White Odyssey

Description
The Christmas spirit is here! Unless there's a better map on the way, I dub this one the official christmas map for this year. According to the author, this is a 4-day project. I have to say, it's very impressive for that. I would like to congratulate the author on a speedy map that is actually [i]good[/i]. It's very easy to see how Blueice Twilight inspired this map. Where to begin...

I'll start with the layout. There are three main areas. All of them are outdoors, and all of them are at least somewhat blue. One is a bridge over a chasm, another is a short road in a large ditch that opens up to a larger area, and the last one is the main area, containing a house and most of the goodies. All three had very nice terrain work. I can't say for sure how the terrain was made, but it looks very nice.

Starting with the road in a ditch area. It's very small, but if you open up the door at the side, you'll have access to a nice, large, open area. At the far end, you'll find Santa's sleigh. I don't know if maybe his reindeer ran out of fuel and crashed and he left to get his insurance information, or if he's still loading up the presents, but in any case, they're scattered all over the ground. I wanted to open them so badly...too bad my lightsaber couldn't get through the outer shell. What ARE those things wrapped in?

Next up is the bridge. There's a road crossing a chasm, and on the other side are plenty of trees. I didn't see any guardrails on the bridge. There's a balloon that floats around over the bridge and out over the chasm from which you can get a nice view of the place. There's not a whole lot to do here, though.

The main area was the really nice part. One of the cool things is the slide up near the top. If you go down it, it throws you up in the air and lands you directly on the frozen pond. There's a tauntaun spawner behind the house, and a small graveyard. There are several huge presents piled up in one area, and there are many presents around trees elsewhere. There's also a fire pit in a small clearing.

Now, on the side of improvements. Since this was a quick thrown-together project for Christmas, I highly doubt we'll see a version 2, but still, it's nice to give some points to improve.

First off, the presents were all made with brushes. Because of this, they couldn't be rotated without misfitting the textures. I woud suggest converting them to ASE models and making good use of the autosolid option, that way they can be rotated or scaled any way you like. The piles would look so much more realistic. I would also suggest a higher-resolution texture on the bricks and crates, it would make everything look more clear and uniform.

As a final note, a notice was passed on to me from Crazy, who got it from the author: they said that you can use their work, just give them credit for what you take. They forgot to include it in the readme, so it's up here in the review.

Well, that's all I have to say. If you want a christmas map this year, this is it!

New Textures: Yes
New Sounds: No
New Music: Yes
New Models: Yes
New Scripts: No
Bot Support: Yes
Gametype: FFA

~Dretzel