Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2

NoWhereIsSafe - Chapter 2
Review- 1/5 Great Idea, Terrible Execution
The good:
  • It has a unique setting
  • A couple of areas have ok detailing
  • It's playable.
The bad:
  • The detailing of most of the map is bad with generic props, and a single texture being copy-pasted through most of the base.
  • The events of this campaign are terribly tedious and regularly broken
  • Horde spam is overwhelmingly common.

This map is a downgrade from NoWhereIsSafe - Chapter 1 which is saying something considering NoWhereIsSafe was already a bad map. It's really unfortunate because this map also has an incredibly unique setting that is unfortunately wasted. This map mostly consists of long corridors with occasional rooms that are made up of generic props, the only notably interesting locations are a bar in Chapter 1 and an elevator arena area in chapter 2 (Emphasis on interesting for the elevator, it doesn't really fit in the space station well). It doesn't help that the corridors just have a basic gray metal texture along them throughout. The biggest pain of this campaign though is it's tedious and broken events. The map has a holdout in a corridor for instance where the horde barely trickles in depending on where you stand, resulting in you just waiting a notably long time just to progress.

The worst event though aside from the finale was the elevator arena that I just praised for being interestingly designed, it asks you to collect 20 gas cans to fill up 4 separate generators that are highlighted one at a time and if you fill up any non highlighted generators, the map BREAKS it will count the gas can count up like you successfully filled the generator with the gas can but it will soft lock you from progressing, it doesn't even matter if you split the gas cans up correctly in groups of 5 per generator, filling any of the generators out of order will result in the map being softlocked. This makes completing the map not only tedious but extremely difficult in singleplayer since you either have to carry every gas can by yourself to the generators or you have to manually direct the bots with a bot mod to fill each generator up but only to the requested amount before turning on the power to enable the next generator and then directing them to fill the next generator. I'm saying that as an assumption of something you could do, realistically using any bot mod to complete this section will just softlock it due to mistiming one of your directions or the more realistic issue of bot mods not supporting that level of control.

Lastly there is the finale which is a running gauntlet to an escape vehicle. This finale is a slog through repeat hordes in a tight building, alongside a tank spawn right in the path of the escape. While hordes keep spawning. I can claim that I beat it once on easy but I just gave up on normal, the ending isn't really anything to special anyway with it just showing a static shot of a launching space ship.

This map is not worth playing beyond it's unique theme which is poorly executed anyway, I do wish the creator was still active so that they could retry making this map as the concept of the map is excellent.
Last edited by theotherzombie; 28 Feb, 2024 @ 6:44am