The original Unreal Tournament version of Facing Worlds received critical acclaim, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest first-person shooter maps of all time.

[1] "Foregone Destruction", the song that plays ingame within Facing Worlds, was written with minimal collaboration between Fiorentino and the co-composer of Unreal Tournament's soundtrack, Michiel van den Bos, who mostly relied on text explanations of Unreal Tournament when composing its soundtrack, as he did not have appropriate hardware to run the game itself.

[2][3][4][5][6] According to Fiorentino, telemetry for Unreal Tournament revealed that Facing Worlds was played more than all other Capture the Flag levels combined.

[8] Peter Glagowski of Destructoid commented that "it is hard to understate the mastery of design that is CTF-Face", praising the map for encouraging teamwork and playstyle diversity without sacrificing its simplicity.

Facing Worlds has also been remade as a custom map for other games, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Halo 5: Guardians.