Lifeline is themed towards an outpost in a beautiful mountains background. The maps is open outside with plenty of room to roam, the inside is focused on providing shelter from your fellow opponent, as well it provides plenty of window views of the mountain scenery outside. The map features a teleporter of a new design not commonly seen, but functional and more eye candy for the map.

Bot support works very well, and the weapon placements are a good amount of distance so that camping out one spot is not easy. The map has many areas to railgun snipe from, as well as inside areas to fight with the shotgun, lighting gun, or rocket launcher. The polycount on the map is also well within Q3 range, so just about any computer should render the map with no problem.

The author also included a second map Lifelinesnow which is the same map structurally, but the theme concentrates on a snow fortress high up in the mountains. My opinion, I liked the snow version of the map better than the original as the snow added more character to the map and a better lighting of the map and shadows. The snow mountains background looks ever better than those in the original map. It just adds even more character and eye candy to the map.

The author already admitted to leaving some BFG ammo in the map and not wanting to recompile to remove it. I can understand the view point, but I really think the extra time should have been taken to the make the map more complete. Sure, no BFG to worry about, but it's those little details that nag you in the back of your mind wondering if your opponent is going to show with a BFG somehow.

The weapons placement for small numbers of players works, but once you get over 6 players, you often find yourself fending everyone off with just your machine gun. In Team DM mode, just about everyone is using the machine gun because the weapons are just too scarce unless you have a 1 second respawn time on weapons.

Most of the action seems to center around the teleporter areas as that's where the most number of weapons are close by. The roof has the railgun, quad, and megahealth which the three in combination makes for a very deadly and unstoppable sniper on top until the quad wears off.

The map has a launch ramp to jump you across to a tower with a megahealth powerup, but the speed at which it launches you makes you think you are going to fall off the map and die, but really, you can't fall off the edge, as there is an invisible wall in place. My only tweak would have been to make the ramp soft on the launch so you land on the tower and not crash into the corner of the map to fall down on the tower.

The map plays well, the bots play well, but I think the weapon placements could have used a little tweaking to help spread things out. Overall, a fun map, beautiful scenery, and no glitches to complain about.

Reviewed by KnightMB