Sweet Half-Life is one of those mods that keep me interested in Black Mesa.
Sweet Half-Life has a great many things that make it shine above other mods. One of these things is the Storyline. The Storyline itself is average. Nothing really seems special about it. But soon enough you realize how cool (in my opinion) it is. The story of SHL is basically some backstory for Half-Life. I am not going to go into detail about it, but it is interesting nonetheless. The graphics are not really that much to talk about. It's HL1, which had average graphics already when it came out. What made Half-life popular is the gameplay, and this shines in SHL as well. Strange new enemies and some interesting NPCs make you want to play more, mainly to see how they will fight and how you can kill them.
There are some major drawbacks, however. There are many glitches that will greatly detract how much fun you have, like that stupid invisible wall glitch which happens pretty early on. Also, many mods today have that point in the game where it is unclear where you should go. Sadly, Sweet Half-Life has many of these points, and even worse, many of these moments are early on.
Unsurprisingly, the mod is not that original. Many mods have brought their own version of backstory to the Half-Life universe. What stands out in SHL is that there are absolutely no flaws. No loose ends or conflicting factors. It fits perfectly into the original HL storyline. Several experiements and enemies seem like they could actually have been in the HL universe.
Another drawback is what I call: Gameslowdownitus. Towards the middle or so, the mod gets repetitive and somewhat predictable, something I was truly hoping would not happen. At least I got to fire mah laz0r.
I give Sweet Half-Life a 3 out of 5.
