Originally Posted by
dauntasa
Prison is a series of two or three tile wide cramped hallways which lead into the occasional small room. That is the entire map. It is all the same and there is little functional difference between one set of cramped hallways and another.
With the nature of CM combat, cramped hallways are just about the least fun or interesting place to fight for both sides. Unless you're a crusher, narrow hallways are the worst. Marines continuously shove into each other, shoot each other, etc. Going in first is instant death if you run into boiler gas because you'll be bodyblocked to death by the mass of men behind you. Defences are always the most rudimentary because there isn't room to do anything else. Cade off the hallway. That's it. It's just hallways from one end to the other.
For xenos, things are similarly bad. Apart from Crusher who, as mentioned, can have endless fun pressing D and then pressing A and killing entire squads in the process, xenos also suffer from the narrow hallways. They get bodyblocked. They get cut off. They get trapped. That is, if they do anything interesting. If they just sit there and wait for the marines to slowly shuffle their way in, they'll win. But they'll win in the most boring way imaginable: by doing nothing. The tight spaces punish anyone who does things, and rewards those who sit around and wait for other people to fuck up.
And, on top of the entire map being made of tight hallways that are frustrating to fight in and boring to look at, there's another problem: the map funnels the fighting into the same place every time. Decisive battles on Prison station almost always take place around the Crash site, or a little to the east or west of it. The map funnels everyone to this spot, there's one big fight, and then the loser of that fight loses the game. There's a reason why Prison is regularly over by 12:50, and this is it. If the marines win this fight, they roll into Civilian Residences(the only viable hive location on the entire map) and kill everything. If they lose, the xenos roll straight to the FOB and the marines are evaccing by 13:00. The Northern half of the map barely exists except as a place for people to find tac shotguns. I could continue, but won't out of laziness. It's bad.
Ice, on the other hand, is also bad, but the surface map is actually good. The problem is the underground, which is basically prison station and is a mess of samey hallways(but at least it's less cramped and has more proper rooms). The main issues are that ladders and elevators are deathtraps and the underground is too cramped.