Map: UtopiaThis map was made by CanadianTyler
Courtesy of CanadianTylerSetting: World War III is interrupted by a massive unidentified object colliding with Earth right off the coast of Indonesia. You and three men are stationed on an off radar island in the deep Atlantic. With the globe in mass chaos and tsunamis quickly covering the east and approaching the west side of the United States, you and your men are ordered to hold and survive on the island. But as wrecked ships swamp the island you have an eerie feeling your "paradise" won't be much of a vacation.
Positives: Utopia started out a bit slow, but as the rounds went on, I gradually enjoyed playing. When preparing to write this review, I thought about the pros of
Utopia and couldn't think of many. For that reason, I appreciated many of the small things in this map that many overlook or take for granted when forming opinions. First of all, seeing any map with UGX Mod and a number of game modes is always great. Throughout my playtime I saw no bugs or glitches (expect a few corpses resting in thin air). The map wasn't overly complicated but had some cool (and potentially very useful) techy textures displaying computers and buttons (shown below), similar to the textures in Tyler's preceding map, Battlestar Galactica. My favorite features of this map were the pack-a-punch custom camos (shown below). The weapon choice was pretty nice too. As far as I could tell, there were an assortment of Cod4, MW3, and Black Ops. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Winter's Howl and Thundergun when rolling the box for the first time. Pack-a-punching the Winter's Howl turns it into the "HELLFIRE" (basically the opposite of the Winter's Howl), which I had a ton of fun playing around with. Not too bad for a 15 hour map.
The cool "techy" textures I was referring to before
The pack-a-punched Winter's Howl called the "HELLFIRE"
Pretty radical pack-a-punched Thundergun camo
Negatives: Now, when one makes a so called "15 hour map", one must expect criticism. Many would review
Utopia lightly because it had little to no time put into it, but today I will be criticizing it as if it was any other map. The map was pretty small, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. In this case,
Utopia actually had much more potential. I was expecting to open a door to an underground base (like Abandoned Rocket Base). When I found none, I was pretty disappointed. Also, a recommendation to all mappers... do NOT overuse grey textures in your map (especially when there's little to no detail. If this is the case, you might want to add some
). The combination of bland grey textures with no detail to unplayable areas really killed the look of the map, which reminds me, Utopia is the worst possible name for this map. Anyways, there weren't any great training spots either, not too big a deal. But if you haven't gotten the picture yet, detail is close to everything for me in a custom map. Seeing an awful map in the downloads section after two weeks of waiting for a new release is bad enough, but seeing a potentially great map go to waste is painful.
Conclusion: Thankfully, CanadianTyler is NOT finished with this map! I'm excited to see what
Utopia becomes within the next few updates. More importantly, my bone to pick is not with the map but rather with the mapper himself. Tyler has lots of potential (as I've said numerous times in both this review and others). I really like his style and believe he can create some sweet maps in the future. if he spends more time on in and out of map detail. Gameplay for this map is solid. As for
Utopia, it needs work, but for a 15 hour job, not too bad. Thanks to the mapper for creating another decent & relaxed map
Level of Detail:
5/10Custom Content:
5/10Fun Scale:
8/10Replayability: If CanadianTyler continues to update this map, I'd give it a solid
8/10Score:
26/40Download Link:
http://ugx-mods.com/forum/index.php/topic,10591.0.html