A sequel to the most excellent
Egyptian Myth map. This one takes place in darker
territory, with similar designs and uses some
Daikatana E2 textures.
My first comment has to be
on the theme. This theme, despite sharing a
similar palette between all of the textures,
is just all over the place. There are textures
that are recognizably Greek/Roman, Egyptian,
Norse, Medieval, and more. Your average Quake
player probably won't care much about this,
but I found it to be really incoherent and not
very convincing. Architecture is a strange blend
between the trademark style seen in previous
Alk maps - multileved, interconnected series'
of rooms - with a couple of out-of-place, if
impressive, setpieces put in. Most of the map
is usual [Kona] territory, again, still the
impressive layouts and same type of architecture,
in this pseudo-temple style. The setpieces however
are more like medieval castles! The setpieces
look great but the theme definately needed some
work.
Gameplay is pretty brutal,
comparable to such slaughter fests as Chanthood
and Grisly Manifest. There's a lot of monsters
in this map, including several new classes of
monster which are stronger. A lot of the combats
is set up by ambushers - fiends, mainly - coming
out of secret closets. This gets a bit repetitive
though, almost 140 monsters without that much
variation in combat types gets a bit bland.
Still though if you like tough challenges and
want more where Grisly Manifest came from (though
that map had much more interesting combat with
different monsters and jump uses), you'll probably
like this. There is a strange bug in the gameplay
though, where you are able to jump across a
ledge to the gold key and thus skip out about
1/6 of the map. However if you do this, thinking
'haha!' as I did, you'll have missed out upon
grabbing the perforater and may later get lost
(as I did).
Overall the map's theme is
quite poor and its gameplay is mostly unremarkable.
Its merits such as tough gameplay, amazing layouts,
and solid architecture have been done better
in past Alk maps - especially the first Egyptian
Myth. It's still a worthy single player map,
but has difficulty measuring up to past maps
in the series.
