me wrote:

I got this because I loved HL1 single player map packs and stuff, and the review said this was maybe one of THE best HL2 single player mods out there. Seeing as how there was only about one singular HL2 single player map pack worth playing at all, this is not the glowing recommendation that it might sound like. Anyone who actually thinks that this is one of the best single player experiences you can have should not be trusted and should have to register with the state like a sex offender, being forced to go from door to door telling people that they are living in the area and if they have an opinion then you should believe the opposite. Fortunately, being fired from the PHL writing staff wouldn't be necessary, because who cares?

It was promising in the beginning, in fact I thought the whole first half was pretty good with a lot of combat. There were a few problems I thought, such as lots of long range fighting and not having the right weapons or not enough ammo for them, requiring a lot of time spent trying to snipe someone with the pulse rifle or SMG. The "puzzles" and exploration were the same old Quake 2 style of finding what corner to wander around or picking up the gold keycard or whatever that was already wrecked by Old Man Murray back in 1998 or so. Basically no use of physics to get through areas. Even with the length of each map, areas were still too cramped for the current generation of games and the Source engine. The dune buggy felt more like something you had to lug around to open doors than something you actually drove around, most of the time it was reduced to something you had to park so you could get out and fight through the same 4 enemies spawning at the same time (sometimes in plain sight dropping right out of thin air) to find the switch and open a door. Still, the environments were pretty cool and well-designed, and had some nice open endedness to them. Also the game kept autosaving frequently with a notice in the game that it was autosaving, and I thought that was handy.

After the halfway point, the map pack totally falls apart and becomes a lot of overlong third person camera shots (where the enemies MAY attack you or run up to your location while you have to just stand there watching it play out instead of engaging them right out like you'd be able to in Half-Life 2). The hallucination scene would've been a nice 10 minute diversion, but it turns into a 3 hour annoying borefest of figuring out map triggers, env_hurt zones, strange vision filters that sometimes don't work and require loading up the next map map through the console, and then the ultimate insult, playing and fighting through several uninterrupted hours without the HEV suit, so you get weapons and can't even switch them. Hallucination scenes were old even back in the godawful and overrated Chemical Existence. That and having to sneak around in a game that doesn't really have a stealth system, which means getting found out and killed several times until you memorize enemy paths through memory, and even then they might come out in a pack of 4 which will leave you better off just turning on godmode, which is not how any map pack should be played. It soured the entire experience. This entire section of the map pack is spent completely unable to monitor your health or change weapons, and yet you're still expected to fight swarms of enemies, and as an added insult it gives you other weapons and grenades which you have to usually waste just to get back to your guns. Fighting without the HEV suit is not such a novelty that it needs to be stretched out for hours. The whole pack ends with inexplicable instant-kill fire, apparently everywhere, requiring godmode and the occasional noclip, and at the end you don't get a sure chance to kill Breen as the constant text interruptions keep saying to do. At the very end, I managed to kill Breen and the G-Man, and then the final door bugged out and wouldn't open. It wasn't the first time it happened.

Playtesting usually isn't limited to seeing if a map doesn't crash your computer, but if it can be played by players without cheats. This includes endless spawning enemies without a hint that this situation won't be like the previous parts of the pack that had many spawning enemies but you had to fight through all of them to trigger the next part. It doesn't help if they keep spawning, 4 at a time, from the same two spots. In HL2, the Nova Prospekt part where you have to hold off a giant swarm of combine soliders by setting up turrets and trying to run around keeping them up whole blasting guys with shotguns was challanging. This map pack is sort of like that without adding vital things for that sort of situation, such as cover spots and correct health and armor placement. Most of the battles are plain old head on fights where the enemies come at you in single file rows and you hold down the fire button. Definitely not interesting after the 50th time. Sometimes there's variety in the location and spawn points of the enemies, but it's still 4 of them and 1 of you completely out in the open, which means the guy with the shotgun eats up most of your health and armor in a few seconds while you run around firing hoping that they die before you take too much damage to go anywhere. If I were Gordon Freeman in this situation, I'd just stay home and let the world blow up.

Telling people not to play on hard mode doesn't mean your game is hard, it means you couldn't think of a way to make your game work properly on a high difficulty setting because you were too busy throwing enemies in the map without adding more cover or something. This could've been helped if your main weapons became the magnum and crossbow, with the max ammo increased and you found more ammo for these weapons so you could still fight a ton of enemies but at longer ranges, as they'll usually be shooting you from. If you want to throw someone off from sniping, have enemies fastrope down from above closeby. I know, that's a lot of work and wouldn't even be necessary to make this map pack better (just delete the last half and replace it with a room where you shoot Breen in the head with a magnum or crossbow, all better!).

The environment design itself is solid and mostly creative, and the first half is good straightforward single player stuff. The rest ruins it. Saying this is the best HL2 mod yet, or that it's in any way even half as good as HL2 or episode 1 or Minerva is completely insane and should get you put on notice. If anyone I know told me something like that, I would never trust their opinion ever again. I could believe the guy who made this map pack could get hired somewhere to make maps, as long as he wasn't allowed to design them. Unless it was for Daikatana.