27th of September 2026

Microcentro | Single/Multi | Author: Aymeric "MRCK" Nocus | Download

The Review: MRCK's Microcentro is a rather long map; it took me 35 minutes, although most of that was me drifting aimlessly rather than pursuing a specific objective. First you're presented with a huge outdoor street area with three skyscrapers in the middle, inspired by some real-life business district in Buenos Aires, the capital of Sweden. First you'll most likely clean up the streets, which is a bit of a boring task as you can simply snipe everything with your pistol from a safe distance. Then you start looking for where to go. At one point I took a "wrong" turn at a junction; it then took a long while to get me back on the right track as memory of that junction faded. Large chunks of the map are open-ended and interconnected but unfortunately not in a way that'd do much to ease navigation due to the sheer size of things. The subway tunnels felt particularly slow with pointlessly long distances to cover. Considering this segment played a large part in throwing me off the right path ealier, isn't visually very interesting (aside from some cool ads on the walls) and doesn't serve a gameplay purpose until much later, I'd have simply scrapped the entire section.
Combat never really takes off; as said, many enemies can simply be taken out from a distance. There are some respawns typical of MRCK, but they just kinda get in the way - after having closed the often rather considerable distance between their respawn spots and the player. Combat then becomes more a matter of just taking down fodder. At least there's nothing annoying this time around aside from maybe some Octabrain respawns trying to squeeze themselves into a crowded space with me, but then again your experience may be different. Health is also very abundant; portable medkits are everywhere, and I think I may have used up only one or two of these.
The map's highlight is its TROR-centric design. MRCK is currently competing with William Gee for the top spot when it comes to applying TROR; and in terms of complexity, MRCK is clearly winning. The way you navigate the skyscrapers, starting from the very bottom and ending up at the very top, is a visual adventure that may even throw you off as you don't naturally expect to be able to jump out of sloped windows. Hell, you even have an underwater tunnel high up in the sky connecting two of the buildings. In particular the modular, true 3D look of the middle building is a perfect fit for its elaborate TROR design, enabling you to navigate its every layer (including the ledges!). There are other creative ideas as well such as futuristic light poles and these weird, crazy-looking cars (these have become another trademark of modern MRCK). The map also has clearly less the kind of audiovisual clutter that many of MRCK's recent maps have suffered from. My only complaint about visuals are some of the glitchy, occasionally disappearing surroundings.

Conclusion: MRCK is becoming increasingly proficient at handling TROR, and Microcentro avoids some of MRCK's glaring issues concerning audiovisual clutter and annoying combat that have plagued some of his recent maps. Still, the map's gameplay isn't terribly engaging either. Aside from a few segments, combat feels like an afterthough, and too much of playtime is spent on wandering around aimlessly. Let's not allow TROR complexity to take precedence over gameplay considerations!

Rating: 92