Yavin IV: Plateau

Description
\"Yavin IV: Plateau,\" by acryptozoo, is a map on a familiar planet with a large scale that isn\'t entirely matched by its execution.

What \"Plateau\" is, primarily, is big. It\'s ambitious in its scope - which I\'ll often warn off as a mistake, given that maps with a huge scope are almost never as polished as more tightly-controlled, smaller maps. This map does fall prey to that hiccup, although I have to hand it to the author for pushing his design as he did here.

The map itself is a large, raised area on Yavin IV (a plateau, even) surrounded by a forest and the appropriate Yavin-style foliage. Inside the hill is a series of large tunnels, which presents a problem - scale. The hill is large, as necessitated by the concept of putting a battleground on the top, but the tunnels are scaled to the hill, which means that they are huge with very little going on inside them.

Now in playing through, I noticed a handful of bugs and errors, most of which were victims of making a map so large that controlling all the object placements as perfectly as they needed to be became an impossibility. Inside the hill are noticeable errors with the tunnel object placements, there are some collision issues outside, and there are some strange vehicle props floating. It\'s not inexcusable, in fact it is even understandable given the size of the map, but it is still noticeable. There were also AI pathing issues, combo issues, and one CTD I noticed as the player nears the edge of the map.

And of course there is that complaint I hand out to maps often - the size. The map is simply too large. If modes were confined to parts of the map so that the individual battles were tightened up a little more (as is done with the \"Jedi\" mode), I could maybe give this a pass, but too often the player is asked to fight a battle that involves lots of running around.

All in all, it\'s not a bad map - it has some interesting ideas and some parts that are neat. However, its geographical size is really a big negative and it has a handful of bug issues to sort out. It\'s still worth a try, though, so give it one courtesy of the link below.

-Mav