Reviews - Hellektronic

Excellent AI mod. The best I've tried, and I've played many.

The Dark Secret Part 1 is a hideous clown car wreck... I've never seen such an underwhelming mod. It's staggeringly bad mapping, paired with bad scripting, paired with bad puzzles, paired with bad voice-acting, paired with more severe bugs than you can shake a stick at, all coming together to totally ruin what would otherwise be a decent idea for a horror mod. And for some reason it takes a lot of content from They Hunger, I'm not sure I understand that either. Which... also begs the question why the first part was made for Half-Life Uplink. I really don't think this guy knew what the hell he was doing.

First of all, if you even get the mod to work, you're in for a treat. This mod is like an acid trip or fever dream that doesn't make any sense. There was ambition, but horrifically poor execution. We've got Blue Shift Barney Calhoun arms, Half-Life HD pack weapons, unimaginatively reskinned aliens pretending to be undead monsters, Half-Life sounds trying to be creepy, really bad map design, and a lot of instant death traps that force you to reload a save. It's ugly. Then there's stupid ways forward that get you lost for like an hour, when it's pretty obscure what you're supposed to do. Then there's pointless places that trap you with no way out other than noclip. Then there's... I guess what's supposed to be a story? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now I'm willing to give mods a bit of leeway with story, but the storytelling of this mod is just loopy and confusing. Apparently a young woman was murdered by evil men, and her child possibly too. What this has to do with anything going on? Good question, because its extremely ambiguous as to how a murder ushered in the apocalyptic situation going on.

Then you notice the extremely high number of overlapping, buggy textures. And the blatant disregard for closing off the map bounds, allowing you to either see, fall, or just walk straight through into nothingness. And then you notice the invisible walls and bad trap shenanigans. In fact, I found a spot that basically allowed me to noclip through the map, because it was like swimming in water, except the "water" was like around the map boundaries. So without cheating, I was able to walk around in places that you clearly shouldn't be able to go. Anyway, you keep going, and it just keeps getting worse. The story gets more nonsensical, the enemies are more unimpressive, the mapping gets more unpredictable with bugs, and the puzzles, while not entirely bad, start to grate on you. It's basically just Half-Life, except attempting to be a good horror mod like They Hunger, and not hitting the mark. There are even suit batteries that inexplicably give you armor, no explanation, just armor, hah. Technically you're not even wearing an HEV suit, so it's just lazy. And when it comes to an attempt at ambitious modding, being lazy is pretty unacceptable. And this mod is lazy.

Maybe if Part 1 was remade it wouldn't be so horrendous, but it's the same old lousy HL Uplink mod that it always was, broken as ever.

The original Mistake was quite accurate to it's namesake, a mistake. But this was actually pretty decent, if nothing else there was a lot more action and enemies to offset the key hunting. Arguably way too short like the original, but the atmosphere took a pretty huge leap forward to being actually kind of creepy, which is progress. Uses a lot of assets from Paranoia, which I don't like mods built on mods, but I guess it had charm enough to overlook.

At the end of the day though, unfortunately this is one mod that you play once and never look back at. Still, 8/10, it's a cool atmospheric horror mod. The original wouldn't be worth playing if part 2 wasn't better, but it is, so I forgive the flaws of the past.

I'm very disappointed in you guys after playing this. This isn't true to Heart of Evil. Specifically the voice acting... the voice acting is a holocaust so tragic I can't even put words to it.

I'll give you 4/10, but I seriously had to wrestle with myself not to go lower. That would've been wrong. Because the models are good, I can't argue with better looking models for Heart of Evil. But you didn't have to change anything else, and you did.

I'm going to be honest, despite the huge zombie horde battles and obvious Blood references (which I like), I was actually kinda disappointed by this one compared to SIC 1. Its very short, and you don't fight as wide a variety of enemies. The NPC AI is also horrendous for the situations they get put in, they don't react well to that They Hunger animation of a zombie rising out of the grave, and it can get them killed VERY easily. For that severe balance flaw, mainly on hard, it gets a C rating from me, even though I enjoyed it. The NPCs get involved in fights that would be fine if you were on your own, but they're just not suited to fighting that many zombies at once, and it gets frustrating trying to babysit them.

Having said that... the level design was a step up from SIC 1, in my opinion. Lots of ambient sounds and interactive things, and there's a part kind of like Xen that I really thought was a stroke of design genius. Try it out, but don't be suprised if you get stuck a few times trying to figure out what to do next.

Woah... this isn't a Half-Life mod, this is a fully fledged game of it's own. I honestly feel like I've been to Russia after this, outstanding work.

This is a pretty good little horror mod, in my opinion- it's not They Hunger quality, but its definitely got good energy. The weapons are all custom with custom hands and sounds, which I think is one of the main highlights of the mod. The zombies are pretty cool, lots of variety with custom skins and sounds, and the monsters aren't half bad either, even if they are mostly just Half-Life aliens reskinned with new sounds. The maps are pretty decent overall I'd say, a little on the average side in terms of overall look (some obviously repeating textures and unnecessarily wide open areas), but they do the job well enough. Note that the mod is in Czech, so you might not understand the sparse dialogue, but there's not a lot of it. Also, the keybinds menu doesn't work on Steam, your best bet is just to import your config.cfg file from Half-Life, because there aren't any special keybinds in the mod, it'll work perfectly.

Now for the bad part however- I played the mod on Steam, just the standard mod, and I made it to level six. Well, sic6 has a nasty bug- it crashes anytime a new map loads. So if you're playing through, keep a save BEFORE sic6, and after you beat sic6 it will crash. Best fix I could cook was to load then level skip from your sic5 save past 6 to 7. This will leave you with no inventory, so you'll have to try your best to recreate your inventory using cheats. But other than that pretty big issue, so far I haven't encountered any similar issues.

Oh yeah, and by the way, the mod gets a little strange towards the end. In more ways than one, and not really in a good way. Just keep loading those checkpoints until you succeed.

A very good mod, but arguably the quality of work degrades each episode a little more than the last... kinda disappointing really, because the map design is pretty good. It's the skinning jobs that really start to go down the toilet in my opinion- you almost have to pretend they're not as bad as they are. The worst I think being the farmer zombie with the Team Fortress Classic engineer face- looks like a big fat pink thing with a human head glued onto it. That and between the Taurus and G36, the arm skins are uglier than I could've ever imagined. Somebody from the team really should've went back and redone those before or post-release.

Having said that, it's a fun mod to play, and gets better with additional skins added to cover up the flaws like unskinned Half-Life enemies and ugly skin-jobs. The work that went into the mod is very good, but unfortunately not universally. Some things leave a lot to be desired in my opinion, like they were rushed or lazy. BUT, all things considered, it's easily worthy of the title it earned. It's a must-play mod.

Basically a vanilla bugfix patch for Kane's Wrath that goes beyond the fixes of other unofficial patches like 1.02+ and 1.03.

This is a huge fix, the infantry getting stuck on vehicles is a really frustrating problem in all three games.