I rolled into this one right after jp1m1. Another good time!

In a way these kind of remind me of when an old-timey mapper reappears after a long absence -- nostalgic layout & gameplay but put together more cleanly than back-in-the-day. Kind of a missionpack1 feel. I do enjoy the sense of working into and through the castle, sort of a complete arc of exploration.

As with jp1m1 there's a shortage of shells (and to some extent nails) ... which is not necessarily a bad thing, but on the other hand this map makes use of a lot of shamblers (skill 2) & it's disconcerting to have to face a shambler or two or three with lots of rockets and very few nails/shells.

One specific thing I'll talk a little more about is the last big fight. It has a fun setup but FWIW I think it could be improved in a few ways:
- Make that arena bigger and more interesting to move/fight in. Once you do that you can also feel free to make it hard or impossible for the player to run back into the entry hall.
- Don't teleport new waves of monsters directly into the fight space. It's a real "feels bad man" when e.g. a fiend teleports in and instakills you with the fiend-on-head bug.
- The Quad secret is cool, but no one is going to find that until the big fight is over. That might or might not have been your intention, but IMO it would be nice if there was a chance for an observant player to grab it before or during the waves.

Keep 'em coming. 

Skill 2 demos for both maps

So what's up with the 2020 trend of episodic naming for single releases? There's this, the "beepisode", Chris Holden's map. Xalanoth too, but that one has a clear structure at least. A bit late with the Valve jokes, no? I don't really mind it, just a curious pattern. 

The final arena, in my own opinion, is the worst part of the map :) i sort-of ran out of ideas (or rather, a will to finalize all of them) and in the end, just wanted to finish the damn map.. originally, I had this idea of an open arena where 3 progressively harder monster waves spawn - and after each wave, some sort of "partial" trigger (button) is revealed and there is a cooldown moment (i.e. to grab the quad in between waves). Also I realized in the process of making the original version of the final arena (which was 2x bigger) that in the end, a large open room with sky etc feels too contrasting to the rest of the level.. it was supposed to be underground and claustrophobic, with a sense of "crawling back to the surface", not suddenly emerging into a big open castle with a lot of space to run around.

Maybe at some point i'll re-do it.. but, as we say to Death in Westeros, "not today" :P 

Yeah to be clear any comments are never asking for a re-release. :-) Just things that might be relevant in future work. 

Rare newbie mapper produced so definitely quality maps. Last year community discovered for themselves absolutely incredible HCM. Now it makes JPal. Both jp1m_ maps are perfect.

p.s. And if You hate shamblers, try to love them:
https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/middle.html 

Playthrough available here :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0W1Lu0oQeo

I have noticed that you can absolutely skip the end-level arena by making a rocket jump on the sides, as you forgot to add invisible walls there. Thankfully, this wasn't seen on my video.