Reviews - DiamondBorne

This review is for HLC 4.6, on normal difficulty.

First thing's first, this mod is not Doom but a classic style survival horror. As such, you're not an nigh-immortal Doomguy but a guy in a hazmat suit and everything can and will quickly kill you. So, no run and gun deal here.

The game's premise sees you infiltrating a hotel building and locate a group of SWAT team that was sent in earlier and disappeared without a trace. Since this game is set in the infamous Backrooms internet mythos, you can guess what happened. Most peoples that went in got noclipped through reality and into the alternate dimension called The Backrooms, while some otherworldly lifeforms from over there got noclipped to ours. Hell broke loose and we're left cleaning up the post-apocalyptic scene.

Healing items such as pain killer, Snicker bar, Pepsi and Cocaine can be picked up and use later, providing a much needed flexible strategy. Unfortunately for some reason, only one of each healing items will be carry over to the next level no matter how many you have.

For weapons you have a rather mundane set of arsenal with typical reload system found in most shooter, no magdrop or anything fancy. A more fancy list of secret weapons and weapon upgrade (one that I know of) can be aptly found inside many secret rooms.

Monsters can be separate into three tiers: the lower tier fodders in which you can dispatches them in melee with ease. And the high tier enemies which are unreasonably tough, fast enough to be a jumpscare of its own and can one-shot or two-shot you regardless of your health and armor. Every encounter with these pure evil can be considered a miniboss battle. There's also enemies with firearms which is something of a tier of their own, in that they're highly accurate, hits realistically hard and can take as much hit as it can deal. Not to mentioned the stronger variant of these guys will actively strafe away from your reticle, making every firefight with them very intense.

Atmosphere-wise, this mod is phenomenal in crafting some of the most nerve-wrecking setpieces ever. You will travel through a hotel floor and a messy alternate version of it, an absurdly large indoor pool, a dark hell of rust and blood that immediately brings Silent Hill to mind and a very interesting take on the deepest level of the Darkroom: a dark valley suspended above the abyss where various massive otherworldly entities are floating and stomping around, minding their own business. A combination of labyrinthine hallways, aggressive droning ambients, fast moving creatures and occasional break into big fights make this mod an extremely intense experience from start to finish. There's nothing bad to say about the map design except for a rather box-y, jumbled and inorganic map design which seems to be intentional, making it in line with the actual Backrooms aesthetic.

However this mod is not without its flaws though and there's quite a number of them:

-Very high difficulty, even on normal. And like I said above, HP and Armor are useless in this game.

-The mod can be very taxing to play. The constant droning noise can put the player on edge all the time and can become extremely annoying, even if it stays true to what is described in the Backrooms. Unfortunately, the intensity is going to get worse the further you go into the mod. The Silent Hill level in particular genuinely makes me want to puke in a bad way due to how disorient combined with how dark it is.

-Monsters can get unfair. Not just from the monsters themselves but the map also actively working against you. Throughout the map, there are many holes that connect two hallways together that only the monster can use, ensuring that fast enemies will always be few steps behind you no matter where you run. "sleeping" enemies can also hear your gunshot through these holes and trigger their chase before you even know it.

-Unintuitive weapon hotkey placement is the biggest issue I have about gameplay. For example, a lighter "weapon" which gives you a much needed respite in the darkness are bind together with the knife (key 1) and require two presses in order to pull it out, instead of having a flashlight key of its own. While for some reason, The Fire Axe which is a more powerful melee weapon, is bind to the pistol slot (key 2). Another mildly infuriate example would be the secret Supershotgun that, instead of sharing slot with the Shotgun like it usually did, got relegated to the "big gun" key instead.

All in all, this mod would've been a perfect horror mod, if not for the glaring flaws outweigh the goods by just a slight margin. So I'll give this a 7/10

Slow movespeed and slow acceleration means you have to hold movement ket in one direction for a sometimes before you gain full speed, and this speed is suddenly gone if you touch anything. On top of this, the map is realistic and huge, making the problem even worse.

Autosave only, no manual.

The "Realistic" reload system seen in Cry of Fear and some modern milsim, where reloading any magazine-based weapon will make you lose all the remaining bullets inside that mag, as if a guy would toss all bullets away in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Very good voicework.

Beautiful urban landscape and mapping despite the linearity.

Effective enemy placement, all of them are capable of providing jumpscare by themselves without any setpiece.

All in all, It would've been a 10/10 survival horror if not for the very sluggish and frustrating gameplay. And yes, I didn't finish the mod despite being a very patient person.

+ Calm and peaceful music. Nothing tense or spooky make for a relaxing experience.
+ One Very interesting hubworld with 4-6 branches complete with their own set of theme.
+ Very interesting stage selection design.
= Treasure hunting troves. Fun for some, not so for the other.
= Monsters quantity are generally on the low side, sometimes balanced by huge amount of easy mobs.
- More than half of arsenals locked behind a hard to find or overly contrived secrets. I play through the majority of the games with Axe, Pistol, Shotgun and Sniper Rifle.
- The reward from the Eyes mini-quest needs to be bigger and better to worth the hassle.
8/10 A very fun and unique mod with very few nitpick.

Even if if you look past the ponies thing, the whole mod is just a reskin which doesn't add anything of value to the game. Honestly these type of mods need to stay in their own circle.

*This is a review for the first episode of the Rebirth Edition*

This mod is an amazing alternate take on RE2. In this you play as HUNK on his usual hunt for the G-virus with more than a few twists.
++Lots of story change, including 4 new substories depends on how you interact with the remaining citizens in Raccoon city. The author also did a really great job on writing a coherent story. There's a few clever use of cutscene here and there that greatly expand the characters instead of detracted from the experience and gameplay as a whole like in the previous version.
++new locations added, some were cleverly spliced seamlessly from RE3 into your typical RE2 location.
+-Puzzles both old and new. Also, be prepared for alot of backtracking which seems to be the only weakpoint in this otherwise perfect release.
++New enemies and changes to your existing weapons that force you to approaches them in a different way from before. Many of these changes will surprise you in a positive way, veteran and newer player will get used to it easily.
++Various mechanics from other RE games are in this one, a very basic form of ammo crafting via gunpowders, Loot drop from specific enemies, knife not taking a slot and is somewhat useful and etc.

All in All I would give this release a 9.8/10 if MODDB allow me to, The small minus was only because of the tediousness of running around if you don't know what to do.

*This was my review for the older version. I keep this on just to show how heaven and hell of a difference the old and the Rebirth version is*

As if this mod was trying to be something like Resident Evil 4/5/6. With tons of enemies, pseudo random item drops, run'n guns with no puzzle.

-The story also pointlessly jumping around between two characters instead of a traditional playing long story for one character before swapping disk for the other, while this kind of narration works well in movies, it become very jarring and tedious in a game.

-And apparently the creator thinks it is much more fun putting player in nigh-unwinnable situation from times to times. ie, force low health on player with no guns/ammo. These along with bad item detection on the ground and inability to save makes this game very annoying at best and totally unplayable at worse.

I must commend on the creativity of some of the new mechanics and storyline though, else this would warrant a 1/10 from me.

3/10

Lacks of objective direction. Impossible start. And a blatant copy of Silent Hill atmosphere, right down to the name but without the charm of the original is a serious insult, not a tribute to the game that inspired this. For that, it deserve 2/10.

All the new models are very good. The guns, the monsters, especially many types of zombies, oh and those sharks scare the hell out of me. One last thing is you should've replace those "devilish tree" in the final battle to match their description.

Ps. My rating is for the game as a whole. Your new models however, i give 10/10 :)