can't replenish anywhere.
Final Verdict:
The attempt and ambition is awesome but it's still product of its time. Since you only care to know how good it actually today (and not back then), I'd sum it up by saying it's good but not even close to great. If you're willing to go along with some of the problematic designs, it's something I'd recommend everyone to play once.
Pros:
- Total Conversion map (no boring Black Mesa garbage)
- Creepy atmosphere
- Explore and slowly unlock new areas
- Generally a fun and classic experience
Cons:
- Difficulty spikes at some points
- No checkpoints (new respawn points) so when you die it takes 3 minutes to catch up
- One section can softlock a player, requiring you to suicide and respawn
- Key items usually have poor visibility
- Scarce ammo that also doesn't respawn
Review originally from *
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