Reviews - Mazzma

Okay so the good stuff first I guess. The mapping in some of the levels is really great and gives a fantastic Black Mesa feel while also being reminiscent of Gearbox's mapping in the expansions for some areas. For the most part the pacing is good and there are some very fun fights in the mod, I tend to always play Half-Life on hard and this mod does an okay job with the difficulty.

Bad stuff. Like I aid the mapping in some of the levels is really good but I feel like there is a good chunk of the mod that are really uninspired. Namely parts of the old Black Mesa industrial areas, they just felt very open, boxy, and disproportionate. The other big problem with this mod is the air vents, oh my god are they long. Most of them arent filled with headcrabs but christ do they go on forever sometimes with multiple ends that I compulsively spend all my time checking down expecting some extra goodies to no avail. Oh any about headcrabs, there are TONS of them in this mod and they often aren't even in areas to ambush the player really. The zombies even drop them after you kill them, which is like Half-Life 2 but it isn't as rewarding because you can't kill them instantly along with the zombie using headshots. No matter how the zombie dies it will drop a headcrab, oh and did I mention that zombies have a much larger health pool than normal? Super obnoxious, not just the zombie security guards or gonomes either, the normal scientist zombies take far too many shotgun blasts. The custom content is lazy to be honest, you meet an Otis (Who can die very easily to the FOUR headcrabs they spawn on top of him the second you find him) who is just as threatening as Barney with his extended magazine water pistol disguised as a desert eagle. The HEV allies are simply re-skinned security guards with shotguns that function identically to a pistol, come on, Sweet Half-Life was released in 2001 and it had HEV clad scientists with custom weapons. Also, all of the HEV allies you meet will give you a gameover if they die and they don't server any purpose, they dont open any secret areas, don't operate something the player cannot, and of course one of them IMMEDIATELY charges into a group of headcrabs via scriptde sequence when you see him. You get to use the desert eagle from OpFor and its just fine but you also get the displacer gun which is a complete let down as all but one of the locations you can teleport to have really underwhelming rewards, one of them even as insulting to only give you 3 pistol magazines. Plus I never felt there was a reason to actually use it as a weapon, in OpFor I used it primarily to kill voltigores but despite taking content from OpFor there are no Race X whatsoever. For some strange reason the black ops assassin's have renounced their oath of silence and will shout just as much as the grunts, giving away their position to the player and ruining one of their defining features. The weapon models are ugly, not sure why but the player's arsenal is either darkened, rusted, or covered in a nauseating airbrushed pattern. I think it's a nice touch when in mods where you don't have an HEV suit that chargers and batteries at still around, even better when the player is allowed to wear body armor instead like in Blue-Shift but this stuff is rare for some reason and I looked in every nook and cranny. I only found 3 helmets and one vest in the entire game, the only time I had 100 armor was at the end the game right before a cutscene where the main character gets shot in the back with a sniper that ends the game.

Wow, coming into this I really wasn't expecting writing a wall of negative feedback but when I got thinking about it the mod really has a lot running it down under the surface. You're lured into a false sense of security by the attractive first maps but after a while I really falls apart, maybe gets a little better along the line, but in the end is a big disappointment. I don't think you should avoid this mod like its an absolute dumpster fire, it's extremely OK, but not even close to the 9-10 rating status that 54% of people reviewing have so graciously endowed it. Have fun.

Oh look, another headcrab...