Reviews - BenzoSt

If you enjoyed HL2 and its episodes, be assured that you will enjoy this mod.

What I liked most about this mod was its style, plot, and dialogue. The action was pretty well balanced as well. If you have difficulty understanding the intentionally distorted voices of your character, Bad Cop 3650, or your fellow combine, simply turn on subtitles. And you should indeed enjoy the dialogue, especially given that Bad Cop 3650 has about as much swagger as Duke Nukem from Duke Nukem 3D (in other words, that's a LOT of swagger).

The only irk I had with this experience is exactly the irk that I had with the official HL2 games, and that is that the autosave/checkpoint system saves the entirety of your current state, which can result in you respawning at a checkpoint with very low health. I would prefer if the authors make each combat scenario a little more difficult but set the game to always respawn you with 100% health and 100% armor.

Aside from that, I suppose the only thing keeping this mod from a perfect 10/10 would be that the textures look dated and blurry by modern standards, but that's something that can probably be efficiently rectified with AI texture upsampling.

LONG VERSION REVIEW: (it's warranted because this beta mod, although a little glitchy, shows tremendous potential)

HERE IS WHAT I LIKED:
• AMAZING alterations to existing Quake levels, with additional details and decorations like corpses spiked to walls, vines hanging from ceilings, and dripping lava and sewer sludge.
• More monster variety. I really appreciated the multiple variants of existing monsters, such as multiple versions of ogres, zombies, and knights.
• Improved gore effects with blood painting the floors, walls, and ceilings. Very well done!
• Footstep sounds for player and monsters.
• Improved episode 1 boss battle against Chthon, although I found it to be a bit too difficult – I think his projectiles should only deal like 75 dmaage instead of 100.
• Bosses added at the ends of episodes 2 and 3. However, these bosses could use a little bit of a health boost to make them more challenging.
• EPIC final level in an extended Shub-Niggurath’s Pit, but with notable things I didn’t like, which I will describe later.

HERE IS WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
• I mysteriously lost previously collected runes when restarting levels after dying, which essentially forced me to cheat with ‘impulse 11’. Evidently, rune loss after dying is an old Quake glitch, and it really should be fixed in this release, since having to either cheat or repeat an entire episode is terrible.
• After dying, clicking the mouse automatically loads my last quick save. I clicked the mouse instinctively a few times after dying, and this sent me all the way back to the Start Map (since I regard quicksaves as virtually cheating). Anyway, it isn't too much to ask to make your players manually press F9 to quick-load.
• Shub Niggurath’s Pit was disproportionately difficult and frustrating. This level could have been less frustrating if the esophagus didn't cause as much crushing damage.
• Also in Shub-Niggurath’s pit, towards the end of the level, there was a spot where you kill like 4 ogres then a pair of Yakmans spawn, which likewise need to be killed in order to proceed. On 2 occasions, the Yakmans didn’t spawn after I killed the ogres, which left me stranded and forced me to restart the level.

GRAPHICS AND GAMEPLAY GLITCHES:
• Water was messed up. For example, in E1M3 you can see the legs of zombies underwater, but nothing else. And in E2M2, water occasionally seems to toggle between looking murky and mirror-like, depending on your viewing angle. Using the console command 'r_novis 1' corrects this, but makes water look pristine and refreshing, which is counter to the grim-and-grungy vibe of Quake. So perhaps add a bit more fog to the underwater areas in the next release.
• Blood stains formed a sort of red square on hanging vines in The Ebon Fortress in episode 2.
• Fiends can sometimes get stuck in the air mid-leap when they touch a wall.
• Zombies got stuck in mid-air in starting area of Azure Agony.
• There really should be at least some sort of a blood-geyser when you Thunderbolt a monster into gibbing.

MONSTER ISSUES:
• What’s up with those Enforcers with proximity grenades?! Beep-beep, BOOM! (and I’m instantly dead from like full health, WTF?!) This can and should be disabled by default.
• Some new monsters, like Yakman, the flying devils, and especially the spiders, seemed out of place in a Quake game.
• It would be nice to be able to blow up zombies when they are unconscious, instead of having to wait patiently for them to wake up.

