Detour Ahead is a very challenging map that is a little rough around the edges, but still quite good and enjoyable overall. Right off the bat there’s some oddities (the Title in-game is messed up and shows as ‘$DetourAhead_Title’, the first weapon pickups are just single guns rather than x4 pickups for the full team, the starting area opens up into a swampy ditch with water, uneven terrain, and foliage, and the first Tank showed up right on the other side of this swampy ditch on the first level). But none of this ended up detracting from the experience terribly as a whole.

One interesting novelty/oddity that persisted throughout this whole map, was that guns tend to only spawn in singles, and ammo piles were nearly non-existent (even in the Safe Rooms). Meaning that you should be prepared to swap your weapon often, or main the Magnum during periods of relative calm.

The other stand-out feature of this map is that the horde timer appears to be very low on Chapter 2 and beyond. The moment you leave a Safe Room, there’s typically a horde, and then they continue to attack very frequently; with only very short lulls in between. Be sure to make good use of the throwable and carriable explosives that the map provides frequently, in order to even the odds against the continuous hordes.

Besides explosives of all types, the map is not super generous with ammo (as mentioned), specific weapons, or healing consumables up until the Finale. We also notably only found four Sniper Rifles (two Hunting and two Military) across the entire campaign (two on Chapter 2, one on Chapter 4, and one on the Finale), so be sure to covet them when you find them.

The difficulty spikes significantly during a Very Hard Gauntlet event at the end of Chapter 2 ‘DTA2 Hill’, during which endless hordes of Commons will continually spawn ahead of you and block your path to deactivate the alarm.

After this Very Hard Gauntlet, the difficulty remains high, but static, up until a Super Hard Gauntlet on Chapter 4 ‘DTA4 On A Rail’. This Super Hard Gauntlet is set on a railroad bridge just after a Dead Drop, and intends for players to follow a train as it slowly creeps forward, whilst Common and Special Infected endlessly rain down upon you. However, this results in the difficulty of this Very Hard Gauntlet becoming borderline Unfair, as the Common Infected become bash/stumble-immune whilst they’re doing their falling animation (but they can still hit you during this), Commons can get wedged under the sides of the adjacent train cars and become bash/stumble-immune whilst hitting you, and because Chargers can frequently fall down on you and be nigh unavoidable/instakill you off the bridge on this segment (all of which are some of the worst game design elements of L4D2 itself, and should typically be avoided at all costs in good Custom Maps).

Despite clearing the rest of this Custom Map with relative ease, this event singlehandedly wiped out our entire team on our first try of it, despite us all having high Health + 4 Medkits + 4 Pills/Adrenaline going into it (although it didn’t help that 3 of us had thrown our bombs at hordes just before this event, and one of our players instakilled themselves early on by trying to jump down to the Infected-only catwalk next to the bridge; which kills you).

On our second try, rather than try to follow the slow-moving death-train, we simply held on the train car at the start of the Very Hard Gauntlet, jumped on Common Infected to crush them when possible, sniped the Specials, and made good use of the guaranteed two First Aid Kits provided here. We then waited for the train to make its way to the opposite side, and then ran and held off the horde in a convenient open train car which had ammo and a First Aid Kit inside.

And it’s a good thing we did, as a Tank spawned on the immediate other side of the bridge, but fortunately didn’t aggro onto us until after we defeated the horde and advanced. The map even provided yet another Kit on the other side of the bridge to help get you back on your feet, but we didn’t need it.

The Finale was an appropriately difficult Hard Gauntlet-Tank-Hard Gauntlet-Press A Lever-Reverse Hard Gauntlet-Tank-Reverse Hard Gauntlet. This Finale was also notably unique, as it was a Hard Rain-style Hard Gauntlet where you start at the helicopter escape vehicle, then must run to get gas for it from a fuel truck at the end of the highway, and then must run back with the gas on your back in order to evacuate. This Finale was frantic and tough. We had several close calls (especially as we missed the ‘Hit The Lever’ tip on the fuel truck and got temporarily confused), and we had to play smart and use every consumable provided in order to survive.

But overall, it wasn’t a frustratingly difficult Finale even with a pub player, and we managed to beat it on our first try; thanks to the large amount of consumables and explosives which the map provides along the path.


For more Expert Custom Map Reviews and ratings, see my full Collection here. https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2252724380