Review - Silver Owl
(Version January 29th 2023)
Synopsis: Silver Owl is a melee map for eight players, featuring a slightly customized tile set with a winter theme. Custom aspects of gameplay are brought by Runes of Rebirths and unique Waygatge placement, allowing quick shifts in positioning on such a large map.
Map Aesthetics: The visual aesthetics of the map are crude - perhaps intentionally so. The Northrend trees in combination with shallow water and rocks give an unforgiving touch to the environment that works. The green-grassed rocks look sometimes quite out of place, breaking the otherwise well-carried immersion. Overall the look is good, but finer details could be carried out better with more attention to consistency and coherency: the tile usage and doodad placement sometimes look a little blotchy, giving it quite a synthetic look: with a narrow water strip in-between, the tree type shifts complement from snow-covered firs into dead-looking frozen trees (on SD graphics), while on Reforged (HD) other parts of the map looks off (Lordaeron Rocks, Lilypads and Jungle Stalkers). With the high-tone rocks placed with high-tone snow and rocks the visual clarity also suffers, making it a little hard to read some parts of the map.
Map Layout: The layout looks fair and functional - it could have some more wide-open areas for battles between all eight players, but it is manageable. The narrow-ish pathways also give more impact to the waygates that are placed quite intriguingly. With the rocks covering most tree walls, the map layout is quite restrictive but an interesting take on a large map.
Neutral Objectives: Creep camps seem decently placed and of appropriate strength and reward correlation. Jungle Stalkers are an odd choice for a winter map, but I doubt such creatures could migrate to the warm South anyway. Hah. The Way Gates are a nice touch, though quite a niche as they require boats to be utilized and have no land connection. I also like the central Goblin Merchant that has two separate creep camps (on each side) guarding it, nice job with that.
Map Gameplay: Overall a solid map. Visual work with color contrast and tones could be better as it suffers from reduced clarity due to high tones used both in walkable areas and unpathable surroundings. Way Gates bring a fresh take on positioning and the game flow. The CP-version gives slight alteration to the gameplay, but not a very drastic change.
Recommendations:
The visual clarity could be improved by being more consistent with the contrast between walkable and non-walkable areas (some areas lack contrast, for example, Northrend Trees mixed in with Lordaeron Rocks, with the terrain tiles consisting of Snow, Rough Dirt, and Rock).
The Way Gates could be color-coded as pairs. Currently, it is quite hard to say which teleport leads you where (though you can just try and find out).