#And then the OTHER rounds I played had us being spawncamped the whole round like. gang

[opal-owl-flight]

Ever play sploon with fatigue bc youve been drawing all day and still end up being the top player in the worst fucking teams imaginable

[floofe-trans-doggie]

My review of every Smissmas 2022 map for Team Fortress 2

Rumford: Decent little Payload map, dragged down by the fact that Valve fucked up and didn’t include a bunch of materials originally, still missing a couple textures post-patch, otherwise fun but nothing to write home about. 7/10

Coal Pit: An excellent reskin of Gravel Pit with a refreshing new theme, a more interesting area around the final point with broken ice, and snowman bombs that make the old map more lively. I also find BLU trying to stop RED from using a freeze ray to enact global cooling fairly amusing. 10/10, honestly kinda carries the update.

Frostcliff: A Payload map that is mediocre at best, Frostcliff provides perfectly fine gameplay for the most of the map, but the last point is far too chokey and easy to defend, making it almost impossible for the attacking team to succeed. The texturing in some parts of the map is lazy and jarring with snowy textures on top of inclines connecting to wall textures with no snow in sight, carving straight lines in the terrain that scream ‘unpolished.’ It also suffers from the Bread Space problem of RED’s first spawn facing towards the end of the map and being at a right angle to the beginning, leading to most teams trying to run to C at the beginning of the round instead of A, at least on their first round on it, though this is somewhat mitigated by a door closing off part of the map when it’s not in use yet. There’s some potential, but it’s overall poorly designed and executed. The layout also gives me flashbacks to Erebus and Terror, two of the worst Halloween maps. 4/10

Frosty: It’s capture the flag. The map seems fairly well-put together, but you’re never going to actually play this map. Any server running this map turns into the same playground as 2fort, so I can’t speak much to how it plays, though being a capture the flag map means my expectations are low anyway. For these reasons, I’m not giving it a score, but nice as it looks, I’m not queuing for it.

Frostwatch: This is the worst attack/defend map I’ve ever played. The second point of the first stage is by far the most difficult of the entire map for BLU to push with the only routes aside from the main choke being two parallel routes to the sides, one of which is a tunnel not even wide enough to fit 2 people side-by-side, and the whole thing is an uphill battle giving the defending team the high ground. And that’s if you even make it there because BLU’s first spawn is absurdly easy to spawncamp, being wide open for Snipers to have a field day and having a dropdown from one of the spawn exits which can be camped under very easily. BLU’s last spawn has a similar issue, though not to the same extent, except on the last spawn all of the spawn exits have similar, albeit smaller drops to camp under. The second stage, for no discernible reason, has two points that can be attacked simultaneously, both of which need to be captured to progress to the final stage. Neither of these points are particularly well-designed, with one of them in particular standing out for basically just being a pit outside RED’s spawn where they can rain hell on anyone attacking, but because of the second point of stage one, if you make it to stage two, your team is almost certainly stacked enough to steamroll both it and stage three. Stage three is mediocre and really boxy. I’d also like to point out that this map has had several out-of-bounds spots you can get to, an issue normally only present on Halloween maps where you have to use spells to do so. How they fucked that up, I don’t know. 0/10, I never want to play this map again. I leave the server if the other players are dumb enough to vote for it after the round ends.

Edit: It has occurred to me that a reason for the prevalence of spawncamping on the first stage, aside from how easy it is, is that the area immediately outside of BLU spawn connects directly to the first point, meaning RED more or less has to hold right outside of spawn in order to keep A. This, combined with the second point being chokepoint hell, makes stage one of this forsaken map strikingly similar to Dustbowl last.

And thus concludes an unnecessarily long rant about Frostwatch my Smissmas 2022 map review! Have a fucking Smissmas or whatever.