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Map review of Pagoda
by GrandmasterJ | August 15, 2026 | 4087 characters
I've played this map before and stopped when I discovered that it used a hub map and when we solved a puzzle we would go back to the same map and watch the enemies respawn and attack each other. The map has been updated by the community since then and while it still does the same thing the enemies don't respawn like they did, so that's an improvement. I recommend playing v3.
The map is a conversion of a singleplayer map and with the hub map it doesn't quite fit into Sven Co-op smoothly. We start off in a train ride through a very small and short map that drops us off at the main hub. It's about a minute long and if the community is merging maps I question why this wasn't merged too.
One thing the community edit did really well was prevent players from walking backwards and switching to the previous map. I remember doing that before the community edit and it was hell. So big win there.
I will say the introduction train ride does showcase how beautiful the map is, there are some bright and vivid textures here and some amazing foliage sprites. The sky is a flat blue and there are multiple areas where we can see through the map and see some features of the earlier map floating in space, looking like they got blasted into the void. It's a weird contrast of really good visuals put together badly.
The opening part of the map is pain. We step off the train and are without weapons, medkits, or even HEV suits and are immediately hit with zombies and male assassins. I don't know how players were supposed to survive this in singleplayer. Crowbars, medkits, and HEV suits are very close by but it takes several deaths and a gargantua spawning in to distract the assassins so we can run by and pick up an mp5 and actually start playing the map. Thankfully all these different enemy types do attack each other so somewhere in our loop of dying and running they thin themselves out.
Then we climb the pagoda and enter doorways that take us to different maps with some combat and jumping puzzles. The rooms at the end are a bit more involved and have a boss fight but that's about it. We do go back to the same hub map once we're done with a room but whatever the community did worked and we don't have to fight a bunch of assassins, zombies, and a gargantua every time we're here.
While climbing the pagoda there are some areas where the roof crumbles or there's a shitty ladder, these parts are very frustrating. But eventually we make it to the roof and fight a series of what I would definitely call bosses and then we end up in a room with TWO TORS AND A KINGPIN! The Tors spawn a million alien grunts and launch us into the air and the kingpin hits us with the instant kill sprite. The tactic that worked for us was dropping a grenade in the split second we were alive and hoping for the best. It's not a good boss fight although maybe if there were like ten people it could have been bearable.
The map doesn't fit Sven. The hub map is annoying more than anything and I don't see why the whole thing couldn't be compiled into one map. Maybe the spike room prevents easy merging, at one point my teammate marveled at how many spikes were in one room without making the engine stutter. When the map works I will admit it is very fun and the map is visually striking. It just doesn't feel right to play and with two people there was more frustration that forward momentum.
Pros:
- The map itself is really beautiful
- lots of stuff was happening in this map, never a dull moment
- The community edit made the hub map far more bearable, or at least I think it did.
Cons:
- there was far too much map changing, this all could have been one map
- I didn't like having to run through enemies to gear up, we don't even start with a suit
- the final boss was a mess and wasn't fun at all.
- crumbling sections of floor with no warning
- crap ladders
Review originally from *
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