Introduction
Bored out of his mind after defeating the last alien invasion, Duke loiters around his motel room playing computer games and watching TV. An unexpected “Pizza Delivery!” with a gnarly growl soon turns into a failed assassination. Duke finds a note on the alien’s smoking corpse revealing they’re up to something else around these parts. Something… something… teleporter units. Better go check it out.
Review
This was C3PO’s first singleplayer release made for vanilla DUKE3D while being part of the mapping team working on levels for the Starship Troopers TC. LEAVINGLA is a shorter piece of work that showcases strengths of their mapping style that carry on through into later releases, including a special attention for lighting up scenes with appropriate shadows, even extending to areas that are often a neglected part of design in many cases such as the inside of vent shafts. C3PO had a certain distinct industrial approach for visuals, even within an urban theme, often a result of their texture usage and colour schemes. Another aspect of theirs are small in world jokes and other cute details, keeping an eye open for these can be fun. Simple things like a butcher knife embedded into a kitchen wall and the massive pile of paperwork causing someone a lot of misery. There’s a room toward the end that has a slight transformation going from basic office to a hidden EDF function, but a lack of sounds doesn’t do it much justice.
LEAVINGLA should be a fairly straight forward romp considering its size with a decent number of foes to gun down, yet there were a few problems that hamper this experience. Progression can be weird at times when it comes down to keys. You’ll grab a blue card, use it and find nowhere else to go besides operating a security monitor that reveals an unrelated window has opened up at some point. No switch is used or had any prompt occurred. A similar case after nabbing the red card and not having seen a corresponding lock, which tripped me up thinking I’m going mad having missed it within such a small playing field. That too is later revealed beyond some open windows without much notice. There isn’t much involved with the combat side of things which gets affected by how tight most interior spaces are, turning these fights into easy corner peeks and little else. It’s ironic how the largest positions from Duke’s motel room and diner hall aren’t really utilised for fighting. I took more damage from running into invisible beams of tripbombs placed at some devious spots more than anything else of note.
Conclusion
C3PO went on to create better work down the line and while LEAVINGLA has some odd aspects for progression and level design being too tight for combat to work well, it still provides a good showcase at earlier beginnings of their mapping style to see where it would eventually evolve.