Star Destroyer

Description
Jaspo's "Star Destroyer" is exactly what it says on the tin - a Star Destroyer. [i]A[/i] Star Destroyer, which means that it's pretty much an interior map. The gist of the map is that some Rebels have landed in a side hangar in the SD and are trying to successfully storm the ship.

For those of you who wanted "full" full interiors to space ships, eat your heart out. Not only is this an interior to-scale with the Battlefront II Star Destroyers (which admittedly are a little small), but it's probably the largest interior map I've played in a while.

I always find interior maps fairly impressive, as they usually represent a much greater amount of work than a map that is set outside. For that reason, this map scores points on my scale simply for the enormity of the undertaking - it's not a small amount of work to model that much. However, before I touch too much on what I liked, I want to go ahead and get the criticisms out of the way.

The first thing I'd change would simply be the size of the map. Yes, it is very impressive to have such a large map, but running up corridor after corridor can be a little wearying. I know that part of the goal was to physically link the bridge section of the Star Destroyer with the hangar section (which is done well, I might add), but that would be much better accomplished without a true "physical" link (maybe a teleport or something). Secondly - and related - is the number of times certain models and textures are reused. Again, it is impressive to see the scale, but it could be very tiresome to see the same texture repeated over and over on the same model, especially when it was large. Your best modeled sections of this map were in rooms where there was a lot of variation. And also, I would add a landing region in your hangar - you can land everywhere on the map, and I am certain that this was not as intended.

Now criticism aside, there was a lot of good to be found here. I think technically the most impressive thing I saw was actually the planning - it's not easy to create good planning for small corridors, but it was done very well here - I rarely saw AI getting confused. And, of course, there are a number of new models here (most of them, in fact). Some of the models were really well-done - I liked the bridge especially, and some of the rooms looked really neat. As mentioned above, the places where the model felt novel and not tirelessly repeated looked the best. Oh, and the classic SW game music was fun.

The map comes with three modes - conquest, CTF, and 1flag. Conquest is fairly standard - unfortunately it seemed very linear, but it was a large enough map with enough command posts (and alternate routes) that the linearity didn't break down the gameplay much. CTF and 1flag surprised me, though. I thought they both worked well - the author was wise to confine these to smaller sections of the ship. Much of the time I spent playing through those modes was spent finding my way around, and to my surprise the AI scored a number of times while I was plodding around (they soon became valuable guides, though, since the AI paths led me to the flags).

All in all, it's a fantastic map. I would really like to see a little better texture work and a much smaller map, but those aside, it's still a lot of fun to play. Try it out!

-Mav