This mappack tells a story of a man who finds himself in a dark drainage after escaping two combines. His journey takes him through a sewer system that is now ridden by headcrabs and zombies. Later he catches the attention of combine forces while driving through canals with a water boat. The action gets hectic when the combine try to stop this rebelling citizen.
This is a Half-Life 2 single-player mappack of 4 maps.
The map works best on Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One but can also be played in Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
This mappack tells a story of a man who finds himself in a dark drainage after escaping two combines. His journey takes him through a sewer system that is now ridden by headcrabs and zombies. Later he catches the attention of combine forces while driving through canals with a water boat. The action gets hectic when the combine try to stop this rebelling citizen.
To play the map: extract the contents of the downloaded archive into:
Steam/steamapps/USERNAME/half-life 2/hl2
or
Steam/steamapps/USERNAME/half-life 2 episode one/episodic
or
Steam/steamapps/USERNAME/half-life 2 episode two/ep2
Then open the game and type "map drainage1" into console without quotes to play the map.
This is an updated version that was released on January 16th, 2013.
The original was released on April 22nd, 2007.
I didn't have high hopes for this at first. With such a generic name and no story to speak of I figured the maps themselves would be lackluster too. I was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong.
The gameplay is fun and balanced, the maps are well designed and look good, and all in all this is a very competent attempt at map design. You're a skilled mapper, but the "packaging" needs work. You might do well to team up with someone who could write a decent story for your next map, as a premise is the only thing lacking here. :)
how do I install? how do I play it?
Really nice. Desperate battles, airboat races, and choppers. What more can you ask of a map?
Background story is very simple, but that doesn't really detract from the map.
This is a perfect example of what an addon should be
Very nice brushwork and perfect lighting, nice,nice!
it was awesome to play
What a disappointment.
With such high praise and a 9.3 vote, I expected a top notch experience.
Instead, I got nice designed maps, several dead ends (areas going nowhere and with nothing to find), and a gameplay from mediocre to average.
Not really bad, but no real pleasure either (especially after having played thrilling maps like Strider Mountain or Mission Improbable).
It looks like my tastes are different from the average ModDB player; to each his own.
Bottom line: try it out for yourself, but don't set your expectation high.
It's been almost six years since the original release but I just released an updated version of the map. This is because there has been a pretty bad bug in the first map since Valve updated Half-Life 2 to use the Orange Box engine. On top of that I added stuff like a few gameplay changes and HDR lighting.
Anyway, the map works now and is a little more playable. :)
I still really enjoy revisiting this map every couple years. It's such a high quality custom map, almost Valve level quality, definitely was on the same level that "Minerva: Metastasis" was.
For some reason, off the bat when starting this map, I didn't think that it would turn out to be much of a map. "Drainage" is a fairly nice and diverse map, and the playing time isn't too short either.
The difficulty level is somewhat on the easier side...however the combat and difficulty increases the further one progresses. You start out mostly facing zombies and headcrabs, etc. but later on face a few slews of 'combine bulls.'
Areas of this map are very, very large -- almost 'too' large at times....but I don't mind that, even if it seems that there is a lot of 'empty unused space.' Many textures and ambient lighting are a little too dark, and some textures are too low quality with low polygon counts, however other textures are good quality.
"Drainage" is a nice entry-level 'exploratory' map and I rate it a 6.5/10.
Pretty cool map!