Capture the flag, by 
First review, yay!
Bay of Pigs is a 120×60 large CTF lvl using the new Diamondus B tileset by Pyronamus. I’m not going to dive into one of my occasional super-sized reviews nor into one of the tiny midget-reviews I write when I’m in a ‘review-spree’ mood. :-)
Bay of Diamonds, also not known as Bay of Pigs, doesn’t look as great as it could have done when considering the tileset used. The eyecandy…well, shrugs, it’s all right, I guess, but absolutely nothing amazing. ChippieBW has not taken heed of my “warning” and the lvl lacks a lot when it comes to foregrond tiles as well as variety. Not all tiles in the tileset are used, which is a shame and given the size of the caves/spaces that exist in-between all of the platforms, it’s a real disappointment to see the spaces unexploited. Bay of Diamonds is not ugly, no way, it’s anything but ugly, although most areas are quite plain and normal-looking. What I do like is actually just good tileset usage. The watery background with the calm, rolling hills and the lush trees look perfect and completely justifies the name of the lvl.
The gameplay of Bay of Diamonds is much better and so is the general flow of the lvl. What’s new or original about the gameplay is that you can easily choose whether to take a spring or not. Two springs are placed in a two-tile wide hole so whenever ppl want to soar into the air, all they have to do is slow down a little. If they don’t want to take a spring up, then all they need to do is to keep running/walking…if anybody still walks in MP, that is. No annoying jumping or positioning poor Jazz/Spaz above a one-tile wide opening before being blown up by your opponent’s 50x seekers here. The springs are well-placed, the platforms, one ways and float ups are also thoughtfully positioned and there are no dead ends. The water in the lvl slows ppl down a bit and ppl just below the surface of the water are quite vulnerable to attack. But since when did submarines fight aeroplanes? :-P
Weapons placement is a bit dodgy. Most of the ammo is floating in air, making it hard to collect them without jumping. The ammo follows the countours of the lvl, but they always stay tantalizingly above your head. :-( It can be hard to collect ammo under pressure. Also, the bouncer and seeker PUs are outrageously close to the red base while blue team has a medium-length trip to the RF PU. Not only that, the red base is under water and there’s only one entrance to it, the thinnest point of the underwater cave leading to the red base is defendable by just one crazy guy with 50x powered-up RFs. Gah! The full energy carrot is well-placed, however, and it’s not too hard or too easy to camp there. ;-P
I haven’t really played a game in this lvl in MP (all I did was shoot Urbs with powered up RFs in the red base underwater cave :-P) but Bay of Diamonds seems to be a very fun lvl with no major faults. A bit more eyecandy, more easy-to-reach ammo and less imbalance between the two bases would push Bay of Diamonds up to 8.0. For now, here’s a 7.5 and a download recommendation. If not for the lvl, do it for the awful, awful music. :-P
