Vendaxa: Forgotten Forest

Description
"Vendaxa: Forgotten Forest," by theultimat, is a woodsy map set on the planet - to those familiar with Star Wars lore - recognizable as the home of the Acklay that seems to keep showing up on Felucia and Geonosis and everywhere else.

First and foremost, this modmap is definitely a great step forward from the author's previous work - it includes a campaign (which always pushes some of the right buttons for me) as well as a couple other non-conquest (assault, really) modes. It is not without its faults (which I will address), but it is always a breath of fresh air to see something besides the basic conquest we are so familiar with.

The map itself is decent. The environment is well set-up in concept, but the design (basic forest) is a little blah. The design isn't helped by the sense of minimal contrast in the map - everything is just dark. The best thing about "dark" maps is that they afford you the opportunity to play with the lighting when it is used, whether it's moonlight, firelight, searchlight, whatever, but in this case things remain dark through-and-through. The low-contrast setting doesn't help the gameplay much, either, since few of the units (with the exception of the stormtroopers) really stand out.

The construction itself could also use a little work. Like I said above, the design is solid, but there are nits to pick here - the terrain, especially around the streams (canals, rivulets, etc.) is very blocky and unnatural. This is bad enough by itself, but it also makes the painted-on foliage look tacky, because the foliage brushes don't deal well with non-smooth terrain (also; bushes on the bottom of the streams?). The streams themselves are unnecessarily deep, too. If the author had wanted to use them to prevent AI from crossing, barriers would have been a much more effective and less unwieldy choice.

On to the modes. The first mode I'll look at is the campaign - it's a basic campaign mode in the style of Pandemic's campaign maps, following a detachment of stormtroopers on a mission to attack some Rebels. As mentioned above, those familiar with Star Wars lore will not be [i]not[/i] expecting some things that pop up. The campaign works well for what it seems to be trying to do, with the exception of the last objective, which sort've comes out of left field. Even if it is a very simple one, remember that a campaign is trying to tell a story - you should have a bit of setup and/or a bit of resolution for any plot point.

There are two assault-type modes - CTF (which is really Order 66) and hunt (Clones vs. acklay). CTF is fine, although it suffers from the same things the rest of the modes suffer from - low contrast. It's tough to pick out saber blades (which are the only high-contrast elements) in perspective when there are just a whole bunch of them (and only them) flashing around in the bushes. Hunt is somewhat less good - it suffers from terrible balance - it's bad enough putting up any side against a team of acklays in hunt mode, but most of the time when it is done there are a couple specific things going for the non-acklay team:
1) Ability to attack from a distance
2) Points multiplier (you see this in stock Hoth hunt, too)
The clones here have neither of these things. They're all melee-only, which is a virtual death sentence for anything not strong enough to kill the acklay in one hit (they are not). There's no points multiplier either - usually this is put in place to make the death of a stronger hunt opponent (acklay, wampa) more "valuable" than the death of a basic unit, since they are proportionally harder to kill.

The final mode is the standard conquest, of course. The sides are changed to make each side have really only the three basic units, a stronger ("officer") unit, and a hero. These things are dependent on taste, of course, but this was not to mine - the weapons all felt weak (all the units had a small health recharge as well) with the exception of the sniper rifle, which felt incredibly overpowered by comparison. My heroes would get one-shot by enemy AI with this rifle... whee. It's also worth mentioning that a couple localizations were missing (melee attack, unit names in campaign).

All in all it's a pretty decent map, but it does have its issues. If it looks appealing, give it a try - if for nothing else than to break the monotony of conquest conquest conquest with a little campaign.

-Mav