As one of the entrants, I suppose I'm biased (YOU WILL DOWNLOAD "THE YEAR OF BURNING STONE" NOW!) and still a little confused why I didn't at least get an honorable mention, but...
UMS was great fun, for me. A long time ago someone posted the idea for Myth III: The Wind Age, and the idea really caught my interest. I truly hope there will be a UMS Deluxe. The new types of Herons and Locks was great fun--frankly, I liked the first level the best. Connacht meets Damas got a little old and there were no realy surprises. Darkpool Crossing was tough as nails but a lot of fun. The zerk level was interesting but involved far too much running across open countryside, IMHO.
Legend of Gor-Ash was, of course, lushly beautiful, immaculately scripted, and the new units were great. I'm not a big fan of most Creation solo maps--the entire point seems to be to run around killing random bunches of monsters for no apparent reason. LOGA broke out of that pattern--most of the time--and was therefore much more fun.
Senex Silvae was built around an incredible idea that was perfectly executed. The bit at the end with the Old Hermit suddenly acting out of revenge the whole time kind of made me go Huh? but I got over it. The drifting pollen was a really nice touch (that is what all those golden flecks in the air were supposed to be, right?) but some of the graphics were sorta cheesy--the polychromatic lightning, specifically, and the souls of the dead showing up as energon cubes.
CAGES was probably a lot of fun for micromanagers but for me it was just a pain. I feel the same way about the WWII meshes: the guns make it either way too easy to kill someone or all too difficult, based on the terrain you happen to be standing on. I've been playing with the poacher rifle round tags lately and I just don't think they were ever meant to be used seriously.
Touga was, as has been said, a good idea poorly executed... and yet I couldn't stop playing it till I won. A lot of solo maps (like the Alpha Guard maps) just aren't that compelling.
Havre River was big fun and used a lot of dwarves, which I liked (this is my new Myth obsession--blowing things up) and the dwarven mechs were fantastic. It was, admittedly, a little incoherent (especially the bit with Soulblighter's ghost) but cool all the same.
One of my favorites was sadly disqualified because it used a pre-existing color map: Fall of Naugrimin, which, for all its silliness, just looked so danged cool. The ghol anarchist bombs were maddeningly inaccurate but in general the level played well and had a lot to recommend it.
Man, that's a lot of gushing praise, huh? I guess having spent months of my life building a campaign (THAT YOU WILL DOWNLOAD NOW!) built up my respect for anyone willing to go through that madness.
