Reviews - Jim_Partridge

Great visuals and a really nice Half Life feel. Alas, some poor design decisions make it less fun than it ought to be.

Rexaura is pretty much the best Portal mod in existence. Put simply, it's a bunch of Valve quality test chamber maps with a continuation of the wry and nasty sense of humor that ran throughout Portal.

If you liked Portal and want more of the same, this should be your first port of call.

Compared to other HL2 mods out there, this is really great stuff.
Nate knows how to map and re-creates City 17 well. The Auto-saves are in the right places (YAY!) and the combat, while too close for my liking, works really well.

A good quality mod, lets hope we don't have to wait too long for chapter 2!

It looks amazing. Boy you guys can map!

Other elements let it down unfortunately.
The firefights were all face to face, very few long range fights. Door opens, 3 combine run at you. Turn corner, combine right in your face.
Found that rather frustrating as Combine AI will always have them run right up to you if they can.
They work much better at a distance when there is no route to the player with lots of cover.

Also, using names like "Kevin" and "James", don't really inspire adventure. I can't recall any names being given to me of the resistance members in the official half life games so this kinda made me feel like i was playing a mod rather than an official expansion (which is what we're all dying to play).

Finally I wasn't really impressed with the puzzles. Battery puzzle took 2 seconds to solve and we've seen it before, the powerbox on the wall that opened the secret door was just plain dumb luck that I tried that. It's tantamount to running round the walls spamming the E key.

Still, the sheer amount of work on this and the mapping put it way about many of the offerings out there.

I agree with some others here.

There's nothing original at all going on in this mod. Basically they've re-created HL2 Episode 1 and simply re-arranged the elements.

Hell, they've even used the same puzzles which is really silly. What's the point in adding a puzzle that everyone knows the solution to? They've already completed these puzzles in HL2 Ep1. I get the feeling they added the puzzles just because they thought they should have puzzles in their mod but never bothered to sit down and actually think about creating anything new.

The score of 5 is for the mapping work. It looks good.

But all this good mapping work is utterly wasted on a lazy effort at gameplay.

What a shame...

OK. The 4 is for the mapping effort. The maps look good and the overall presentation is fantastic.

...but....

...what the hell were you thinking with the Antlions. This isn't fun. A constant stream of Antlions trying to kill you at all times is just plain annoying. They're always in the way. You never get a moment to look around or understand what you're supposed to be doing. I just ran around chaotically trying to find somewhere to go and never made it out of the first map.

Have Antlions come in waves or something but for goodness sake please allow the player a moment to breath...

Nice map, simple but fun. Wayyyy too short...

Was very dissapointed when it ended so quickly.

More please!

Is stunning. The closest to an official expansion you could hope to find. These maps are good to look at, well designed / intuative and challenging.

I've played through them several times and I have a feeling I'll come back for more again.

I'm reallt torn with mods like this because its so clear that a tonne of great work has been put into it. It looks good and for the most part plays well...

...but...

There's nothing new here at all unfortunatly. Like Precursor and other similar mods, this simply takes the same elements and puzzles you've already played through before, rearranges them and sets them all back down again.
The puzzles are simply recreations of puzzles youve seen before, the environments re recreations of mostly episode 1 maps and the firefights are all very similar.

Another thing about this mod that almost made me ditch it and not look back was the huge mount of strobing and flickering lights as the only source of light. Not fun at all!

But after all that I can't say dont play it because its all there, it all looks good and plays well. I just wish such. Huge amount of work and talent had been put into something more original...