WTF Series 1 !!! , this is one of my most replayed sp campaigns because of how fun, creative, weird and straightforward it is. The project was done by Shivaxi and LOL_PEANUTS, I'm not familiar with LOL_PEANUTS but Shivaxi is a big name in the Unreal community, he has done lots of things but the most famous one is RLCoop, a very big and ambitious project that changes how you play Unreal in Coop forever
. He's also a music artist and he has done plenty of songs and remixes of songs from the Unreal franchise. As evident by the name of this campaign, WTF Series 1 was supposed to have more installments, however an unfortunate incident caused the majority of the files to get lost, so it's very unlikely WTF Series 2 will ever be finished
Shot Down is the first playable map of WTF Series 1 and it's a good start that establishes the atmosphere and mood of the rest of the adventure, level geometry is simple but it has enough details to make the level more alive, there are plenty of messages that explore the bizarre nature of the story with small hints of what's to come. However while the level geometry is acceptable, the texture alignment is a different story, the reason why this map looks so ugly is because of the bland lighting combined with the awful texture alignment, small things like texture choice combined with alignment can make a big difference on the appearance of a map. Also the terrain brushes are very poorly done, however I don't blame the mappers because terrain is the most difficult type of brush to use, but still, the terrain leaves a lot to be desired. Lighting is very bland, the map looks like it was made using only ambient brightness when in reality it doesn't, that's how bland the lighting looks. We can all agree that this map strength isn't the visuals.
Sound design is also very unremarkable, there aren't that many ambient sounds and most of them are used during the final tunnel sequence, so the map in general feels very empty judging by the ears, there's not even an ambient sound where the campfire is
. Thankfully music is much better, WTF Series 1 is famous for using plenty of custom tracks, unfortunately this map only uses songs from Unreal, however the music selection is great, the map begins with the action section of Hub 7 ( Crater ) and it works very well as a song to push players right into the action, the second song is everyone's favorite Unreal #16 ( Newmca16 ) and that song has always worked in levels that take place at the start of a journey and this is no exception, however I don't know if this was intentional but I love that Newmca16 gives you the impression that this is going to be another sp campaign with the usual atmosphere and mood, when in reality WTF Series 1 is anything but usual.
Gameplay is this map's (and also the campaign's) strongest suit, the level begins with an action sequence where you have to react quickly in order to survive, after that you have to run or fight the Titans around the place, now you are probably thinking that trying to fight Titans with just a dispersion pistol and an automag is suicide, but WTF Series 1 has a little surprise for all players, because the arsenal of this campaign is just as crazy as the campaign in general. The arsenal of this campaign is a combination of weapons from Unreal and weapons from a UT99 mod called Unreal Forever ( U4e ), and it's great seeing some of the weapons from that mod being used in a sp map. However the weapons do make the experience shift towards the easy side, especially when you realize that the majority of the new weapons can decapitate enemies, this makes the fight against all enemies (even Titans) very easy. However WTF Series 1 has some tricks up its sleeve, but that happens during the next levels, in general this level is very easy. The only big thing that might cause trouble is the lack of health pickups in the map, so you have to try your best to kill your enemies before they hurt you. The final sequence is great, nice combination of textures, lights, fog and sound effects, this is just the beginning when it comes to this campaign's bizarre moments.
The map has a hidden translator message, let's see if anyone can find it
Also this campaign has an intro sequence, it's very well made with good use of interpolation points, music and voice acting. However there's a section that has a visible HOM effect, but this might depend on the render.
Issues I found :
- This map commits one of Unreal's worst cardinal sins in mapping, navigation points (in this case PlayerStarts) and movers have filtering. This type of actors should never have any kind of filtering.
- The map doesn't have a DefaultGameType.
- There's no difficulty/coop filtering.
- The first section is glitchy, if you get unlucky you won't get the weapons at the start and you can also lose them because they can get crushed by the movers.
- If you start the campaign with the intro, you will get low health because of how the gametype works. And considering how glitchy the first section of this map is, you can get killed without you knowing what happened.
- The terrain brushes are very poorly made, this causes a small BSP cut when you look up during the first section of the map, and there are some invisible walls.
- For some reason there's a tunnel full of Skaarj out of bounds.
- The texture of the planet in the skybox is transparent, classic mistake.
- Some rocks look unlit because the center of the mesh is out of bounds.
- The campfire lacks an ambient sound.
- The level lacks pathnodes.
- Because of the way the terrain brushes were made, there are visual artifacts in some of the corners of the brushes.
- All human corpses have translator messages, however the corpses can be destroyed but the messages stay.
- There's a new type of trigger that doesn't do anything.
- This map uses an ammo pickup called GirlAmmo, but that pickup doesn't do anything, you can't even grab it.
- There are some Torch Flames out of bounds.
Somewhere in Nevada...
What with WTF Series 1 being fairly obscure, it's nice to have it all "on tape" 
