Opening thoughts:When any game creator sits down to begin working on their 'Epic' plot one of the first things you need to put on your to do list is (or in some cases should have been) 'Caaft your characters personality'. In most cases this is as simple as grabbing your big book of cliches and flickig between the pages of Big Badass Military person and Missundertood Social Outcast and waiting for inspiration to strike (unless you are a Jrpg creator where you just make a sexually repressed ten year old). But sometimes an optimist will think, I know lets make our main character a strawman version of our audience? And thus we get frameworks like we find here, where you get a normal problem posed to a character styled like a video game nerd (here you need money because you are being kicked out of home) and then you head off to suddenly unrealistic castle to hunt for gold, whichis really how we all wish we could make money, rather than the usually boring mundanity of getting a real job.
Visual:At the start I had good prospects for this game, the starting area was some what colourfull, the catle looked varied and it seemed like open spaces were goig to be incorperated. And then I got inside the castle and suddenly our old friend stone decides to come and hang out with us for the rest of the game, I will admit that with each different puzzle we would find a different kind of look, such as some dirt puzzles, lava puzzles and water puzzles. But otherwise its all stone. The other issue here is the design, the map is called 'Alnes CASTLE'! what kind of castle is built like this? There is no structure to the thing, it feels as though the pzzle rooms were built first and then they were connected. I wouldn't mine so much, but the puzzles so often force us to see the bare bones of the map that is becomes a problem.
[5.5/10]
Challenge:I wouldn't exactlly call the puzzles here brain busters but some of the puzzles do make a decent attempt to confuse you, so while I'd like to see some harder ones the map does do a reasonable job.
[3.5/5]
Length:In the end this map is probably a tad too long,the reptitions don't benefit from an inreased difficulty and somettimes youll be stumbling around behind walls where tnt went up, wondering if you are in the right spot. So tighten up the path finding a bit and lose ome of the repetition and this will be better.
[3/5]
Puzzle variety:As I've already said, variety is the key phrase here. There are enough fun puzzles to keep you amused, with a nice tke on the regular parkpur puzzle, but by the time you are coming across the puzzles for the 3rd time, you will just be bored. Another thing that might need a tighten up is the tnt parts, the probelm with tnt is that it is a single time use, once you blow it up you cant put it back without a full reboot. The other issue is that you can't direct the flow of an explosion so it can blow an unintended hole in the wall that will drag your player off track which makes the map feel like more of a grind.
[7/10]
Things that need Improvement:- Puzzle variety
- Tnt usage/path finding
- Over use of stone
- Castle design
Things that need No-Improvement:- Framework
- Starting area
Final Thoughts:I like the base idea here, the normal guy conqering the castle of puzzles is a nice centeral thought, but at the moment the rest of this map just doesn't hold up the idea. I reccomend that this map gets a retouch, tighening up the puzzle variety and particularily the tnt usaage, and it would be nice if the castle design is also fixed, I know how hard ths is to do so it is more of a suggestion rather than a demand. So give it a whirl, but there are certainly better puzzle maps out there.
Percentage Score: 64%
Link: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/705276-alnes-castle-v133-adventure-map/page__p__9205181
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