Reviews - phipe

This is quite an unusual mod. It is essentially split into two parts: battles and following the plot.

Following the plot involves you being unarmed and doing what the game asks of you, while the characters talk and share exposition. Sometimes the player is alone and will perform certain tasks to move forward or make something happen. The players ordinarily fast running speed means that you’ll bump from cutscene into the other like a victim of pinball – and I say cutscenes, because many times the camera becomes static, and you get to see a scene unfold while remaining immobile. This occurs whenever you’re not following a different NPC who of course walks slower than the player per usual.

The battles sequences are almost literally shooting galleries, in which you aim at small living targets and fire away. The enemies do relatively little damage to the player and explode in precious gibs upon death, which satisfactorily happens every time. The weapons that you need are conveniently found for the occasions right before these instances of kerfuffle and are immediately removed from your inventory afterwards. So, while you get to use 7 new weapons in total throughout the mod you do never have all of them on your person at the same time. I didn’t turn off the Auto Aim, so all my adversaries popped like balloons that covered the screen in unholy hell of alien blood and gibs. It all feels like a parody of videogames.
I was a bit upset with the texture work. I realised that many buildings are broken down and carry cracks in their walls, not because of realism but because of Russialism – that’s how people lived back then in Soviet.
I liked the music present in the mod. There is quite a lot of it, and it has that wonderfully funky compression to it that lowers the sound quality. The music is easily comparable to long mods like Riot in Progress.

I recommend playing this if you have a sixpack of strong beer or some hard liquor to drink. It is short and sweet.

This map pack starts good but gets tiresome.
It is a great looking set of levels that happen to be gigantic. The first level, with the mountains and scenery, had me daydreaming about travelling to USA and seeing views like that in person.
As I made progress through it the problems began piling up. Enemies are everywhere, and when you have cleared an area and return to it later new enemies have spawned. The issue is that they are often so many that they slow down the game as opposed to add to it.

It feels ridiculous to complain about enemies being everywhere, but it is a thing you understand easily once you've experienced it: You’re a high-speed dude, who manage to feel sluggish because you can’t go fast. High-health and high-damage enemies show up early, and soon by very large numbers, so the battles all feel like chores. You have to stop and strafe and you have to take two steps back every time you take a step forward in the right direction, and then two steps forward and four steps back as you return to an old repopulated area.

When you play Duke Nukem 3d you notice that all the battles and encounters with the aliens vary in intensivity. Sometimes you're able to find a lone alien, sometimes you can launch a suprise attack. Then you make some major progress and a whole bunch of them might appear to have at you. Some battles are over in a few seconds, others are a little longer because you needed to take cover from shotgun blasts. When a area has been cleared you can pipe down until you've done collecting pickups and prepare for what's ahead.

In this map pack, almost every battle is as intensive as they can be. The difficulty of the levels escalates by the number of enemies that appears, disregarding the difficulty setting the player choose when starting a new game. There are already almost a hundred enemies in the first level alone – halfway through the mod they are over two hundred. This is not Duke Nukem - It is Serious Sam… With keycards.

Getting stuck trying to find the next hidden door or key card is a pain we all must deal with at times, but the size of the maps magnifies the problem. The labyrinthic design of the indoor levels (toxic bath, Pestilence, Duke Is Here) coupled with the classic bland textures makes getting lost easier, and because of the size, backtracking to the wrong area costs you tons of time despite the wonderful running speed. And the moment you make a inch of progress, bam! tons of high-health enemies!

I recommend this batch of levels to those that bought & loved Serious Sam first and foremost. The amount of killing required to get through is either going to be the best thing ever or the greatest timewaste.

I really enjoyed the inventory & shop systems. Being able to carry health restoring meat with you at all times is very efficent. I found it smart to heal yourself at the shops to full health and then buying more to use along the way forward, assuming your got enough lamp oil already.

Combat is a lot of fun and doesn't get repetitive. The reason being that Parasomnia never ceases to challenge you: Once you've gotten adjusted to a certain enemy and its attack patterns, you often find yourself facing off against a new hostility in the forthcoming maps, often in a mixed group of multiple foes. A cycle of discomfort, if I may call it so. I have metaphorically and literally been on the fence (there's some in this mod) as I have panicked, wondering what to shoot at first while being blasted from multiple directions by cavalry men... Then bitten to death by a unseen bottom-sniffer. If you were poor at target prioritization and had slow reflexes before playing the mod, you'll be better at both when you've finished it.

Parasomnia's sounds and looks differ from most other mods just as much as the predecessor does, but with the added plus of not recycling anything from it. Everything feels new and different. You find yourself wanting to take a long good look at the monsters before kicking them; which can be done when wielding the saber. When there aren't any gun toters around you can bring it out and wreak some fun havoc on the poor saps, that don't know that you may or may not be high on cocaine.

When there aren't any blaring enemies around I find the levels very ambient and atmospheric. Exploring and taking in the enviroments around you not only immerses you in the experience, but also rewards you with some hidden items and areas. Most of the maps are perfectly connected, making the town feel quite big despite some buildings being closed, and the indoor areas are very detailed. I think I played the mod for about five hours and loved it almost the entire time.

Half-Rats: Parasomnia is bigger and better than its predecessor in almost every way. I recommend playing A Fever Dream before this one however, not only so that the story can be enjoyed to its fullest, but also so that one may appreciate all the incredible effort that was put into it in a little more than a year's worth of time.

