Quake Review: Bastion of the Underworld (kinn_bastion.zip)

Bastion of the Underworld (kinn_bastion.zip, 2004) by Kinn

Bastion of the Underworld is a linear crawl through a huge fortress. It uses quake 3 stone textures and alternates between densely interconnected labyrinthine structures and grand architectural spaces – sweeping spiral staircases, gigantic open courtyards and cavernous rooms replete with hazards like lava pools or a giant steel blender. This map is really darn pretty to look at and conjures up an immersive atmosphere with custom ambient sounds and some really nice lighting throughout. It’s also a joy to explore with a lot of height variation and reuse of space. Most of the walkways seen from the ground level become accessible later as the player double backs across areas, opening up new paths – all in all a pretty decent space for a walking simulator.

The smaller areas keep things interesting with a drip feed of incidental combat to guide the player’s progression and some trickier, well choreographed fights in enclosed spaces. Ogres are frequently positioned on ledges and walkways, providing a carpet of grenade spam while fiends and knights provide additional constraints on where the player can dodge. Throughout the map, there’s also plenty of nice traps and pins to keep things varied, but never so many that they dominate play and become tiresomely predictable. The fiend ambush in the lightning tunnel and the walls that burst open when backtracking to locked doors caught me off guard, leading to some frantic improvisation and genuinely tricky manoeuvring. Moments this put the player at risk of getting boxed into a corner, providing an incentive to use the high burst damage grenade launcher that’s provided early on, despite the risk of accidental self damage.

The grand scale of the larger areas is matched by combat involving hordes of monsters, explosive weapons and a large quantity of ammo. There are two big set piece battles that have the typical structure of fighting ever-intensifying waves of enemies in large enclosed arenas until the path is opened, with snipers and other high value targets positioned around the periphery. These feel similar to the larger arena fights in doom pwads or those painkiller-style games. The first arena is situated at the middle of the map, featuring only the standard quake bestiary and a quad damage to be grabbed at the player’s discretion. The second arena is the climatic battle, involving all the custom monsters and bosses and a full set of tools.

Speaking of custom enemies, this map has three of them and they’re all really decent. The least interesting is an ogre that shoots flak at the player instead of grenades – nothing too exciting, but the nails look cool when they’re whizzing past and the spread of projectiles fills a lot of space. My favourite is re-purposed strogg enforcer ripped from quake 2. Their primary attack is shooting a volley of plasma at the player, which has significant random spread that widens at a distance.

The way they are introduced is inspired: Beating the first major arena fight reveals a hole to drop through. Dropping down puts the player in the back corner of a room, facing the wall. Turning around reveals a long rectangular space filled with lava, a series of small platforms to jump across and enemies positioned on some surrounding elevated walkways. The strogg enemy is positioned directly in front of the player on one such walkway at the far end of the room and will always be able to fire at least one volley, both demonstrating what their attack is, and being far enough away to provide a very wide spread of shots to avoid. Disoriented from the drop, there’s only a second to read the situation and make a decision – charging ahead recklessly, trying to navigate across the platforms without falling into the deadly lava, or the far more attractive option of attempting to read the attack pattern and then dodge through it while returning fire. It’s really neat:

Another behaviour they have – faithfully ported over from quake 2 – is the ability to get off a final attack off when killed. After their heads get blown off, there’s a chance that they will spray plasma around wildly before falling to the ground. This caught me by surprise on my first playthrough and makes blind spam and uncontrolled aggression a little more risky. Most of the times the player will encounter this enemy, they’re placed in the more cramped corners and corridors of the map, usually set up an for ambush at close range. This plays to their strengths and makes them rather lethal.

The final enemy the map introduces are weird minotaur (or yeti?) guys. They shoot a brief volley of fireballs similar to the strogg, but are far more agile, using an extremely fast charging attack to relentlessly chase after the player if they get too close. Whereas the strogg are used in more enclosed spaces, minotaurs are placed out in the open where there’s plenty of space to run away. The boss variant of this enemy used in the final fight, has more health and can summon fiends to act as a meat shield and deterrent against spamming with rockets or grenades at close range. Both varieties are an excellent pressure tool and high priority target in any fight.

While the sheer scale of the arenas and rooms that dominate the second half of that map make it look impressive, the impact it has on gameplay is less positive: They feel slightly too large for the enemies to pose a significant threat. It’s easy to pelt any opposition from afar with grenades and nails at no substantial risk. A good example of this is seen in the first arena, and on the spiral staircase where knights and death knights slowly filter towards the player from directly in front of them. In these situations it feels like if the areas were even just two-thirds of the size, the map would play better – as enemies would actually become an obstacle to navigate that could actually block the player – and the sense of scale wouldn’t be too badly diminished.

This issue is compounded by the two level structure the arena fights employ. In both arenas, the layout consists of two levels – an upper level where most of the opposition spawns and all of the resources are placed and a smaller lower area connected by sweeping staircases. The upper areas are open enough to dodge around in comfortably, generating absolutely no incentive to go into the more enclosed and dangerous lower level spaces. Making matters worse, in the first arena, the most dangerous wave of enemies – the shambler and fiends – spawn on the lower level and the sweeping curved staircase has the unfortunate defect of creating a natural basin for the monsters to get trapped in. Pathfinding in quake is quite crude and enemies mainly just want to get to the player by running in a straight line towards them. In this specific case, the player is positioned on higher ground directly in front of the monsters, but the staircases are so large and far apart from one another, that they simply walk straight between them. Any random movement and backtracking in an attempt to find a path toward the player just leads them to walk around in circles, never quite able to backtrack far enough to reach the two lowest two steps.

It’s not quite as simple, but its also possible to trap the minotaurs and shamblers in the central pit area of the second arena with a little spatial awareness: The player simply has to lure them down the stairs from either side and then hang around in the nice empty space between the two staircases on the upper level. They’ll remain trapped so long as the player lures them back away from either of the staircase they try to climb, creating a nice opportunity to safely rain fire down on their heads.

The design of the minotaur enemy and especially the boss variant help mitigate the scale problem in the second arena, because they’re fast enough to close the distance and get in the player’s face and the minion spawning creates enough potential ammo pressure to encourage player aggression with the high DPS weapons like the super nailgun and thunderbolt. Thankfully, there’s plenty of variety generated by the smaller sections of the map to prevent the scale issues from dragging things down. The fact there’s a early grenade launcher and plenty of ammo prevents fights in the other affected areas from being drawn out too long and hence progression from being slowed to a tedious grind.

On a final note, there are a few minor gameplay changes for this level in addition to the custom monsters. The ammo limit for the nailgun and shotgun have been increased, which is nice given how much meat is thrown at the player. It reduces the need to constantly backtrack to pick up that nail box from the previous room, preventing the flow of play from being interrupted. The axe has been sped up so it swings at about three times the speed, which I suppose makes melee more viable, but when you’re drowning in nails and explosive ammo what’s the point? There’s also new explosion sprites that look like a stock effect from a low-budget sci-fi movie – really pointless and a bit jarring, but whatever.

My complaints are relatively minor when it comes down to it. Bastion of the Underworld is a great map by any criteria and never starts to drag, despite its scale and length. It also plays extremely well on nightmare too, as there’s few vores, sudden shamblers in your face or other incentives to hug corners and snipe with the shotgun all day. Well worth checking out.

5/5