MISCELLANIOUS:
• Decrease the bounding boxes of pickups. I know this is an issue with vanilla Quake. Anyway, I often pickup items by accident, which can be really irritating when, for example, I accidentally walk over a medkit while at 99 health. This can be corrected with config files, which will allow you to only take as much ammo or health from a pickup as needed to max out.
• I recently tried a mod for Quake 2 called Neural Upscale, which really improved the textures but without changing the feel of the textures. Keep an eye out for an AI texture improvement pack for Quake that would be compatible with Quake 1.5. I know (and you probably also know) that there are already high-res texture packs for Quake, but I don’t think that’s the feel you were going for with your mod.
- I prefer the texturemode "gl_linear_mipmap_linear", whereas this mod uses "gl_linear_mipmap_nearest". However, gl_linear_mipmap_linear causes a weird border around bloodpools from slain monsters.

This mod is annoying, awkward, and ugly… and that's what makes it great! The most memorable game mods are those that bring a new experience that feels fresh and full of novelty. Although Duck Nukem is actually rotten and full of novelty, I nevertheless feel compelled to strongly recommend it specifically to my fellow loonies who appreciate gaming experiences that are downright weird and silly. This mod ain't for everyone, but it is for me. Also check out Bubba Lego Tep, also by Brain Trepanier.

Just about everything about Mmod makes Half-Life 2 simply better, especially the adjustments to the weapons. With the built-in menu, adjusting the many features of MMod is easy. I found that the option 'enhance combine accuracy' made the game much more difficult, so much so that I had to turn it off. I would go so far as to recommend that even first-time HL2 players use this mod along with Half-Life 2 Update for a significantly improved gaming experience that doesn't meddle with the atmosphere of the original game.

The purpose of computer games is to be fun. This mod is fun. Lots and lots of fun. There are a few imperfections, such as with imps and revenants triggering their melee hit sounds when they actually whiff, and also the fact that some demons die just a little too easily to the upgraded weapons - most notably cacodemons easily pop into chunks with a single super shotgun blast. But if this mod were to significantly improve in the future, I would feel compelled to petition ModDB to allow reviewers to award a score of 11. The included manual is also well written and will help you properly get the mod working and properly configured.

This mod tries to tune Doom 3 into a realistic survival horror game with an emphasis on cautious gameplay and ammo management. It also corrects many logical issues with vanilla Doom 3. Some of the gameplay changes are for the better - you can store medkits and adrenaline for later use, melee with any weapon, ammo isn't so ludicrously abundant, and the final battle in the Hellhole is epic. Unfortunately, I found some of the alternate firing modes of the weapons awkward, noticed that monsters ignored weapon-mounted flashlights, and definitely found the volume of weapons firing and footsteps either too quiet or way too loud. So this mod could use some further tweaking of .def, .script, and .sndshd files. Furthermore, I think the Sikkmod options should be adjusted so that the image doesn't look so high-contrast and washed out.

This mod does a remarkable job of fulfilling its intention: to improve the graphics of Doom 3 without making any changes whatsoever to gameplay mechanics. It also has an improved menu with support for higher resolutions. A glaring omission is that the particle effects aren't upgraded, and I think incorporating particles from, say, the Phrozo mod would be a big improvement. Also, there are a few textures which aren't yet upgraded, so attending to them would likewise be an improvement. Nevertheless, this is a great mod for folks who simply want the official, stock Doom 3 experience but with significantly improved graphics.

The quality of this mod is absolutely incredible. The levels are finely detailed with lots of brand new assets, the story and dialogue are phenomenal, the new demons are superb, and the action is challenging and fun. So why not a 10 score? Because I found myself lost too often, not knowing where to go, usually because I couldn't locate a hidden button or switch required to progress. I actually spent more time wandering around searching for switches than slaying demons, so I'm hoping such frustrating, cryptic button-searching is eliminated in future episodes. Also, it would be nice if they edited prior episodes by adding hints or landmarks that lead the player to switches and buttons they might otherwise have difficulty finding.

Overall, I regard this as a significant improvement to Quake 2's audio. This reminds me of a similar pack from many years ago called Tronic Sound (q2tsndfull.zip), but this Q2HM pak has more pleasing, cleaner sounds. The only sounds I didn't like in this pack were the Gunner's "sight" sound and the grenade bounce sound.

A definite improvement that makes Quake 2 less blurry, and I do confirm that renaming them as .pk3 files makes them work with KMQuake2.