The setting of this large map is a large castle in some fantasy world. The author's intention was to create an imaginary an fascinating environment that tells a story. The vast castle has a rocky, central courtyard and is surrounded by walls and some smaller areas with rocks walls and waterfalls. Guillenet74 made extensive use of large models for parts of the architecture, statues and rocks. The author also used particles to create effects like fountains and fire.

All of this sounds good but the implementation is not that great. The castle feels blocky and is overbright in a few parts. Texturing is boring because the very high walls often use only a single texture and lack details. The scale also seems off. The poor quality of the brushwork contrasts with the models, some of which are really impressive. There are knights, angels with moving wings and a dragon tied to a wall with chains. The rock models also look good. The color saturation on some of the plant models is way off and does not fit the rest of the map at all but that is a minor issue.

I have got to admit that my imagination is too poor to get the whole story behind the map: the book on unicorns the angles point at, a structure that reminds me of a laser cannon and banners that look like ads to me left me wondering. But Quake is not for telling stories anyway so let us have a look at the gameplay.

As I already mentioned the map is large and the scale does not fit in some parts of the map. Especially the stair cases feel weird. Due to the size of the map and the distances, most fights are rather boring I guess but it is a little too hard to tell because the map has no bot support. I tried it with a friend (who also failed to get the story BTW) but you would need 10 people to get a good game going.

There are many powerups included (2x Regeneration, Invisibility, Quad, 2x RA to name a few) but the map could use more weapons, health bubbles and ammo. Item placement is not great with 2 Regenerations close to each other, the LG hidden in some remote one-way passage under water and other issues.

Altogether the idea behind the map is good, the author tried to add many creative elements and seems to have some good modeling skills, but most people will not keep this one.

Reviewed by spirit