GAMEPLAY
Azumith is a map that feels like it has potential for interesting and fun gameplay areas, but many parts of it feel very unpolished, rushed and/or poorly thought out. Many times my first impressions when walking around the map for the first time was "Wow, this area looks fun to fight in", only to discover that it either wasn't or the fun was very one sided towards one team. This becomes very apparent right away on the A point. I had a lot of fun defending, but when it was my turn to attack, I quickly realized that I had fun on defense because the attacking teams options are extremely limited and often just plain unfun to fight around.
Look at all these small doorways on the low ground you have to push through to get anywhere near the point, this feels like I have been transported back in time to early days of TF2 and I am suddenly playing Dustbowl with million demomen spamming every tiny crack you have to try to push through. There is nothing wrong with small doorways and easily spammable routes, those can actually be very important for gameplay, but when every option you have is the same, your choices when attacking don't matter and defending becomes basically an act repetition of same thing every round. The gameplay doesn't evolve, it remains static.
The problems don't end there, beyond a heavy and demoman sitting on the deck with the one way door, spamming the tiny doorways, there isn't much of a forward hold on A. After mentioned hold on the upper deck also allows red to keep jumping on blue trying to push through the outer route and can be very painful to break up because the only ways in are, you guessed in, tiny doorways. One of which is behind a very roundabout route through a rooftop and a very narrow ladder which can be a death trap if you are spotted while crossing.
The starting area in general is very uninteresting and doesn't lend itself to any sort of a proper front line, it is much better to just sit on the point and wait for blue team to come to you, which is fine but it is really the only gameplay you are going to have here. The outer upper deck is only place where you can really try to make any sort of a forward stand and not even that is very good, despite overlooking most of the starting area. It is very exposed and it is much more effective sit indoors and force blue to push through all the spam heavy routes. In general, this area feels very much like a box that has been filled with some fences and a building to the side, if there is one area I would outright redo entirely on this map, it is this one.
I haven't got much to say about the point itself, it seems like an interesting point, but nothing leading up to it is really doing anything to let anything of interest to happen. If the area before it was suited for an initial front line and the routes allowed for more interesting options and playstyles, the point would probably play really well with very little changes.
Also side note, there is plenty of room on the map to have a red forward that doesn't require doing a loop, nobody likes needlessly complicated walks from spawn to the front line and it just makes things needlessly confusing for someone new to the map.
Now, onto B, and this is where this map really starts to fall apart in my opinion. B point itself once again seems like it could be interesting but the area before it feels like it repeats all the mistakes of the previous point on even more extreme scale.
Right out of the gate you are met with this area, now with even more doorway based routes that are all underneath an immense height which can easily be abused and is extremely painful to fight against, especially if the defense knows what they are doing. Once again, my options as attacker are being limited by the map itself, I can choose a doorway to an area that holds gives you no real advantage to another doorway to an area that gives you no real advantage but it is behind longer walk time. This is not an unbreakable position, but boy is it dire to play around, but the problems don't end there.
Sightlines, sightlines everywhere. Even if you manage to get enough of a foothold to not have red just sitting on the container, you basically have to play and push through this long rectangle with most of the routes leading you right into the sightlines across this entire area. Pushing into Doom playing sniper in this area was one of the most aggravating experiences I've had in TF2. There is a way around it however, but it is almost suicidal.
Now introducing, the ultimate small doorway of death. Not only are you pushing through a small doorway, the area around the doorway is also small and you are pushing into a blind corner with no certainty what you are pushing into. There is also a platform above you that could be under red control, you have no way of telling. This route could be viable if it at very least had a window I can look out of to see what is waiting for me around the corner.
Side note: You should probably close this door until B is capped to prevent combos just skipping the point and walking all the way around C to the red spawn. It is not a big or common issue but something to consider.
Now, we move on to the C point, which can be an absolute nightmare to get even remotely close to if red manages to set up their defense. The problems begin all the way from the blue forward, from which the routing feels almost overwhelming and needlessly complicated. There is also a lack of any sort of a bottleneck to prevent red from bleeding into this area if blue is pushed back.
Look at all these routes and doorways, it is an information overload for a new player. In my opinion routing from forward spawns, especially for blue, should always be as simple as you can make it without making the map too basic. More complicated and spread out the routing is, harder it becomes for new players find their way and for the attacking team to stop red bleeding into the area and find a consistent front line naturally, something which they almost never have on C. Beyond the overly complicated pathing, it doesn't help attackers cause that their lobby just kind of sucks.
