Reviews - KingDaniel

One of the very best HL1 mods ever. Gameplay-wise, you can convince yourself it's an official addon. And it's LONG.

Early access review: This is fantastic. It’s the fever dream where you’re playing some uncovered beta Half-Life 1 build, except it’s a polished and complete game. Amazing atmosphere, fantastic gameplay. Different weapon/damage balance to Half-Life but I like it better this way.

And the way the zombies walk is hilarious.

There is a great mod in here, somewhere. It's enormous, looks fantastic, has loads of new weapons and interesting settings but feels very unfinished. It's kinda like playing through a beta. Weapon damage has changed quite a lot leaving the game feeling unbalanced: Combine go down much more quickly, and so we get loads more of them thrown at the player at once making it a bit enemyspam-ish. The new alien enemies are a very mixed bag. Some are pretty cool, some not so much. Some levels have unique concepts (like walking along scaffolds in the arctic) but I wished more was done with them. The ending didn't trigger after killing the last gunship, leaving me wondering around for ages not realising and I didn't realise until I watched a walkthough on Youtube.

That first penguin scene, following so much blood and carnage, was pure joy. It made me so happy. I loved it.

So 6/10 from me. More story and more meat on some of the areas would have made it a 10.

Some of the mapping was a little crusty and some of the jumping a little frustrating, but this had some of the most amazing storytelling of anything I've ever played. Take my childhood and distort it into something horrific and heartbreaking, why don't you. Loved it.

This mod gets a lot of flak for calling itself “Episode Three”. With that name comes the weight of expectation which would crush pretty much anything. You imagine a semipro supermod, built in as close in style to Valve’s work as possible, intricately following the Epistle 3 story outline. This is not that.

But, taken as a fun elseworld-style adventure, where the characterisations are a little off, the Combine are a little different, and zombification doesn’t necessarily require you to have a headcrab attached to your skull, it’s fantastic. Huge, complex levels, some very impressive visuals, intricate scripted sequences, cool early-2000-syle cutscenes. A barmy plot where Doctor Kleiner turns bad and into some kind of smart zombie from exposure to headcrabs (presumably got a little too friendly with Heddy…). Poor Alyx is treated horribly, spends the entire adventure crying in a huge mansion and then dies.

And when you find yourself exploring an entire deck of Enterprise NX-01, except it’s not meant to be the Enterprise it’s just repurposed maps from an aborted Star Trek mod used as the deepest innards of a TARDIS-like box… that’s a special kind of awesome weird.

Some serious technical difficulties to get this one working with modern HL2 (I had to change 220 to 215 in gameinfo.txt just to get it to run, then apply a patch and replay much of part 3 because my save was ruined), but another all-time classic from Koumei Satou. From his very first Quake and Quake 2 mods long ago, through Pieces Like Us and Sweet Half-Life and now to this (and his Portal map, too), Koumei has always been inspiring. Creative, colourful and emotional. Thank you for everything.