The Reserve map in this game is honestly epic, it could be one of the best FPS maps in any game I have ever played in my 25 years of gaming. A wonderful mix of terrain, open space, angles galore, a plethora of places for sniping, nade games and CQC like no other map I have ever played. It has a ton of vertical play, awesome zones like the bunkers and tunnel system. It's a truly great well rounded map
BUT, this map is so disgustingly neglected and the spawns absolutely ruin this map like nothing I have ever seen. There are a few spawns in this map that are just instant doom from the get go by placing your spawn in-between two other spawns that are RIGHT FUCKING ON TOP OF YOU with insanely clear paths to shoot other plays the moment they leave their spawn.
This causes two massive issues in the map, the high likelihood you will be shot at within seconds (even worse is the whole fucking spawning right next to Gluhar for some ungodly reason -black knight spawn-), and possibly just as bad, Reserve raids are absolutely fucking dead after 3 – 5 minutes. I play this map probably 80% of the time, there is regular 20 – 30 minute windows without a single shot on the entire map going off, and it's because half the PMC's get wiped out in literally the first few minutes due to how stupid and poorly thought out the spawns are. Don't get me wrong, not all the spawns are bad, but the two south corner spawns are completely void of any thinking by BSG, at all. Those two spawns are a joke, if the raid is full, you're dead as you will get closed in on or have 2 other spawn points just looking at you because they know someone is coming from there and there is no way out if you have other players spawn on both sides, which happens often. You have to depend on other players B-lining in a different direction.
Another issue is when someone spawns on the dome hill, if you get this spawn there is at least 1 free, easy, within 5 seconds kill you can get every time, yo9u just have to look to the bunkers in the south west. 100% of the time someone spawns there and they have to come up from the bunker, so there is only ONE direction they can go, it's a free kill for who ever spawns up there (LVNDMARK showed how freak easy that spawn is to exploit other spawns for a free kill in less than 30 seconds)
I love this map, I think it's one of the better designed maps in all of FPS gaming, but the spawns are just flat out moronic and ruin the map by making it extremely dull. Causes way too much instant fighting which in turn leads to extremely dead raids.
The worst part is, the map is so layered and spread out, you could easily just plop PMC spawns in buildings, giving players all directions to go instead of leaving in a few spawns that dictate the direction you start your raid. Look at interchange, Woods and Shoreline, there are very few forced paths on spawn, you can take off in virtually any direction. Reserve just has too many vulnerable spawns AND a few of them force the player into a direction which every player already knows where players have to run because they have no choice. What's worse, the other half of spawns are just freaking epic and allow you to hit hit value rooms immediately while others are just trying to survive the first 30 seconds from their spawn. If you spawn at the Knight building, you can unlock 3 rooms before anyone can even make it there for example. Horribly lopsided.
I feel Reserve has several spawn zones that cause the same problem as Big Red spawns were causing on Customs, it's trapping players in a corner from the very first second.
