Hastings Surrounded

Description
Operation Hastings has always been a favourite of mine - a nice combination of infantry, armour, choppers and boats. Now this remake by zixed01 concentrates the action around the temple in Operation Hastings.

The US team holds only the Temple control point and must fight their way through the NVA, who own all but one of the control points around the Temple. The choppers and planes have been removed from this map, but tanks and boats remain. I started out as the US team in Coop and captured the neutral point near the temple. No sign of NVA...then I got picked off by a very well-aimed tank shell across the river. I messed around a bit with the good ol\' M-14, then switched teams to NVA and had a look at what we got.

I\'ll say that it\'s a long walk from the former NVA base to the Temple :p Probably a good idea would have been to fiddle around with the out-of-bounds areas as well and have the temple surrounded by NVA positions, and leave the old airfields in an out-of-bounds area. The action would then be more concentrated around the temple, instead of having all the space out in the open that\'s most likely not going to be used if you want the fight around the temple. But then that\'d require a fair bit of work on the original Hastings map, working on not only the objects but the terrain and textures as well.

A nice point of this map is that it\'s seperate from the stock Operation Hastings, so you can still play the old Hastings online, but this map is coded to use some of the more hefty files (mostly terrain textures) from the original map. This means they don\'t need to be included in the remake and cuts the file size down by about 30MB. The only slight downside is that if you happen to have deleted the old Operation Hastings, this rehash won\'t work. However I seriously doubt you\'ll have deleted the old Hastings so that\'s ok. :)

The only problems the map had was that the undergrowth (i.e the grass and small plants) wasn\'t there, probably because of a coding mistake that meant the map was looking somewhere other than the original Hastings or the remake. So there\'s no grass on the ground. The loading screen for BFV Arsenal was slightly off too, but that\'s not a life-threatening problem either.

All in all, a nice remake. Works well, which is always good - the grass just needs some fixing and editing the out-of-bounds areas and control point locations to concentrate the action around the temple a bit more would be excellent.