Review: Fire Drop

Released in March 1999, Fire Drop is a lone release by the mapper Quicken. Made within 64 hours, it is one of many first (and often only) maps from the early days of Unreal's custom works. Let's see how it fares… shall we?

The release notes already shed an interesting light on this little gem. Apparently, as the player was crawling through the vents, the Vortex Rikers caught fire - perhaps an unintended shout-out to the Hard Crash novel wherein it was destroyed in a bombing raid ordered by Karrikta - and our friendly neighborhood Prisoner 849 needed to jump down a vent into a thus-far unknown part of the vessel. Judging from the surrounding area, it seems to be a research deck, shedding some more light on the Rikers being a multi-purpose vessel rather than a mere prison ship. For instance, an armor is being researched in high-pressure conditions and some folks have been fooling around with an eightball gun, one person having dropped it into sewage.

Going door to door, the player finds some more weaponry, including an automag, an ASMD and a stinger - and then proceeds to lay waste to anything that moves. Similar to unreleased Unreal PSX (work in progress Rise of Jrath campaign), the corridors of the vessel are crawling with Skaarj and Krall (there's even a Brute!) but the texturing - aside from the doors - or the lighting for that matter is hardly consistent with the stock Vortex Rikers map. The area feels more like a grounded base rather than any part of a vessel, putting the gameplay/story segregation trope on unfortunate full display. Especially that the upper part of the level is described as being Level 87 - just how big the old gal would have to be in order to have this many decks?

Having reached Level 87, there is, admittedly some challenge as to what to do. For instance, there's a button put at a desk and the player needs to press it to open the exit hatch. Can it be pressed by approaching it? No. One has to jump onto the desk and step on said panel. Just how weird is that? And the valve in the room opposite it - it's placed in the corner and shrouded in pitch darkness so unless the player uses a flare, it's easy to miss - and it's mandatory to raise the stairs to the hatch.

As said before, the level shares little consistency with Vortex Rikers and there are some solutions which make more sense if Fire Drop is treated as a grounded base instead. The geometry is a bit on the basic side but there are decent seeds of concepts at play such as the waste tank area and the armor testing area. The switches may be a tad out of the way at first which could make the player run in circles wondering what they missed but the combat is fun and balanced and there's some translator messages fleshing out the background information on the area. Opal.umx is a fitting track during exploration, adding to the feeling of tension, as the player is outnumbered, facing difficult odds. There's little to none in terms of ambience so without that track, the level would've felt hollow. On the bright side, there doesn't seem to be any errors present which is a plus - and an admirable feat for a first level.