Reviews

TOW Arena 2.0

Homepage: http://www.planetshogo.com/bs/towarena
Download: Mod v2.0, TOW Arena Maps

The Basics
If you are familiar with the popular Quake mod Rocket Arena, then you know the basic idea. Two warriors enter the arena, only one remains. The others stay in a spectator area until it is their turn. Who is the best? There can only be one!

The Gameplay
This is not a team play mod, it's every man for himself. Matches usually do not last very long, so there's usually not much waiting. It's a pretty straightforward kill-or-be-killed scenario. Gameplay is often fast and furious with gibs galore.

The Good
This mod is just the thing to get the adrenaline going. Think you're the best player around? Get in the arena! You spawn in with full health and full weapons. The "force" of an exploding weapon has been greatly increased so you can really get thrown around by TOWs, even if you aren't directly damaged by them.

When you are waiting for your turn in the arena you are inside a glassed-in area that gives you a good view of the action. You can go into full-blown spectator mode by tapping your tractor beam key. That allows you to float freely (and invisibly) around the arena and watch the action. I've found that I can learn a lot of good (and not so good) tactics by watching others in the arena.

TOW Arena has some of the best maps I've ever seen. Some of them are a little big for one-on-one play, but for the most part they are very well laid out. There are a wide variety of different styles of maps too, so they all don't appear to be just variations on the same theme. Kudos to Smoth and company for some great work!

The Bad
There's a couple of rather annoying bugs in TOW Arena.

The dedicated server crashes on level changes, so currently you have to stay on the same map all the time or shut the server down and restart it. Hopefully Bunghole will address this after finals.

When I am spawned into the arena, I usually get the "You are no longer in god mode" message about five times.

During the countdown before a match starts, sometimes the whole process restarts on my client, but not on my opponents, so the match starts a couple of seconds before I get the "Fight!" message.

When you get the "Fight!" message, you still can't shoot for a couple seconds.

Currently there are only two MCA TOW Arena maps. More would be nice.

The Conclusion
This mod is a lot of fun and adds a unique twist to deathmatch. You just have to concentrate on one opponent, without having to worry about someone else coming along and getting a cheap frag at your expense. I suppose it would be possible for one very good player to dominate a server, but I haven't found that to be the case so far.

There's a lot of action (and a mess of gibs) to be had in TOW Arena. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give is that it has come the closest to replacing Squishie in my heart. That's very high praise indeed. If Bunghole can get the level-change bug fixed in the dedicated server, it will be pretty close to perfect.

I like this mod so much I convinced the folks at EZ-Net to turn their Shogo server into a TOW Arena server. It's running 24/7. My MAD (RIP) practices there every Tuesday night. You have no excuse. Download the mod and maps and get in the arena!