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Daikatana in-game runs
Quake2 mission pack runs
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Return to Na Pali runs
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Wheel of Time, UT, Half-Life and other FPS runs

Peej / QMap interview
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Daikatana overall thoughts
Q3A SP design brief
Serious Sam Test review
UT demo vs. Q3A demo
Q2 "Oblivion" review
Why Xen 0wnz
Botrmatch vs. Single Player
Unreal speedrunning ideas
Unjust level promotion
Q2 "Zaero" review
Rant against bad levels
Requiem demo review
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Wheel of Time map review
Recommended Unreal and UT single player maps
Recommended Q2 SP maps

Q1 DM custom map tricks
Q2 in-game map tricks
Q3A in-game map tricks

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Silly banter and abuse

Summary:

Good points: > Overall map quality is very good. > Looks mostly great, especially outdoors. > Some nice custom textures. > Variety of units keeps it interesting. > Some very interesting and useful new items. > New monsters quite good. > Gameplay is solid and fun overall.

Bad points: > Some sections don't fit with story. > Maps are often very 2D. > Some custom textures are too bold and distracting. > Snipers rifle is very inconvinient, and some items are useless. > Ammo balance is rather flawed in the waste unit.

Introduction:
    Zaero is a full, authorised, commercial mission pack for Quake II, though not an official pack like The Reckoning or Ground Zero. It was developed by Team Evolve (of PainKeep fame), and you can find out more information about it at the Zaero website, where there is also a recently released Zaero demo (26 meg) that you can download. The pack was released in October 1998, and despite positive reviews, I didn't see it receiving the hype and promotion it deserved - hence this review. Although the pack is advertised at $28.99 for US orders, I recently purchased it for £7.99 (= $14) in the UK - I would say it is definitely worth a full mission pack price though.

Beginnings and background:
    Unfortunately, my copy was missing the manual, so I had to find out more information using the online manual. However, the installation (150 meg) was easy, and there were no real problems with the lack of manual. The background story is fairly simple: following the Strogg defeat, a human mining colony was founded near Cerberon. After an uneasy stand off, the Strogg strike back against the colony. When your squadron, Zaero, is sent out to investigate, you are shot down, and must continue the fight on foot, shutting down shield generators and pumping stations - fairly standard stuff. There is a lengthy and appropriate intro cinematic which goes with this story, it's fairly well done and consistent. In some places the maps do fit the background story, but in many places they are arbitrary and standard QII maps (particularly the final unit, which seems to have no purpose) - not that it makes the maps bad, but more adherence to the background would have been good.

The maps and units:
    There are 4 units in roughly Base, night-time Base/Mine, Waste and Palace styles. The base unit is small, with just two smallish levels, the night-time base unit is larger with 4 largish levels, the waste unit has 3 variable levels, the palace unit has 4 mostly large levels plus a final boss level - 14 levels in total, with a variety of themes and gameplay. Team Evolve had experienced mappers such as Richard "Fingal" Farrelly (at least I assume so, as one of the maps is a modified version of his Fin1b4: "Waste Pumping Station"), and the world famous Marcus "Mexx" Dromowicz, thus the quality of the levels is generally very high, both in design and build quality.
    Some general thoughts about the levels: 1. They contain a mixture of outdoor and indoor sections, the outdoor sections are always very nice. 2. Each unit has it's own theme and style and the maps stick well to that. 3. Curiously, the first unit is in daylight, the second at night, the third and fourth in daylight - an oversight, or a deliberate indication that the pack progresses throught night and day?? I'm not sure, but both the night and day themes look nice and work well with the maps. 4. The levels, though they have complex and sprawling layouts, are mostly very 2 dimensional, and quite open. While this isn't a real problem, it is rather noticable, and some uses of 3D monster positions stand out as a lot trickier due to this. 5. "Sticky outy" bits and alcoves are fairly common in many levels, this has quite a noticable effect on gameplay as ducking into the alcoves is a common tactic.

