Cool-looking floating island castle. Mostly nice brushwork. A fun concept, and lots of good ideas, mostly falling short of being executed very well.
This falls just short of 4 stars.
As I said, the brushwork and texturing is mostly quite nice. Well lit, which I like. A few walls could have used clipping, but it's a minor issue.
The main things that bothered me were the combat and the secrets/exploration.
The thing is that the combat was 90% spawn-ins. Sometimes it's fine to use spawning enemies, but when all the combat turns out that way, it doesn't leave much room for strategizing when looking at a space. I think the environment could allow for more moving walls and monsters jumping in, and staggering the spawns. A lot of time, the player enters a room, right at the center, and is suddenly instantly surrounded by the entire battle. Or kills a crowd, then boom a new crowd is spawned in instantly, together. Copper makes it really easy to add delays to spawn-ins, all of which could use the same triggername. I don't think that feature was used at all.
Also, progression of monster spawning was broken a little bit, due to non-linear progression. I know how hard it is to account for the various ways that players might move around a non-linear map, so I understand it. But I got all the secrets, but was still missing about 20 monsters.
As for the secrets: most secrets were triggered without there being any reward, or, the reward for the secret was confusing. I think one secret leads you to a gold key, but then I ended up at that same spot where the key was later through normal progression, so I was confused about what the secret actually was. I guess the reward is that you get it early? which is weird, because a reward shouldn't be "Hey, great: you get to play less of the map!" Otherwise, that means the reward for the secret ends up actually being... nothing.
Another two or three secrets were triggered in empty areas, and the rewards were given after looking around for another secret little cubby/ledge/whatever, after finding that area. The gold key secret was like that as well, I think. I guess here the idea is that the area is the secret, and the player can then look for a reward... in that area?
Lastly, the floating rock platforms confused me. I reached them via secret, but then they also seemed to be part of progression? One button moves them around, but the position they end up in yields platforming that can only be done with rocket jumping.
Overall, I think if the mapper had spent a lot more time making combat that wasn't just monster spawn-ins, and made secrets be simpler. It'd have felt a lot better.
I'd love to give this map 4, or even 4 and a half stars, but it felt more like a map all about nice brushwork, texturing, realistic lighting -- and then after the map was done, trying to fit combat and exploration haphazardly.
I look forward to more maps by this mapper, because the environment and world were so fresh and fun. But I hope the next map spends a bit more time crafting complex combat, playtesting, and playtesting more. And keeping secrets simple: find a spot with an item - that's the secret.
