Telos: Mandalorian Wars

Description
Telos: Mandalorian Wars, by elfie911, is another look at a theme I really like - Knights of the Old Republic. It's not his first foray into the era, having done one previous map similar to this one.

Fortunately, this one is better than that other one, which was not the best. He seems to have at least made the sides a little more balanced and the map a bit smaller - two of the biggest faults with his past map.

Anyway, this map is set on Telos, as featured in KotOR II (although it only vaguely resembles some parts of Telos). The map is a hilly plain, with four CPs spread out in a diamond formation. A few KotOR props are scattered around each CP. There are also a number of locals for each side, as well as some hammerhead cruiser skydome models.

There are two modes, a standard conquest and a "headquarters" mode, which is essentially assault with destructible command posts. It's a nifty idea. Each mode has a different set of sides, which are laid out in the readme.

In playing through, I had a few issues with the map. First of all, the Republic/TSF troopers had retextured faces. And while I appreciate the effort to mix things up a bit, the face retextures looked bad. It looks like stock face textures from other models were pasted on with very little time spent trying to make sure they lined up on the face, giving a stretched appearance to every face.

Secondly, it felt like a huge mishmash of various KotOR things without thought to rhyme or reason. There were dozens of HK-50s running around, along with Canderous Ordo and Revan, as well as Carth Onasi inexplicably running around as a local.

Finally, all of the melee units were out of balance. The standard melee'ers for each side had, essentially, lightsabers (they could block with vibroswords and they were just as strong as 'sabers). The Jedi units for each side were as powerful if not more powerful than the heroes, their only weakness was slightly less health than the heroes (they even had [i]health regen[/i]). I wasn't ever really tempted to play as the hero, because the basic units were just as good.

There were also a couple bugs. Some of the locals were unlocalized, for one. Also, the skydome cruisers were far too close to the ground, making them semitransparent at all times. This looks very sloppy, in my opinion.

Anyway, it's certainly better than elfie's last submission, so if it interests you, give it a download.

-Mav