Corellia: Hidden Valley

Description
This map is version 2.0 of bobfinkl's earlier map, [url=http://starwarsbattlefront.filefront.com/file/Corellia_Hidden_Valley;97993]Corellia: Hidden Valley[/url]. This version includes what I'm sure are some minor improvements too, but the biggest new inclusion was a campaign for the Galactic Civil War era.

As a result, most of what I'll be breaking down here will be the added campaign mode (which is playable in GCW hero assault). Little else has changed in a major way, and for a rehash of what was mentioned, if you want it, be sure to read the review of the earlier file (v1.0).

Campaign sets the player as a single sniper unit with the goal of assassinating a rebel commander. It's a pretty straightforward go-here-shoot-there-go-back-there mission. However, the level of "artificial" difficulty is ramped up to the point where it is, for all intents and purposes, unbeatable.

The second objective in the mission is pretty much a hit-or-miss that's completely dependent on getting lucky with AI behavior. In the mind of the author, the player is supposed to hide himself from the AI for the duration of this objective (an all-too-long minute and a half), and as a result the AI will not enter a specific region. Unfortunately, the author did not take into account the "wandering" nature of the AI, and as a result - [b]totally independent[/b] of the player's actions, AI will usually wander into the region whether prompted or not. This makes this particular objective completely not reliant on player skill or action.

The rest of the objectives are not as difficult, but some of them are still timer-dependent and especially difficult. The objective about trying to shoot two snipers (on a grassy knoll) or the objective about trying to shoot the commander each give you very little time to achieve and with inaccurate sniper rifles they are very difficult (you are given 14 and 8 seconds to do either of these, respectively).

The only way I was even able to attempt to finish this mission was by:
a) Searching through the mission.lvl to find the name of the region AI entered to make you lose
b) Using the code console to disable this region
c) Giving myself invincibility

Even with this, it still took a long time of trial to finish this mission. I suspect that the author did not spend a lot of time trying this out himself to test the actual difficulty, or he would have seen that this is virtually unplayable - which is too bad, because it's a nice map and the [i]concept[/i] for the campaign is a good one. It could do well to have a little more effort put into insuring its playability.