First of all: Thanks for all those awesome Hammer tutorials, ToppHat. I'm only mapping since a year and those videos definitely make climbing that steep learning curve so much easier.
Having watched a lot of those tutorials, I had pretty high expectations for this mappack - and unfortunately was pretty disappointed.
Not visually though, the chambers look great obviously. But gameplay-wise there were a lot of things that annoyed me:
||It started with the hub (which is an exception from the otherwise great visuals, to me it seemed just bland): Forcing the player to walk back and forth to the boring switches to then search the next randomly appearing elevator became annoying quickly. I assume that area resembles the company's office and they wanted the player to spend some time in it? I would have found it better if there just had been some company related eastereggs scattered for example. They would have made me curious to explore the space. The way it is now I'm forced to just walk back and forth.
Unfortunately, none of the puzzles required much logic but rather reflexes (fortunately not too fast reflexes though, everything was easily doable). To me, it felt like the only reason the difficulty was rising throughout the maps was because the test elements got placed further away, out of sight around more corners. Map 4 was especially annoying in this regard. It took me forever to finally notice the laser receiver in the destroyed area for example.
Map 5 forced me to backtrack a lot to get a new sphere or cube which got annoying pretty soon. Killing the turrets was again no logic puzzle but a matter of spotting the correct surface. The death counter came out of nowhere for me. Could be that I misunderstood the AI up to that point, I thought it needed me to find that code, why would it kill me all of a sudden? Maybe I just didn't catch all of the voice lines though, I'm not a native speaker. Anyway - one second after I pass the death counter the AI is all friendly again and explains that binary puzzle to me - that felt just weird.||
In short: awesome visuals but not so enjoyable puzzles in my opinion. Still, looking forward to play the Coop-Map now.