Maple Lake Zone by ZarroTsu - 10/10
I must say, you know a thing or two about visual design. Simple yet elegant. Same thing can be said about the layout. I admire your ability to stuff a lot things into a map that seems to very simple at first. I also admire the idea of having a large open center area and then distributing the weapons to the sides. This gives the map an interesting dynamic: If you stay in the center, you will have plenty of targets but no weapon rings, which makes it difficult to hit people because of the open nature of the map. To get an advantage, you must go out of your way and into one of the corridors on the outside of the map. You must do this quickly, or else you will miss out valuable time in the center room, where you can score the most points. If you do meet somebody in the corridors though, combat will be much more intense because there's less room for dodging. The really powerful items are placed in the center room itself, but to acquire them, you will need to perform difficult platforming which makes you an easy target.
I consider all of this to be perfect execution of the risk vs. reward principle. There are plenty of strategic choices to make and the choices are highly balanced, each decision having its advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation. The characters are also very well balanced. In particular, using Tails gives the map a whole new angle. Skilled Tails players can use their flight to their advantage, remaining difficult to hit for Sonic and Knuckles. Rail is much easier to grab for Tails, so you can try to guard the Rail location and snipe approaching players from above. Possibly this strategy is too powerful, especially in smaller games, but I'm sure Sonic players can outsmart Tails players who use this strategy by simply staying out of reach and concentrating on the tighter areas of the map. This will leave Tails with no possible target, so he'll have to come out of his safe spot and expose himself to the faster Sonic players.
And before anyone asks, the perfect score is because a.) even after playing several matches, I still had a ton of fun here and b.) I can't see anything wrong with the map.
