Shadow Over Innsmouth

Content - Quake - Quake Levels - Quake Single Player

Author: Steve Rescoe | Rating: 9.00 | Download: shadowgl.zip

This is one of my favorite single player levels. Shadow Over Innsmouth is basically the “second try” at a concept first seen in the level “Village Of Dread” by the same author. This involves the user starting in a dank cave, working his way down a forbidding canyon, fighting his way through a medievel town, and ending up at a harbor.

In Shadow, most of the canyon portion of the previous outing is gone, and the player starts on the edge of town. The combat starts out tense, and just keeps building until you get to the water’s edge. Then you must get to to a submerged pyramid that contains the exit for a grueling fight to the finish. Expect a steep difficulty level, along with a few somewhat modified enemies. They only seem modified in appearance though, as otherwise their attributes are the same.

This is great stuff. The original Shadow release was a BSP, and required that the “barrel” mod be run at the command line so the exploding barrels in the village would look right. This new release combines all this into a PAK file, so that no additional mod is needed.

There is a daunting array of monsters as well as quite a few traps (if you see a weapon or powerup just “sitting there”, you may want to check health, switch to a close range weapon, and look for possible escape routes before you get it). Some of the traps can be used to your advantage though, like wall-mounted nail traps, which can lay low even the most powerful enemy quickly, as well as the exploding barrels. Weapons are scattered in a manner that makes getting to each one a challenge, although there aren’t many places where you will be running low on ammo. There may be a few places where you find yourself “swarmed” by monsters quicker than you can get them all, so use QuickSave often. If you have some room to maneuver, you may want to try and get some of the monsters fighting each other. That can save some ammo, and it’s always fun to watch.

Retro Quake has recompiled the map for transparent water, mainly because the lake at the end is quite possibly the largest single body of water that the Quake engine can render, and looks very cool. Try it with MHQuake or TomazQuake for even better effect. Predictably, r_speed’s can suffer greatly in this last stage of the level, so don’t try the “vis’ed” version unless you have a stout system with excellent OpenGL capability and substantial video memory.

Overall there’s really nothing bad I can say about this map. The flow is great, the enemy count is challenging but not unfair, and the overall design is the “cream of the crop” in Quake single player levels. You owe it to yourself to get lost in the Shadow. Highly recommended.

- Zoop