Had a look around this last night for a brief period. This is really impressive.

The core layout is solid and while there's probably room to refine the item layout it would be difficult for me to recommend anything without some lengthy playtesting. I appreciate the thoughtful design of the flag room and its connectivity with the two major side routes. If you want to defend in this map by turtling up somewhere, you'll need to actually have your head on a swivel, and that playstyle may actually be detrimental to the team. With the current level of item density in this, it's probably better for the entire team to go mostly aggro and try to win cross-steals. That's a style of gameplay most CTF maps for this game have been unable to foster in a positive sense (plenty do result in this kind of gameplay but are regressive due to lacking in other areas).

The aesethetics are also quite nice, neutral to the player models, and broken up in interesting ways. I think more greenery around the base/flag room could look nice in addition to the palm trees, or more water, or both. Maybe some pottery on railings, or other low-cost artifacts of Egyption civilization in out of the way places.

There is one potentially major flaw with the flag room's construction that I should bring attention to: players can perform the "head stuck in ceiling" glitch under the wooden walkways adjacent to the flag and fire through them with all weapons. Often in maps where players can do this there's no real benefit to doing so, as it locks the player doing the glitch into one position and they become an easy target. However, on this map, I suspect it's fairly useful, as it's a way to attack the flag room without going into it. This could be used to take someone expecting you to enter via an established route off guard (and it's impossible to pre-aim against, because you can glitch anywhere the wooden floor exists). Timed correctly, you can probably throw a mine into the flag room through the floor while your head hitbox is cancelled entirely by the crouching animation.

Addressing this is tricky for a few reasons - you could change the wood to grating, but that would look pretty bad and completely change the way it plays. You could raise the entire base up far enough to prevent the glitch entirely, but that will have other consequences on the feel of the map. I can think of one potential way to address this without a large investment - by mitigating the usefulness of the glitch instead. By creating some visibility through the floor itself via holes and/or patchwork in the wood, you'd make it much more difficult for players to use the gitch to take defenders off-guard. And it will still be possible to throw mines directly into the flag room via the glitch, but it would often be harder to do so without it being telegraphed. And if the holes allow players to throw mines in without using the glitch, the path of least resistance will often take over - resulting in the game play being much more predictable and consistent.

⚠️ This review was written for an older revision of the file. The comments may not apply to the newest version. Reviewed as: Ankh (beta 6)

It looks like an improvement to me, but I've only played it twice - once 3v3 and the other time 5v5. I'm looking forward to playing it more 2v2 - 5v5 and getting getting feedback from all the CTF match players. Nice work Romek!

⚠️ This review was written for an older revision of the file. The comments may not apply to the newest version. Reviewed as: Ankh (beta 4)

I really love this map in terms of aesthetics and gameplay. Romek takes the best part of TF2 Lakeside (which is the middle of map imo), and then IMPROVES upon it. Then, Romek discards the worst part of Lakeside, and replaces it with his own unique routes and bases that cater to fast paced RF match gameplay which always = fun I think this map is a great example of a 2v2-4v4 CTF MATCH map that will also be fun at any player count. Since map is still in Beta, I would be curious to hear what other Match Players and/or Map Makers think of weapon/ammo placement.

⚠️ This review was written for an older revision of the file. The comments may not apply to the newest version. Reviewed as: Ankh (beta 1)

You can't go wrong with Romek's maps, and this is yet another fine piece of egyptian playground artwork for CTF. It isn't huge which is good, can be played with fewer players and the details on the textures with the layout are stunning. Eager to see how this plays in a gamenight eventually.