It's a beautiful day on Dead Before Dawn (Extended). In the suburbs, birds are singing, flowers are blooming... On days like these, Custom Maps like this... SHOULD BE BURNING IN HELL!

If you play this campaign on Expert, you should expect to have a bad time.

On a more serious note, Dead Before Dawn (Extended) did not amuse me, to say the least.

It earns my lowest possible ranking that I’d rate a fully playable map, by repeatedly insulting your intelligence with inconsistent game mechanics, illogical scripted events, frustrating and arbitrary additional lose conditions that reset you and force you to rewatch cutscenes over and over (literally satanic), and long and non-linear levels with variably sparse/excessive supplies and misleading safe room signs/arrows that result in significant navigation issues (‘getting lost’).

All of this nonsense combines to make Dead Before Dawn (Extended) Unfair in overall difficulty. Which is not to say it’s the *hardest* Custom Map ever, or impossible on Expert, but it can feel very, very cheap, frustrating, and more like a chore than a challenge.

My full human team of skilled Expert Campaign players quit this map just before the Finale, on the penultimate mall event (easily the ‘hardest’ part of this campaign), where they quickly contracted brain rot as a result of the arbitrary restriction of ‘Not letting the Infected into the mall’, as the Infected hordes continued to spawn from every nook and cranny behind us, inside of the mall, because the mall is already totally overrun and overflowing with Infected in this campaign.

They had no idea that we were at the part just before the Finale, which I only discovered afterwards by playing the map again on Solo and beating the penultimate mall event. Otherwise they likely would have stayed and completed it, as it’s definitely beatable with some near-perfect bomb usage and/or some Bile Bomb cheese.

Dead Before Dawn (Extended)’s Finale is a Hard Gauntlet-Tank-Moderate Gauntlet-Get To The Escape Truck in the mall’s car park.

Just like on Dead Before Dawn (Extended)’s better-designed reworked versions, the Finale was also somewhat poorly designed, with a very large hole confusingly placed next to the intended path near the end of the second storey; which appears designed for you to jump down safely. However, jumping down this hole only resets your progress back to the bottom floor of the car park. This is of course frustrating, because this is all still the Hard Gauntlet phase of the Finale, where resetting your progress can easily result in you running out of supplies/ammo and perishing.

The Finale ends with some feel-good music by AC/DC and the Midnight Riders, as you triumphantly drive out of the mall in the Crash Course truck in style. However, getting to the ending on this version of Dead Before Dawn on Expert just left me feeling mentally drained and exhausted, rather than feeling good or accomplished.

Ultimately, you can tell that a lot of love went into designing all of the Dead Before Dawn Custom Maps, however, Dead Before Dawn (Extended)'s many issues, Unfair difficulty, and its numerous better-designed reworks means that there’s no good reason to play this version of the campaign, in the present.


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