Sunken World

Sunken world is a nightmare of concrete and bullets and blood. It aims to keep you disoriented and on the back foot at all times, with little chance to get a grasp on your surroundings.

Most of the spaces of the map are discontinuous from each other, connected by teleportals, some obvious, some concealed in darkness, preventing you from really getting a sense of the map as complete and coherent whole. The only constant is the occasional glimpse of a long bridge in the distance, bathed in the blue light that makes up one half of the map's stark red/blue lighting set up.

Its encounter design is equally as harsh and intimidating. Its main trick is to take advantage of moving you by portal to put you in arenas with no retreat and demanding fast reaction against overwhelming odds. In one arena before its given you a weapon besides the default pistol, it drops three shamblers in, hands you some armour and leaves you to own devices to hit three switches to unlock the escape path. In another modelled after an Escher illustration with stairways heading in all directions, all covered with plasma gunners and ogres raining down fire from above the player.

The drawback to this disconnection is that this kind of chaos easily strays into feeling a little haphazard, like a series of ideas loosely connected more than a coherent idea. The last encounter paticualrly feels this way, its a horde of about 200 zombies and enough invoker ammo to kill all of them. Its fine as a novelty, but feels ancillary to what's going on with the rest of the map, its tone and encounters; a bit of a deflatory finale to a decent map.