Rakas Adventure

Description
BHF_Breakdown is back with his latest map, Raka's Adventure. This is a very unique map, aiming for an end result usually not achievable in the original Battlefront, much like his other creations.

Raka's Adventure is essentially a story-driven map. It is centered around your character, Raka- a man armed with several swords and a laser crossbow. The goal of the map is to capture all of the invisible command posts scattered throughout the map. Each of these command posts is accompanied by an intensive platforming section (if you're not familiar with platforming, it's like Mario games). The command posts, or "energizers", are also hard to find, so good luck!

The map itself is gigantic. It is easily one of the largest maps I've ever seen. There is a snow-capped mountain range off in the distance, as well as a castle, a small town/village beside the castle, a large lake, rivers, and a maze. The overarching theme of the map seems to be a grassy, wide-open-spaces feel. There are trees, ruins, bridges, and various other things placed throughout the map. The largeness of the playing field is both an asset and a detriment to the map. In some ways, the concept would not work without such a large map, but in other ways it detracts from the enjoyment of the map by requiring you to walk or ride an animal for quite some time to get to where you need to go.

The map is rather difficult. While there are some ways to get around a few of the platforming sections, those that you do have to go through are a bit confusing at times, and due to some of the models used, are very hard to see and stick out in places where there is actually nothing. While this is certainly annoying in parts, it is tolerable considering that things like this require an incredible amount of re-purposing and using stock models is quite hard to make something like this. In the end, the platforming is fun, but it can be a bit confusing sometimes.

While roaming around the map, occasionally you will see some enemies. These are mostly avoidable, since they move slowly and only carry melee weapons, meaning that they have to get very close to you to be able to kill you. The downside to this is that you can't kill them either without getting very close, since once you run out of ammo for your laser crossbow all you have left are swords. Luckily, everything kills in one hit when you go down to the swords, so there's no awkward running around slashing at each other.

On the technical side, the map is a bit crash-prone. On lower-end systems, the large amount of water will crash the game. Sometimes, the game will also crash in other places, though I'm not sure what the reason is there. My system is fairly mid-range, but I was able to play through most of the map before it crashed. This is something that needs to be worked on- either from a creator standpoint or by the end users. Perhaps a version with fewer graphical effects could be released for those with low end systems? It does tend to hamper your enjoyment of the map when it is consistently crashing.

In the end, Raka's Adventure is a great map. It is a concept rarely seen in the Battlefront series, much less so in the original Battlefront. While the map does have its flaws, one can overlook them in appreciation of the greater picture- this map is something that's never been done before. It's a trial of a new type of playing the game- and it works well. Granted, the game that hosts it is limiting its full potential, but everything that it does it does well. Great work.

I highly recommend downloading and playing this map. While it doesn't work in multiplayer, it is still a fun experience and should be played by everyone.

-Jedikiller