Jam Quake 30th Anniversary 1024 Jam

Beautiful, creative levels, but the game play is completely unbalanced. I have played just about every Q1, Q2 jam, mod, level pack, etc, and usually play on Normal...sometimes on Hard. The gameplay in most of this jam's levels does not even try to follow the standards for Normal or Easy. Not even in the same universe. So annoying to start to play these great looking, clever level only to get ridiculously swamped and die 10x in the same rooms. The 3rd level I played was such a ridiculous overload of monsters (there were like 50 all at once) that after dying multiple times I had to cheat and give myself 250 health.....4 times to get through it.
Anybody can make a level hard by dumping piles of monsters on people. But when you ignore the standards for skill level and just pile on, it is a poor gameplay experience and - in the end - bad level design.

If you want to show off for you and your elitist Quake playing friends. then great, do it. But it should come with a warning: "This jam ignores skill levels and is only for the the top 2% of elite level Quake players"

Hate to complain given all the hard work and normally I love these community Jams. But instead of enjoying this I am just left feeling very annoyed. Good gameplay balances challenge with accomplishment, relative to the intended audience (skill level). That is not the case here.

Great maps, some can be a little slaughtery which isn't to my test, they all look amazing, highly recommended.

Perfectly done, delicious jam.
I had a lot of fun playing it.
Thank you guys for your time and labor.

In general, the maps were fine to good. The biggest problem is that some of the enemies in AD are just not viable for Easy difficulty, especially the Wraith.

Some aspects:
@Aurelius: The last fight is overcooked on Easy. 48 enemies in a claustrophobic fight is not viable for Easy players.
@NovaFrost: For your secret buttons, you use red buttons, that upon shooting turn yellow and then back to red. That's usually an indicator that it would be a timed switch. If you don't use a timed switch, they should stay yellow.
@ChrisHolden: The megahealth secret can be acquired by just walking at the box without destroying it. Apart from that, this was the best map of the set. Loved the detailing, especially on the lower floor.
@sock: You know I love your maps, but throughout every iteration of Thousand Cuts it will still always be your worst map.
@moko: The horrible balancing for Easy is beyond words (or at least beyond words that would get me banned).

Great ideas, though some maps throw too much at the player at the same time.

I'm not the biggest fan of Arcane Dimensions - mainly because the monster roster is just so wide and variable that it's hard to get a proper "feel" for the thing (elemental versions of everything, for example), but also because I think the damage-over-time effects can feel really bad (dying from flames/poison after running around unable to find health packs is not fun).

That said, then: there's lots of really nice design here, making best use of the space available with dense multilayer maps and some lovely texturing. It's also pretty hard - even on Easy, there are maps which I needed to godmode through (although in Nait's case, partly because I got hit by the trigger bug that is to be fixed, although I also needed to godmode through another section too), and I definitely didn't find most of the secrets in some of them.
And I forgot what the blaster belt was for, since it's been a while since I've played an AD based pack, so didn't think of rocket jumping in that one map for a while.
Reading other reviews, I'm also not sure I did IC's map as intended - I didn't use the pushable items for anything, I just messed around with jump boots for a long time before I managed to make something work.

In any case: if you are better than me at traversal and at combat, you will like these maps just fine If you aren't, then we have godmode for a reason!

A very pretty and at times quite atmospheric set of maps with a decent focus on verticality aided by the 1024 limitation. I preferred the more wide/open approaches but the tighter maps were also nice and tense. I mention this because AD's roster is very big and can be quite brutal lol (a few of maps can feel very horde-ish, borderline slaughter-y). My favourite monster use in AD that I get reminded of everytime is the boil, this had some nice good use like in tango's, whose map felt like a nice mini sandbox on how to approach a quite confined space, felt very spootnik. I forgot AD has jump boots, these were used quite cleverly in the handful of maps that had it, which leads me to IC's map which felt unique, nothing too strange but it had the pushable boxes that are so rarely used for a nice light puzzle and jumpy map, more jump goodness also in ROJ's and Aurelius'. I understand AD's feature list is big, nevermind the roster, but I'd really like a more traversal / exploratory / puzzle focus, closest maps that gave me a classic feel for this was grue's, and I couldn't even find 2 secrets that were staring at me the whole time, similar with nova frost's and razzor's. Also want to commend the kitbash idea, this being an ocassional returning thing would be great, feel it was respectful and playful.

PS: The city in naitelveni's map NEEDS to see the light of the day.

I like how most people came up with multilayer architecture to confront the 1024 limit. Some maps use invisible walls to limit explorable space, which I consider a good practice for creating outdoor area with this limit. Though there could be a better approach, at least it does make the map feels big enough without put me in some kind of coffin. Definitely see the effort of mappers trying to offer a nice 10–20 minutes gameplay.
I like Aurelius's map for its aesthetic, architecture and combat. It's tough of course.
I like Tango and Naitelvani's map for its aesthetic and combat. I like Nova Frost's map for its aesthetic. Really hope there are some interesting puzzles. I feel the atmosphere is a good fit for puzzle?
Sock's map is simple but a ton of fun to look for secrets. Most of them are easy to find, but not too obvious, and discovering them gives me a lot of enjoyment. I feel like these kinds of secrets actually make a map more worth exploring.
However, I think the entries from IC and Monkeyshock lack something that would put them on the same level as the other entries. They're fine, but they don't have anything particularly interesting, in my opinion.