Reviews - Exe_Red

A whole well made game based on early HL2 story.

I love this mod, it's the Half-Life 2 I dreamt about. The team does amazing job creating stuff around old documents and models with high quality. I love this mod, it's the best mod based on old storyline for me.

Custom models and textures are done very good. The lightning on the map allows you to feel the dark atmosphere of old City 17 which is located in London.

No softlocking bugs, no bad balancing, no bad map design. It's just amazing. This mod should be tried by everyone who likes old story from 2001-2002.

Underrated.

After hundred hours of playing different SMOD versions, I found a new mod that does look similar - Overcharged.

So, the release version was very dissapointing. Random NPC positioning, very unstable, a lot of cringe in AI, NPC animations, graphics. It really deserved it's 5-6 rating.

But since patch 3, mod felt really good. Very stable, less cringe, better AI, new locations, new models. Even CS GO weapons and dev weapons were cut to keep player's inventory clean.

From now, Overcharged mod is really enjoyable experience. We have global projected lighting, good postprocessing. Also there are a lot of additional setting, that can kinda recreate SMOD gameplay.

This mod presents you some beta locations, where you can walk and look for a stuff. These locations were made well and fit HL2 design.

Overcharged provides you with a lot of weapons. There are really many of them. Most of Opposing Force and HL1 weapons are here. Also there are HL2 Beta weapons. I can't name every weapon in this mod, but there are a lot of unique and fun to play weapons, that make gameplay better. Quallity of the models isn't consistant, but at least developers remaster models by the time.

Mapadd is the thing to add content on maps without changing map file. SMOD has the same system. In Overcharged you can change mapadds, to change difficulty and gameplay of the mod. You can have vanilla HL2 with enchanced graphics by using mapadd_lite, or if you do like SMOD a-like gameplay - mapadd_overcharged/mapadd_nightmare presets will be good, because they include all mod's content (weapons, NPCs). Mapadd system allows to create custom levels by users. The only bad thing - there's actually no guides about Overcharged Mapadd system, but atleast it's very similar to SMOD's one.

The main bad thing about this mod right now - balance. There's no challenge on Hard difficulty, unless you play on Nightmare mapadd. Some enemies that are supposed to be an tough encounter, are easilly killed even by pistols (like Gonome or Cremator). Most of hitscan weapons have very similar stats, so it doesn't make sense to have a lot of rifles, because most of them have same spread, same recoil, same clip size etc. Also, most weapons do hit their reserve ammo limit on weapon pick up, so there'll be no situations where player will run out of ammo. It affects gameplay a lot. Rebalance mod kinda helps, but players aren't supposed to download an addon to fix their game, because the devs should do it. Actually developers will fix their balance, but only on Steam version, non ModDB verson.

Conclusion: this mod will probably be good for SMOD fans. Mod still need some polishing and I hope Steam version (Overcharged NEXT) will be amazing on start, just to make players feel like they play a really nice mod, where they can have fun. I don't think this mod deserves 5.6 rating, it's really well made mod and after four patches it deserves higher rating.

I'm talking about V8. This mod is awesome!

There's a lot of weapons, NPCs, new mechanics. Updated effects, updated HUD.

It's the best way to have a fun. Instead of 10 version, it doesn't crashes all the time.

About this mod.

It has a standart HL2 locations, that were edited. Since it allows you to configure the mod by ourself, it can be a sandbox mod, standart HL2 with new weapons, or realistic FPS. Make your own way to playthrough this mod.

Make sure you downloaded Source SDK 2006 and SteamPipe fix :^)