The Road To Inverurie and Inverurie
are historic maps by Neil Manke. I'm not sure
how I missed them, but now I've played them.
The story sets you in ancient Scotland as a
prisoner of the English on the way to a hanging.
There's a bit of backround music here and there,
appropriately enough from Braveheart. The story
isn't necessarily realistic (there wouldn't
be wide use of guns in the 1300's), but provides
a quite decent excuse to pretend some Hell Knights
are English, and blast the crap out of them.
There are some decent elements which help the
story along, mostly (Scottish) Zombies telling
you a thing or two.
The Road To Inverurie is the first map, and
consists of water canyons and a few structures,
all done up in completely new textures. These
textures are a bit cartoony compared to id textures,
and the repetetive use of them means the map
does not have as 'solid' a feel as ID maps do.
The progression is nice though - events like
a hidden key do make sense, and if told as a
story, say for example by the English survivors,
it would sound plausible 'He jumped in the river
then somehow found a key to an old house we
couldn't get into...' Eventually, the progression
leads to a Fort, which is good except for the
'new' monsters which are green grunts and seem
completely out of place.
Inverurie, the second map,
I liked a lot better. It uses the same texture
scheme, and although the thin village walls
make for even less of solid feel, the map does
look nice. In this map you progress through
the town of Invurie, and there is some cool
movement throughout the map - like finding a
way to a rooftop, then dropping down into a
secret attic, getting a key, then dropping down
again to a previously visited room. The last
part of the map is a church which I didn't like
as much as the 'town' section, and the town
and church are connected by several multileveled
gray stone tunnels. When you exit the map, the
story isn't continued (it just shows credits)
which is kind of dissapointing.
I had expected better of this
series, but just because it didn't live up to
my expectations doesn't mean it isn't fun.
