Moo Moos Lasertag Arena

Description
[b]First off, I must apologise to the author for the long wait in getting this map uploaded. This was down to some clerical problems on our end![/b]

My first reaction, when I played this map was;

[b]“MY EYES! MY BEAUTIFUL EYES!!”[/b]

However, after playing around on this map for a bit, my reaction turned to; [b]“Whoa, hey, this is cool!”[/b]. If you look at the screenshots below, you may have a similar reaction!

This map is [i]very[/i] glowy, as you can see. The whole place is filled with glowing transparent fortifications of various kinds, along with ‘emergency lighting’ style strips on the floor and walkways which show you where the edge is so you don’t fall off, which is useful because the rest of this map is incredibly dark. I am presuming that this map is modelled after a real Laser Tag arena, and the photos I managed to find on Google seemed to support this. I myself have only ever been to the ‘Laser Quest’ arena at the Trafford Center in Manchester (England, of course), and that wasn’t really quite so glowy as this!

Nevertheless, as some of you probably know by now from my previous reviews, I love glowy stuff! That isn’t the only reason I love this map. It is very reminiscent of the movie Tron in its style and also Darth Norman’s Jumpspace map that I reviewed three years back (almost exactly to the day!). Man I feel so old now! :eek:

Ehem, anyway, moving on… I am glad to see that this map has CTF support, as the fact that it is laid out in two halves, with red glowy things on one side, blue glowy things on the other with some neutral green glowy objects in the middle, makes this a perfect layout for a CTF map. Even though it also supports FFA and Team FFA. There are some great areas for gun battles in here, especially the ramps leading up to the walkways, which are protected by staggered barriers that look like energy shields. As I said above, the ‘emergency lighting’ style glowy strips along the edge of the walkways, and around the doors both look cool, and stop you walking into the wall or falling to your death!

A cool extra that has been included is a custom skin to go with the map. The skin is covered in glowy green lines, which definitely remind me of Tron. Of course, the skin also has red and blue variants for when you are playing a team game. Yet another extra is that there are some files contained in the .pk3 which change your blaster bolts to a green colour, presumably to fit in with the colour scheme of the map and make them look more ‘laser like’. A nice little touch there!

As much as I like this map though, there are some things I think need working on. As far as the map structure goes, it is very well made and looks good, however, the pipe like areas where you spawn do look a little bland. I think some ring like supports running around the inside of the pipe, or maybe some different textures would look good. Also, the framerate can get rather low when you look out across the entire map, which I guess is down to the huge amount of glowy things in the map. Turning your dynamic glow off should help with this, but the map wont look nearly as good!

So, lets round up a few pro’s and con’s.

[b]Pro’s[/b]

[*]Good layout for team games, especially CTF.
[*]Lots of glowy things! The map really looks great with dynamic glow on!
[*]Good use of strategic defences

[b]Con’s[/b]

[*]FPS can drop quite a lot when you look out over the entire level.
[*]Some areas are a bit too dark and it is easy to get a bit lost in these places.
[*]The pipe areas where you spawn could do with a bit more detail.

Overall though, this is a really cool map, and definitely one of my favourites out of the recent maps I have seen! Keep up the good work Moo Moo! :D

[b]New Textures:[/b] Yes
[b]New Sounds:[/b] No
[b]New Music:[/b] Yes
[b]Bot Routes:[/b] No
[b]Game Types:[/b] FFA, TFFA, CTF

~Nozyspy~