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The story of Xidia by Team Phalanx goes roughly as follows; 22 years previous to the events of the pack, Liandri corp. discovered a planet rich in Tarydium deposits. A facility, Outpost Phoenix, was established on the planet as a base from which to mine the minerals. You are dispatched to the planet to investigate the cause of a loss of radio contact. But when you get there, of course, things become suddenly very complicated.

The story is not just included as a token gesture. Throughout the seven playable maps and one extro sequence that are Xidia, bits of the story are put into place via dead humans' logs, and communications from your orbiting military ship. It is clear that mappers Mr. Prophet and Hourences put plenty of effort into keeping the story going, and since the text story blends with various scripted sequences that happen in the maps, this area gets full marks.

The Xidia mines

So let's cut to the chase on the design front; Xidia is quite possibly the most beautiful set of maps ever released for Unreal or Unreal Tournament. Acrhitecture is uniformly grand and detailed, with the different settings such as the outpost, the mines and the huge underground derelict each having their own, strong theme. Even though the team chose to do the whole pack in a high-tech style, the effect of the architecture is dramatic, and realistic.

The architectural excellence blends smoothly with near-perfect lighting and very strong texturing. The outpost is designed in a mixture of SGTech1, richrig and other high-tech texture sets, and blends them together well. The mines move towards the organic but add richrig for a very modern look, while the derelict demonstrates one of the only really good uses of the Skaarj texture set that I have ever seen, alongside Hexephet. There are no texture misaligments that draw the eye, and the lighting in typical gold, pale blue and red shades gives the pack a "leet" look.

Ambient sounds are present throughout and employ Hourences' pioneering approach that uses the neglected SoundPitch property to make old sound effects sound like new ones. The sound effects set the atmosphere perfectly, especially in the mines. The use of music tracks is inconsistent in the first couple of maps, changing a bit too often, but as the team included a bit of custom music (some of it sampled from Quake and Half-Life), and as music use stabilised in later maps, I'm not going to knock any marks off for it.

So overall on the design front, Xidia is definitely worthy of full marks all round - the overall effect of the environments presented within the pack is spot-on. Congratulations guys. However, I still have some criticisms on other areas of the product that I must mention in this review.

The first of my two points relates to the Creatures & Items score. While Xidia may have perfect visuals and sound, the gameplay could have been tweaked to be more consistent and enjoyable. The main problem is that the first big level - Outpost Phoenix - is far harder than the rest of the pack. I would have appreciated more health pickups - and this is not just down to my playing ability - and the Skaarj around the place who carried Flak Cannons had an unfair amount of health given the amount of armour and firepower I had been given. But gameplay was not all bad - it stabilised on later levels, and modified weapons and bad guys made things more interesting.

A derelict Xidia underground

The second area for criticism is that of technical execution. Most of the bugs in the pack were cleared up in the Xidia 1.1 patch, and the BSP was clean, but there was still the problem that framerate got pretty chuggy at times. Of course, this is the price of high detail, but I did feel that some areas could have been optimised further. I also had a problem that the new weapon disappeared after the map in which I picked it up. This was supposed to be fixed by the patch, but apparently the fix was not entirely successful.

Summary

So what are my conclusions? Overall, a truly excellent pack marred only by at times unbalanced gameplay and somewhat lower than desireable framerate. This pack still surpasses any single player map yet released. I say, download it, and give these guys paid level designing jobs!

Architecture	10	Story	10
Textures	10	Overall Effect	10
Lighting	10	Creatures & Items	8½
Sound	10	Technical Execution	8½

Overall Score: 9½

Second Opinions

None to date

Downloads

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