Hoth: Frozen Valley

Description
Commander Jaspo's self-proclaimed first map is, well... it's very "first map." It's not [i]really[/i] bad, like some maps are, but it definitely leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Hoth: Frozen Valley is exactly what it says on the cover - a valley in a Hoth setting. The battlefield is essentially a big "U" made up of a string of command posts, so it plays like a bunch of command posts in a line, which might be ok, except for the fact that the CPs are so far apart. This is a common problem on "first maps," in my opinion - things just look a lot smaller in Zeroeditor than they do ingame.

And while there is certainly room for artistic freedom, the ground texture was very odd - I gather that it was supposed to be the epynomically "frozen" ground, but it was recolored in a very odd way that left lots of purple and some green inexplicably in a snowfield.

Other things I might mention - there is the seemingly-inevitable Yavin sky. You might like it, you might think it fits (I know I did in my first map, but I was wrong too), you might not want to learn how to change it - but it should be changed. While the author did a good job of concealing the sky's black bar at ground level, once you climb up a mountainside, it becomes easily visible. There were also some texturing issues - in that there were a number of rock props that were missing textures.

Sides-wise, while I have nothing against the stock sides (I like them), it might be nice to use the premade snow units that the stock hoth maps use. The Rebels stood out a lot in their jungle/woodsy camo in a snowy setting, and snowtroopers for the Imperials couldn't have hurt.

All in all, it's a nice idea, but gameplay-wise it doesn't work very well simply because of the size of the map. First thing I would suggest to the author is to get a good feel for size and how it relates to gameplay. Likewise, there are a number of things that could be touched up visually. If the pictures intrigue you, though, who am I to stop you? Give it a try.

-Mav