This is the lobby and the primary path to it, the lower route doesn't really give you much of an advantage and forces you to cross some very awkwardly angles sightlines that cut through the main doorway to C. You are also very likely to die to a combo pushing in from red through the door further back. There is also no good way to rotate to the high ground if you are in the lower lobby, you either cross the after mentioned sightlines or you take another door, which is totally out of the way and disconnected. (And even then you have to do a 180 degree turn to even get to the high ground.)
This is just all very awkward, and while this is more a critique post than a feedback post, I can't help but suggest something that would make this lobby simpler to navigate, easier to hold and just generally more interesting to play around. You would have to still make changes to B and C overall, but this is something to keep in mind.
I would get rid of the doorway to the side entirely, hell, the whole area behind shed even and replace it with a doorway here that leads to a stairs to the upper level. Get rid of the old stairs up and then flip the high ground above the lobby like this.
Now the rotations are smoother and holding the lobby is easier because you can clearly hold the primary way red has in and there is no more sneaky flank to get around the entire blue team when they are pushing from their forward spawn. This would also make much more sense as a staging area for blue and offensive engineers. All this said though, C's problems don't end in the lobby and the forward spawn.
C overall is suffering from very clearly being a large space surrounding one building that has been filled with useless buildings and various props that don't really do anything for gameplay, everything is also in a very awkward angle because of the main building, making sightlines feel very janky and combat generally just overall very uncomfortable. There is also the issue of unbreakable and unfun high ground, if red is not being exceptionally bad. Both of the ways up to the high ground overseeing the point area requires attackers to go the red spawn and trying to spawn camp them. This is just not at all fun and honestly just very poor gameplay, spawn camping should be only happening if a team is getting rolled or someone is doing something sneaky, not as a necessary measure to win a round or gain control of an important area on the map.
It doesn't help that the flank for blue is just not very good.
It can easily be seen from the platform overlooking C and the space you are trying to push through is very cramped because of a building that has just been slapped in the middle of the area. I would just remove the building and try to add some interest with some small cliffs and displacement work, the building feels a lot like it was just plopped down to make the area less flat and open.
Even if you manage to push through this, you are then faced with a blind corner with a death pit around you. I have seen illegal amount of wasted ubers in this area because one pyro you cannot see will end your push before it even started. There would be nothing wrong with this, if this wasn't the only other viable route for blue on C and perhaps their only viable route.
When I was defending C for the first time, it was very easy to not fully grasp where the last point actually is. This is the view you get from the red last spawn, everything in front of you is actually the wrong way to go, C is in fact to the side and you have to turn 90 degrees and more to access it. This is very annoying, especially when playing the map for the first time.
There is also this whole area here that doesn't really contribute much to either team and feels weirdly disconnected and out of place, it's only function seems to be an impromptu sniper deck for snipers. There is no reason red spawn just could have not been here instead of a weird corner that directs you the wrong way upon exit.
DETAILING
Right away on the first glance, it is obvious a lot of buildings are just blocks and exist to either box you in or to break up areas for optimization. Obviously a lot of building in even the most detailed maps are very boxy and serve this same purpose, but this map does very little hide the illusion and you can tell right away even in the middle of intense gameplay.
Almost everything is uniform in height, most buildings lack any sort of break up in their form and angled roofs, even when there are some angled roofs, they too are usually around the same height as the other buildings and most of them feel bit too thick to not look blocky too. The 3D skybox is very minimal and doesn't really add depth to the surroundings, most of the time the map feels like the world is floating in a blue void.
The transitions between the areas feel very strange and sudden too, there is nothing wrong with the idea itself, I quite like the rather reverse progression map has. Normally a map like this would start in the distant farmlands and end at the docks, with the latter being the spytech facade, but here it is reversed and I really like this concept. Unfortunately the transition is not at all subtle and the map kind of just turns from industrial to farms and forests between one room, there is a lot more that could be done with the transition between those two themes and the eventual facade at the end.
There are way too many glow effects on the map, most of the lights on it should use the spotlight effects instead and they look especially off on all the florescent lights.
There's also some very... strange details that really stick out as weird, off looking and some times just totally random.
