I Love de_dolls

Sometimes I wish we saw more bonkers maps like this as official maps in games, just to see what the devs would conjure with no restraints on conventional map making, at least in terms of aesthetics. I love the silly nature and tone of this map, but I also genuinely enjoy it as an actual map to fight in. The scale (and what’s done with it) makes for some incredibly unique fights. You can snipe across the floor, run’n’gun on the inside of the bed, climb and brawl inside the drawers, hide behind the thin plaster walls, fly up the vents, it’s bizarre and wonderful and most certainly anything but run-of-the-mill.

I love that you can get just about anywhere on the map, FROM just about anywhere. There are holes, vents and ladders littering the environment allowing quick flanking or escape routes and it keeps you on your toes. I imagine when servers ran this they had custom settings, because I remember being able to leap down onto the bed and pillow safely from any height. Offline you can kiss your legs goodbye. When there were only a few players left or it went down to a 1v1, it would get terrifyingly intense. The amount of hidey-holes and the potential angles where you or your opponent could shoot from made for some crazy last stands or near-death jumpscares from a well placed headshot on the victim.

The Terrorists must bomb the dollhouse, presumably out of desire to burn the Hello Kitty bed sheets. So Counter-Terrorists locking down the area and keeping a lookout on the rest of the map is pretty important. The lack of a wall is a double-edged sword. It allows you to engage with threats hiding from afar with a decent amount of cover yourself and allows for some hilarious reversals when a firefight erupts on the stairs, only for the CT to jump off the edge and shoot the T in the back of the head as he finally gains the courage to storm up them. But on the other hand, trying to defuse the bomb in the open is more or less suicide. Except in the hilarious moments the Ts weapons are ineffective at the range they’re hiding from.

Sometimes the Ts hide in the murkier, colder areas behind the walls near their spawn though and it becomes a close quarters bonanza. Both teams can shoot at one another through the metal floors leading to ambushes or taking out a target through the floor from above or below with a perfect headshot before they’d even seen you. I love how much the environment manipulates the gameplay. Everywhere has its own feel when fighting, its own tips and tricks to learn. I could play this map for hours, round after round and always be surprised by the actions of individual players and the outcomes of any fight.

You could also run around the entire room on top of this rail and you could also shoot the button on the fan to push enemies to their death! Even better, if you yourself were down there, by leaping into the airstream you could quickly fling yourself from the drawers all the way to the bed (again, with the correct server settings) and it was AWESOME! Many knife kills were the result of these two tricks. The insanity of the map combined with all the knowledge you can apply to it made me fall in love with this map. All the mechanical skill and mind games of the famous tactical shooter thrown into the bedroom of a little girl… It’s perfect.

And that’s why I love de_dolls.

P.S. – There is one thing I hate about this map, but I must warn you. It’s not for the faint of heart, viewer discretion is advised. You’ve been warned.