Lord Basse
Official Reviewer |
Posted on 11/23/11 @ 12:39 PM
I think The Town of Callista is a rather underrated, and hardly spoken of entry to this year's Pretty Town Contest. Seeing that it ended up in 9th place, and that it, as I write this, only has little over 20 downloads, I think it's time to give this map some recognition.
The Town of Callista portrays a ravaged countryside, and the town, Callista, which only remains in a few spread out ruins, and the homes of some odd few people that have remained near the town. It is very desolate and atmospheric. Even though it's not a top notch design, the atmosphere is what struck me as the entry's strongest point.
Some parts of the map are very well done. The desolate, steppe-like environment surrounding the town, and the burnt-down fields coupled with a few well-designed forests surrounding the town, all give the entry a unique feel, and it looks very good.
There are two main negative aspects of the scenario, however: the actual town, or, rather what's left of it, and bits of the terrain mixing and detailing.
The town is, well, not much of a town at all. The ruins are scarse and with lots of space in between them. Judging from the land it doesn't look like there used to be any buildings there at all, even though the narrative suggests that the town was only recently destroyed during a war. More ruins and abandoned city parts would've made the map look better, and it would've made the bulk of the map less monotone. It also looked quite odd with a whole lot of flower packs in the middle of the ravaged town, it just stuck out too much.
There are some parts of the map that don't look too good. There are some places where the terrain mixing just looks odd, for example, where dots of leaves are spread out in desert terrain. The open landscape design is also a bit of hit-and-miss: the area around the statue to the south, and the land around where you start, both look very good in their openness and minimalism, while other parts don't give quite the same impression.
Overall, this is a good but flawed map, overlooked by most as it seems, and with a strong atmosphere as the best point. Definitely worth a look! |