Architecture and textures:
    Architecture is generally very good, with solid detailed structures and complex designs. The general style of architecture varies according to the unit's theme: Base maps are futuristic, with plenty of angles, buttresses and details like computer consoles. The night-time base maps are in a similar style, though with more details such as mine machinery but also more open and sparser maps. Waste maps are more varied in design, from splendid outdoor sections to cramped pipes and including plenty of curves as well as crates and pipes. The palace maps (actually called tomb maps) have a variety of styles (including waste, power and lava influences), but mostly relate to the palace theme, again with buttresses and nice pillars (including plenty of "skyline" structures), though less small scale details. In each unit there are plenty of outdoor areas - I'm a sucker for outdoor areas, and these are as good as any. The well angled rocks and ground, and impressive building fronts make them consistently attractive, and occasionally spectacular. The main flaws in the architecture are the lack of details and purpose in some maps (i.e. a lot of rooms that are just rooms), and some of the buttressed architecture can get repetitive, especially in some night-time base maps. But overall, it's good, well structured architecture.
    Texturing is noteworthy, as the pack uses a lot of custom textures - almost all textures are new or modified. The quality and effect of these varies a lot: in general the more subtle and "smooth" textures look by far the most attractive, while the bolder textures can look too bold and distracting. The best textures include the natural rock walls, the concrete and metal waste textures, and the smoother, simple textures in the palace and some base maps - all of these have a good clean look and work well with the archiecture. Other textures, especially the computer consoles, heavily tiled floor textures, thick grille wall textures, and some of the logos, don't fit in so well, and can look garish and confused. Because there are so many custom textures, they significantly affect the look of the map, and I felt if the pack had used more subtle textures (which are great), it would have looked better overall.

Lighting, sounds and effects:
    Lighting was well done throughout the pack. As mentioned before, there are some day-time units and one night-time unit, and the outdoor lighting is appropriate and very nice in both: A crisp yellow glow in the day time, and a pale eerie blue at night, quite atmospheric. Both sections had custom skies, these looked great looking up, but around the edges they were crude and simple compared to Quake II's original skies - though mostly you didn't see this problem. Lighting inside was fine, a mixture of white lighting and some fairly well done coloured lighting - the coloured lighting was mostly subtle, though there were too many colours close together in some maps.
    Some sound effects were very good, some weren't. The atmospheric background sounds were good, and downright eerie in some maps. The monster sounds were pretty cool, and appropriate to the monsters, as were the weapons sounds. However, the computer voices sounded rather cheesy, telling you about lasers and access denied and whatever. I'd would have prefered some more toned down voices rather than the "distorted sports commentator" style. Another problem was some sound bugs - the Iron Maidens often made a wrong sound, some door related sound that was obviously a mistake.
    There weren't many new effects, mostly just Id ones. Some of the items had new effects, such as the EMP which sent out a pulse "wall", and the Plasma Shield which set up a glowing green shield. All these sort of effects were good, though the EMP pulse did cause a small pause in the games as it activated.

Progression, exploration and secrets:
    Progression through the pack was the standard Quake II progression for good units: plenty of to and froing between unit maps, completing various tasks before the next unit. There were two particularly good aspects about the progression in this pack: 1. Whenever you backtracked through a map or indeed a unit, there were always plenty of monster reinforcements to deal with, and you were never left wandering back through empty areas. 2. Within many maps, there was non-linearity and exploration to be done before finding the right route, some maps had many route choices indeed. Both of these added to the enjoyment and value of the pack, making good use of the maps. Additionally the secrets were good too, rather than the boring "hole in the wall" types, they were more complex and often had you finding multiple items and exploring well around the scenery, even fighting monsters in some. Again, something I really liked as it makes the maps more interesting, though some required counter-intuitive exploration in slime or even lava. I had a couple of problems however: In the first waste map, a door requires a security card from another waste map, yet somehow I had the card already and I'm not sure how. Secondly, in one of the tomb maps, the game crashed a few times at one point, though I got past it eventually.