-SMD- Expansion Pack

Description
The SMD Expansion Pack, by smdautoturret is sort've a sides mod, in that it uses stock maps but with different sides, although it would more appropriately be considered three separate mods - "Jedi Expansion," "Big Gunz," and "Dream Teams."

All three of these are added in through separate addon folders - which, to be honest, I wish the author hadn't done, because it makes for a very untidy addon folder (it adds 31 separate folders!) - it would be nice to see them grouped together in a single addon, or at the very most three separate folders. In any case, they load stock maps through separate mission .lvls (which is why they are only "sort of" a sides mod), so you don't have to overwrite anything.

The first third(/mod) is "Jedi Expansion," and contrary to what you might think, it doesn't technically expand any of the Jedi. What this mod does is add a few stock units to each team; for example the Rebels get a stock Jedi (one of the Knightfall ones), a Jet Trooper, and a Gungan. To be honest, it doesn't seem all that exciting, since none of these units are new or modified. It does add a bit of a twist when playing old maps, but it was more often than not confusing (since the "new" units stick out a lot from the stock sides).

The second mod is "Big Gunz," and - again contrary to what you might think - doesn't really have large or more powerful weapons. In fact, the biggest change I noticed was that all the units had a lot more health, which made the "gunz" much less effective than normal. This seemed more frustrating than anything, since all(?) the added maps with this were CTF, so it was essentially futile to play CTF defense (since the opposing team just wouldn't lose the flag). It just means that I have to race the other team to score, which... isnt' all that fun in SP. If anything, it might be better here to err on the side of "too little" health, since that would speed up the pace of the play. This mod also added some of the Jedi featured in the next part of the mod.

The third part was "Dream Teams." I didn't play all of this (or all of any of them - there were quite a bit of missions, as mentioned above), but from what I saw, this essentially added a lot of new Jedi. Err... new saber-wielding characters, at least, because most of the units were stock models with sabers added on (like Gungans and Wookiees - these always seem so odd to me when they have lightsabers). They all have different saber combos, which is nice to see, but on the other hand, they seem very odd (switching from one saber to two sabers). And like in the last part of the mod, all these characters seem to have much more health than normal, and the game is once again CTF - which means that again, fighting the enemies is more or less futile as you can't stop them from moving the flag forward.

There were very few bugs I could see in this; I only noticed a couple (and the first is the only one really obvious). First, nearly everything was missing localization. Second, if you have the 1.3 patch, some missions will crash, because it tries to load geometry that doesn't exist (the Imp gunner geometry). It's nice to see that this is relatively bug-free, but it does use a lot of stock material. Fix up that localization and maybe come up with a workaround to the 1.3 compatibility problem, and it'll be great.

In any case, it's a mod with a lot of content, but to me, it didn't feel really "new" and it didn't seem as fun (probably also because it felt so much like stock material). However, it does have a lot and it's not a lot to download, so give it a try and find out for yourself!

-Mav