Review: Beer From Outer Space

On one hand, Beer From Outer Space was an interesting pack to play through, with a lot of great ideas. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems that really drag it down. Beer From Outer Space is made up of nine maps, four of which are playable. It needs Unreal4Ever in order to run properly, and has its own batch file and menu. There are no difficulty options.

The introduction doesn't tell us much. A hitchhiker (the player) gets dropped off by a road, and then walks to the nearest bar. There, he has a confrontation with two humans, a gasbag, and a mercenary. They chase him away, and the intro ends. The description in the Readme says that aliens brought their beer to earth; that's pretty much the only plot there is. It's safe to assume that the player doesn't like alien beer, because he arms himself and goes on a killing spree. There are a lot of pointless messages that don't explain anything, and don't add much to the pack. The main enemies of the pack are gasbags and bots, although the mercenaries play a big part in it as well. Most other map packs have a lot more enemy variety, that's for sure.

Most of the time, architecture is inconsistent. Sometimes it's awful, and other times, it's pretty good. The first playable map is confusing, because it's hard to tell where the author intends you to go. The second and third maps seem almost maze-like, and a lot of the time, they're pretty tough to navigate. Texturing, likewise, is either great, or downright bad. One thing about Beer From Outer Space is that it has a lot of small details that could have had a much greater effect if the rest of the pack had been better. There are a lot of destroyable objects in the back: beer bottles, trucks, windows, and barrels are almost always breakable. There are even light switches that you can turn on and off. Lighting isn't bad, but it's much better in the last set of maps than it is in the first two. The skyboxes are poorly done; they end up looking stretched most of the time.

Ambient Sounds are used to decent effect, although there are times when the author loops oneshot sounds that should be used in Dynamic Ambient Sounds instead. There are custom hit sounds when the player gets injured, too. Usually, when the player gets hurt, he says things like, "Ima barbecue your asses with molasses" or "Holy shit". It's a good gesture, but it gets pretty annoying after a while. There's no background music, but the author's band played the song in the introduction.

As far as BSP goes, it was a complete disaster in the first two maps. There were also a lot of areas where the player would be completely trapped. Cheats don't work, so there's a lot of reloading involved. All of the technical problems aren't enough to impact the gameplay, which is so easy that getting stuck doesn't make a difference. There was no point where I had to reload because I got killed; every time I had to reload, it was because I got stuck somewhere.

The last map is probably the best of the lot. It takes place on a high-speed train, a setting that I thought was only ever in Xidia Gold. It's a great map, and there's clever use of the shotgun involved. The train was completely custom made, and the author did a really good job of it.