Rovenami Pack

Rovenami Pack V1.6.1

Temple of Zoom has gargoyle turrets right after a wall, which are very hard to react to if they happen to be shooting. But the map is very well decorated!

Milligan Cave is a fun race course. The main issues are that the items are placed right before shortcuts. To take the shortcuts, you either have to save an item from before and skip having another item or you would have to mash the item wheel and hope. Great course otherwise!

Arctica Snow Base seems to have turns that are hard to react to. I think the walls around the tight U-turns should be lowered to be just above road height so you can see over them.

Aqueous Anomoly (should be Aqueous Anomaly?) has some odd turns after the first jump. Too loose to get a drift boost, but tight enough taking them as a straightaway feels awkward. There is also a shortcut right after an item box much like Milligan Cave.

Arcturus Asteroid's machine gun enemies at the end can cause issues for making a comeback, since their shots will miss their target, instead hitting the players behind.
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I am going to be as thorough as possible while trying to give feedback on this, so this might get lengthy. That being said I will still miss things. First, lets start with Central City Zone, since its the simplest.

This map is primarily composed of straights, with alternating sneaker panels and item boxes. This means throughout the entire map you are either going perfectly straight, or zig-zagging between boost panels.
This means there will be an abundance of offensive items flying around, and there is little risk to using your item and getting caught since you will almost always be less than a second away from the next item box or boost pad. Driving on it is overly simplistic due to the map's design.

Additionally there are no cuts, and you can be under sneaker speed for almost the entire lap even without items, this means that your typical catchup items (sneakers, rocket sneakers, stars) are useless without boost stacking, and even with boost stacking their value is diminished. You will never get a chance to use that item effectively. You need a grow to catch up on this map, and the item boxes being so plentiful encourages you to mindlessly throw out items until you get it. Not only that, but the boost panels and long straights makes grow even more powerful than it typically is. If you can't get a grow, you're better off swerving for every boost pad instead of cycling items meaning that everyone who goes for items is losing ground on those who aren't. This gives first place particularly a large advantage since they're either pulling ahead or the people behind them wont be getting items to hit them with.

The long straights and repetitive back and forth between boost pads also kill the map's pacing and make it less fun to drive on than it could be. The black road and green goo do make nice leading lines which make it obvious where you're supposed to go though, this is definitely the best of the bunch in terms of readability.


Arctica Snow Base Time

The snowmen lining the road near the start are very awkward, if you hit someone into them they're going to be stuck in there for a long time and you can accidentally push them out onto the road to make roadblocks. Its also very easy to bonk people into them making them lose a very large amount of time. The right and left paths on the three way split path feel awkward since they have blind airtime into turns, which often leads to you hitting the wall. The right path is really slow, and even the left path is slower than the middle path. You may want to remove the airtime in these sections entirely. Since there is an item set directly before the split path, that also may lead to messed up item odds. The swerving road after the paths converge feels awkward and cramped, exponentially moreso when playing in a netgame and items/people are on it. The item set at the end of this section does not have enough items for a full lobby and can be almost entirely trapped with a mine.

The large upwards boost pad after this section despite the signage is still very blind and does not prepare you for the hard right turn coming up, and items placed down onto it are very hard to see. Mines may be unavoidable. The final turns leading to the finish line are equally cramped and uncomfortable to drive on. This map also seems to have no real cuts, making catchup on it a pain.

Temple of Zoom

Probably the best map in the pack. The left turn directly after the starting line is very awkward since you need to brakedrift as soon as you start, you should probably move the startline back. The shadows on the road look like offroad, you could probably fix this by having the grass' lighting be consistent with the road, and making the road's shadows less strong. The fire hazards are probably not as threatening as you wanted since they start on the same cycle and there is space in between them where you can straightline this section, you could try putting them on alternating cycles and making them slightly larger, perhaps adding some turns to this section.

The cut only saves about a second, which is more okay here since there are offroad corner cuts you can do, but you may want to make it slightly stronger. Additionally, the offroad on it is slightly too long compared to how much distance you cover when using a sneaker, you have to mow a bit of offroad when taking it which feels janky. This map also generally has a lot of long straights which could afford to be broken or spiced up.

Arcturus Asteroid Zone

The turn right after the starting line also requires a brakedrift, and feels awkward. I'd recommend moving the start back. The first few turns are hard to navigate due to the lack of contrast between the walls and floor, and lack of any leading lines and such. The section where the path splits is particularly tight and difficult to read, it could be trapped pretty easily.
The potholes after this section give you a lot of low gravity airtime, which feels pretty bad and can lead to someone getting a very slow and annoying fall or wallbonk. There is a red wall when you're entering this section which makes the first crater blind. The drop-off in this section can blindly drop you into one of these pits, leading to a lot of airtime, and also just touching the sides of these pits can also launch you. These craters will occasionally eat up the majority of the road, making the sides easily trappable since most players will want to avoid airtime at any opportunity.

The main path is hidden behind a wall, making the cut look its the main path. The cut doesn't work very well, it gives you a lot of airtime and sneaker speed is more than enough to bonk the far wall and slowly fall into a pit. Coming out of the cut gives you very little heads up where you're supposed to go, making it easy to accidentally jump into offroad or into a wall. If you do take the cut properly, it saves over 3 seconds, making it a little overly powerful. I am not sure if this will lead to bagging due to the nature of the rest of the map, but bagging for triple sneakers might be optimal. The drop-off into the cut is also very blind, I did not know there was a pit there until I was over it. The turns on the main path next to the cut are very strange its hard to tell where you're supposed to go.



Issues across maps

The chaos are very loud, their audio line stacks up the more chaos there are and all of these maps have an abundance of chaos around the finish line.
Many of these maps have an overuse of the same texture which makes it far more difficult to distinguish between overlapping walls, tell where you're supposed to go, or tell where some paths are. It also kills the map's aesthetics.

The checkpointing seems messed up in some sections. In Arcturus Asteroid you skip checkpoint 6 entirely, this could potentially mess up item odds. In Temple Zoom you can turn around at checkpoint 3, leading to a ~12 second faster lap. You also can hit 7/6 checkpoints. The same thing can be done in Arctica Snow Base at checkpoint 3 for a 4 second faster lap.

The signposting is lacking, this isn't to say you need to just put more chevrons everywhere, I recommend trying to use leading lines (like in central city) or color contrast to lead the player where to go.

These maps are not balanced competitively, and while that isn't required for a map to be fun, the exploits or strategies that come from this may be very unfun. They will either be too frontrun-y or too baggy. These maps also don't lend themselves to more serious communities or gameplay, such as tournaments.
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