Barrel Full of Monkeys

What a great concept! Monkeys + barrel rolls + splosionz = Win!
I can see some memorable custom games taking place here.

 

Zow, I love this game! I cant describe how this game is great but yet great even more. The concept is amazing, gameplay undescribable and aesthetics beautiful. All I can really is simply great job.

 

^So Much Win^

But at any rate, I've played this many times wth you, and while I can't fathom why you would change it to rockets only, it is still a hilarious and enjoyable game. A job well done.

 

I WANT MEH BANNANA!!!!!!!1!1!11!!!111111!
lol this was a chaotic (trading cards) game and i enjoyed every minute of it. and zows probably the only one who will get the bannana thing... inside jokes are fun. I love the barrel rolling too. its the best part!

 

You know it's a Zow Jr map because he's the only person left in this earth who still wears Operator.

Anyway, this looks like a great concept for a minigame. Simple, chaotic, and hilarious. I'll download it and give you a full review later today.

 

Awesome. But wouldn't it be possible to go to the sides and spawnkill everybody?

 

I played this game during TGIF and Darth Human made some improvements to the gametype. Instead of rocket launchers the players had focus rifles and swords. That was much better than rocket launchers. I suggest to change the map to this and possibly even edit a bit more to making scoring not quite so easy (Maybe decrease the size of the scoring zone). If you make these changes I can definitely see Barrel Full of Monkeys being a great game.

Thanks to Rorak Kuroda on the originality section, by the way.

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Barrel Full of Monkeys

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Barrel Full of Fun, as the map name is called, utilizing a simple well known game culture meme, “do a barrel roll”. Peppy Hare would be proud of this map as players must, “do a barrel roll”, to score. The concept and play space encourage great gameplay but the gametype, unfortunately, gets in the way of this map being a new mini-game favorite.

Players must score twenty-five skulls in order to win. This seems like an easy number to achieve, especially if there are a lot of players in the party, but in practice scoring is slow. The reason, rocket launchers and the nature in which skulls are scored. If these two areas were tweaked, Barrel Full of Monkeys would be a TGIF classic.

Player speed is increased three hundred percent, jump height is removed, and players have infinite use of evade. The end result, the only real movement players have is to barrel roll. The scoring zone is the entire ceiling area of the map. While this system ups the challenge factor, it also makes the rocket launcher a poor choice to actually carry out the kills. Rockets are slow ammunition, so by the time the shot is lined up and fired, the target would have most likely moved on. This makes getting kills essentially random which really slows down the game. This game does not do well once slowed down.

The second problem, the actual scoring in the scoring system. Head hunter is a fine gametype and players do need to score somewhere but having the entire upper section of the play-area be the goal means once players do get a skull, there is no stopping them from scoring. In execution all of the killing only happens on the bottom, flat section of the map and occasionally on the slanted bottom sections. There needs to be a balance in being able to score and how hard it is to kill people for this game to be truly enjoyable.

Past the annoyance of dealing with the slow rocket launcher and the fact that it is near impossible to stop anyone from scoring once they have a skull, the gameplay is enjoyable. Flying through the air, bouncing off of slanted walls, and doing a complete circle around the map is a generally great feeling. It is just a shame the gametype stuff gets in the way of what could have been a real gem.

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Barrel Full of Fun is a free-for-all style game which means every player has an equal chance to win. As killing people is almost completely luck driven it does not matter if someone has played this game a hundred times before or it is their first time.

As previously mentioned, the balance between difficulty in killing other players, and ease of scoring once a skull has been collected is just not there. The bottom floor effectively becomes the death zone with people just spraying it with rocket launcher fire until they get a kill. Then a dash to the center to pick up whatever skulls might have been dropped ensues. Players cannot linger to long during this stage because more rockets are sure to descend on those looking to collect the skulls. The result is players will rarely have any more than one to three skulls at any point in the game. Of course, once they have those skulls it is almost impossible to stop them as once the player uses their evade and starts bouncing off the walls they are essentially “home free”.

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Barrel Full of Fun is completely enclosed making escape impossible. There is no framerate lag resulting from the forge piece design however the nature of having so many rockets on screen can occasionally slow down the match. The game must render all the particle effects resulting from the rocket launcher collisions and with a full party of people that can cause lag. This is by no fault of the map designer and is just a point of interest to know for full parties of people.

There is a spherical object in the center of the play-area which seems to serve no purpose other than to provide a place for players to land on. This gives players who happen to get a lucky bounce off of a wall onto the spherical object a height advantage over the rest of the playing field. These players then can rain down rockets on the players below. These stationary targets are not that difficult to dispatch of but given the challenging nature of killing people in this game it is questionable why there is any object in the center at all.

Another frustrating occurrence is suicide. Player movement is three hundred percent faster which means there is a real possibility that the rockets players shoot could end up hitting them if they decide to move toward the path of their rocket. Not only can players end up killing themselves with their own rockets but suicide can also occur by slamming into the flat sides of the map. There is no suicide penalty for score but it is still frustrating when it occurs.

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The map is of simple design. It is essentially a giant barrel. The left and right side of the map are two flat walls. Between these walls are slanted flat faces going all the way around the play-area. Everything is smoothly forged and no lips or edges are around to slow player movement.

The center spherical object looks nice, and it does serve some basic line-of-sight blocking function but it makes little aesthetic sense. The design of this map is fashioned after a barrel. Barrels do not have spheres within them. Other than this aesthetic oddity the map does look good. It could use a little bit of color though as everything has that forerunner grey look.

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Barrel Full of Monkeys offers an entirely new dynamic to circular arena maps. That is, that it is a sideways circular arena. It is not often that players fight in such intense and strange scenarios, where a player can at any moment be underneath you, and in another moment, directly above you. It is this dynamic which creates an entire new perspective on how to win a game. Capturing skulls becomes reliant upon your ability to quickly observe your surroundings, rather than your ability to defeat an enemy. Luck rears its ugly head, and like a twisted game of Mario Party, no matter how good your strategy is, there's still every possibility of losing the game. In addition, instead of taking ideas used in previous maps or halo games, Barrel Full of Monkeys took Reach's functions and changed them to maximize the hectic style of gameplay which all Halo players crave.

However, the innovation does come to a screeching halt when the ideas themselves are analytically considered. Since the Dawn of Halo, mini-games often choose to simply take all player traits and make them as ridiculous as possible, which is fun, but becomes very repetitive. Barrel Full of Monkeys does well to refine these core ideas to add new spins in new directions to the mundane pool of hectic mini-games, but because of the core mechanics, gameplay does become stale. An old spoon can be twisted many ways, but no matter the twist or turn it takes, it is still a spoon.

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Rating Multipliers


Enjoyment: 6 x 3.0 = 18 out of 30
Balance: 5 x 3.0 = 15 out of 30
Durability: 7 x 1.5 = 10.5 out of 15
Aesthetic : 8 x 1.5 = 12 out of 15
Originality: 8 x 1.0 = 8 out of 10

Final Score



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