Belot
By Ayba - 1 Map
Format: MBF21
[Download]
Started: February 15th 2026
Finished: February 15th 2026
Status: Completed
It's cool but I can't really say it grabbed me all that much. The map design is really cramped and a bit confusing to get around with a lot of higher points you can only get to from one single specific path, the early bit is a pretty annoying hitscan nightmare for a while, and the custom weapon changes were kinda eh. Both shotguns have way more spread than normal, the chaingun is now burst fire, and the rocket launcher creates long lasting fire on the ground that yes, can also damage you too, and spreads out pretty damn far from whatever you hit. Ammo can get annoyingly scarce and the indoor mansion area has like zero health for some reason. The reskins are also very hit or miss for me, they're impressive on an artistic level but a lot of the time it's kinda hard to tell what each enemy or pickup is at a glance, and I just don't really vibe with the whole aesthetic all that much. Replacing the chainsaw with a sword is pretty cool though, even if a lot of my love for it comes from the fact that it's basically the only thing in your arsenal that's not brown colored which made it stick out more (swords are also just inherently neat though). Environmental textures can also blend together and make it hard to tell what's an elevator or a wall or a door, and the really dark lighting on the indoor areas and samey brownish color scheme helps with the whole "getting lost" thing just as much as the kinda weird layout. There's also a handful of custom enemies thrown in to further make it hard to tell what each enemy actually is a reskin of. All the secrets have these bits of voiced lore dialogue which was neat but I didn't really get what the hell was going on, and while I'm definitely just impatient, I almost didn't really wanna spend the extra time standing around waiting for the slow dialogue to finish (also it's kinda hard to hear with no subtitles because of all the ambient sounds and how softspoken a lot of it is). The biggest issue here is the progression though. First, it's just hard to figure out where the hell to go, and I spent way too long meandering around trying to figure out where the hell the red key was after I killed almost everything in the whole map, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is the statues. After about 40 minutes of running around you'll eventually have killed everything in the map except one enemy, maybe found some secrets, and have all 3 keys, while still not knowing how to leave or even where the exit is. What you have to do is destroy EVERY single one of a very specific statue decoration across the entire level, with no way to know where or how many there are, and it does a very poor job of telling you that this is how you progress. It's possible to intuit it since they're the only destructible decoration item and make a little pinging noise after you break them, but even knowing about this ahead of time before playing the map and breaking every statue I saw, I STILL missed some and just noclipped through the door instead of screwing around in the level for another 15 minutes. The statues can easily blend into the environment since everything is brown and dark as hell, and since you're given zero info about this objective whatsoever it's really easy to get hard stuck because of this. Your reward is a terrible boss fight against a weird custom thing that sprints around the arena at light speed so fast it looks like the damn thing just teleports straight to you and spams high damage melee attacks and a wonky spreadshot plasma attack. This would be an absolute nightmare if you weren't given a free plasma gun and max cells for this but even with that it's a pretty annoying fight thanks to the cramped arena and the boss' insane speed. Just kite it around the central pillar and spam it full of way too much plasma and you're done. I feel bad for not really vibing with this much because there's clearly a ton of effort put into it, and from what I remember this is part of a wider custom project full of lore and worldbuilding but it's just not my thing vibes-wise. The amount of effort and detail put into it is pretty impressive though, and if you vibe with this I think the creator was working on a longer wad with more story but it's been a while so I'm not sure if that's still going on or not.
Rating - ⭐⭐⭐½