Review from a Single Player experience

So I played this (and all the previous Glubtastic maps after seeing the trailer for this one as someone who has never heard of them before) on Single Player, simply because I was too impatient to try and gather a group of humans - I figured I'd at least try them solo even though I was sure I would run into issues with the survivor bots - they just aren't built for this kind of extremely gimmicky custom content.  Sadly I frequently had to resort to godmode to make up the difference between playing with teammates who understand the chaos going on around them and AI bots that don't, but I still had an absolute blast.

To focus on Glubtastic 4 in particular though, I was impressed at how much of the custom content the bots DID interact with.  They attempted to attack and avoid the custom enemies and mostly behaved themselves during the vehicle section too.  The vehicle itself was a lot more temperamental than the one featured in Glubtastic 3, but was still extremely impressive in it's own right.  Unfortunately the amount of Smokers during the gate-opening area are definitely too overwhelming for a lone player.

Going back to the custom enemies, at first I was beating them through a fluke, thinking they were just damage sponges. When I first realised how I was actually killing them I was really impressed by the fact that they WEREN'T just damage sponges, which is really above and beyond for custom enemies.  The boss fight was a bit more typical in this sense but the animation, spectacle and sheer variety of attacks to anticipate and avoid make up the difference.  While I again had to use cheats to stay alive playing solo here, I will say it's worth adding some gun spawns to the area. I went in with an m60 and a melee weapon, and naturally once the m60 had run out, I had no way to attack the boss without using cheats at that point.

Cut-scene work is really impressive, there was a lot of fantastic laughs to be had along the way and some of them were just generally cool overall.  I feel like you could make a really special story-driven campaign with these talents unlike what we've ever seen if only you'd use your talents for good rather than evil, hahaha!

The checkpoint system is extremely cool and was much appreciated on Map 2, which had a lot of slow exploration at first (the switches here could be a little more obvious as to what they trigger, finding them wasn't particularly fun).  The bots also have trouble navigating down to the lower depths of the room with the gnome temple, which is surprising considering you had them all platforming alongside the player in earlier campaigns.  My only gripe is that Map 6 definitely needed a few more checkpoints - dying to the very fast-moving doors at the end of the conveyor belt section after the rooms of "witches" and being sent back to the start of the map was insanely demoralising and probably the only time in the entire series of Glubtastic that I lost patience and just straight-up noclipped back to where I got to rather than speedrunning because I knew what I was dealing with now etc.

The platforming section was also really fun and surprisingly non-trolly compared to the series leading up to this point.

Overall though, I really enjoyed my time playing through this series.  While they just simply aren't built for single player, it was very easy to understand the potential of four human players taking on this gauntlet, and while I'm a little sad I robbed myself of the experience of playing this with friends for the first time, I'm eager to introduce some of them to it... and hang back and let them go first.  The sheer technical prowess on offer here is what elevates me to give it a 5-star.  It's definitely not a traditional, vanilla campaign, but I think it takes the mind of someone who wants to make something as insane as this to truly break open and push the game to its limits.  It's far from perfect, but to expect a campaign this unique to be perfect is a tall order.  The unique gameplay novelties that each map offers and amount of humour makes up the difference.

I definitely recommend folks play the entire series to fully appreciate the build-up and what passes for the strange narrative these campaigns entail, just be prepared to play on easy and use cheats to compensate for the AI bots' incompetence if you want to play them alone.  The poor guys try but they just weren't built for stuff this bizarre.

It's a shame that (I assume) custom campaigns can't be given a seperate set of rules for offline and online play.  I can definitely see how reducing this stuff too much would make the campaign far too easy when played with a full team of humans.  If you ever have it in you, releasing a "single player cut" of the Glubtastic series that reduces the burden on a lone player would be amazing, but it makes sense to give priority to the online experience.

P.S. To my fellow Rochelle players... Maybe try someone else for this one.