Review of version 1.2

The initial release was quite the romp with issues as stated in earlier reviews, but this version makes it a wholesomly improved experience over all.

For somebody who loves the original They Hunger trilogy, it's a delight to see the new setpieces and the twists to the atmospheric game world. The scenery looks great, in particular the volcano. This mod suprises and impresses when its flaws aren't bulging.

The maps do look nicer than the original, albeit I feel a lot of the outdoor areas are too cramped. Feels like the geography of Rockwell is completly different.

It is also unfortunate that, as a consequence of the claustrophobic design, the mod is a whole lot more linear than the original. The maps are shorter and doesn't feel diversive enough, meaning that you can't stray from the one path forward for a bit to explore the surroundings.

The combat is tons of fun (as of 1.2, remember.) The new weapons are fun to use, though You're still brandishing a crowbar. It is also a bit jarring to hear the enemies using combine voice-overs and citizens of City17 representing the few non-infected allies. I can imagine these things being fixed once the full version has been released.

As it stands on its own, it's a short, linear mod that is as of this writing unfinished. I am looking forward to the entire finished episode, and the rest of the trilogy - the second episode takes place in a town, so that gives the mapper some great oppurtunity to make wide levels that reward exploring.

You'd be forgiven for not thinking too highly of this mod at a first impression. The mod stars the developer himself, as voiced by himself, with a mod page full of promises, alcohol references, and "Half-Pun: The Game" being the title card. These are traits that I have seen in earlier okey-to-awful half-life mods, but as a amalgamation of all of it, Half-Rats manages to be something different. Rather amazing, in fact.

The mod drenches you in atmosphere as soon as you get to the start menu. From there you're engulfed in a moody and strange experience, futher enforced by the fantastic voice work. The opening dialogue had me succumbing to The Develeoper's repeated recommendation of drinking something while playing, so after getting myself a "Rusty Nail" I was right back into the fever.

Okay, some sort of a joke... The only thing not from the early 1900s is the developer's modding skills. Haha!? The map design is smart. Mostly straight forward, always clever. It manages to make the dreaded Sewer levels entertaining, and the wonderfully detailed indoor areas are what makes this a immersive mod. As said earlier, the voice acting is great, and so are the scripted sequences, the dialogue itself... And I'm still talking about a HL mod!

I suggest that everyone play this on easy or normal first time through. Combat is just challenging enough but can get hard at times, in particular since there is a need to conserve ammo, demanding some melee from your hand. Be also vary that pausing during any dialogue might mute it, a fault of Half-life itself.

Despite there being talks of references to earlier works, such as They Hunger, I didn't notice any of them in the mod. I might be shoutout-blind, or maybe, any and all of these references are so carefully hewn that they have become a part of the beast.

After what Half-Rats: A Fever Dream has given me, I have given in. I'm eagerly anticipating the sequel, and the rest of the "multimedia experience" That Half-Rats has told us about. Sir Half-Rats is not a mere developer, but a genuine renaissance man.

To anyone who's going to try this mod out: this is a story driven mod. There are lots of cutscenes, briefings and conversations, so relax until your mission has started.

I really like the setpieces in this mod. I found them clever and, despite that some of the scripted events are a tad predictable, they're all executed so well I didn't mind them.

The greatest problem I have with this mod is the level design. The layouts are good, but most areas beyond the HQ lack detail and props. The grey, empty corridors in particular, which there are many of.

Every now and then you need to backtrack to find some item or door that you've missed. It irritates me when I can't make progress due to a keycard puzzle, and the mod is full of them. The combat on the other hand is really nice, and it escalates in difficulty smoothly with each passing mission.

All in all, it is a decent mod. The creator's ambition is felt as you play. All that he needs to learn, is to put more detail into all the explorable areas, and to dare to try out new assets. If this had looked and sounded slightly different, it might have hit one of the top mark.

This is one of those mods that you wish you could love but cannot. I played this on Easy mode.

The mods greatest issue is in the weaponry. You got historical western weapons that try being faithful to the time the mod portrays and a few crazy ones that are there for fun. Most of them are poorly designed: The reloading times are painfully slow. You can see the player’s arm animation reaching for bullets or shells at the speed of a snail. Most of the guns are not reliably accurate. I found out by testing that most of the guns’ bullets scatter around the crosshair as opposed to in it; it makes using most guns exceedingly difficult at long range. When you do your best to aim for headshots or torso shots at medium range you mostly miss or hit a less sensitive body part.

Because of the nature of the historical weapons (revolver got six shots, shotgun only two shells, etc.) Winning the battles should be done by making every shot count and by having the quickest mouse button in the west. This mod would have been perfect for it! But no amount of twitch shooters you have played in the past is going to help with the artificial inaccuracy the designers forced upon you.

Halfway through the mod you encounter the Mexicans, a gang of bandits that all have more health than any earlier gun totting enemy in the game. The problem? They use the exact same weapons as you, without any of the drawbacks I mentioned! They are extremely good sharpshooters at medium range, and they reload their weapons at the default speed of the military personnel from Half-life.

So, when you encounter a bunch of these guys, it is hell on earth. You are either going to miss your shots or hit these bullet sponges in the body parts that matters the least. If you take cover while reloading your slow gun, they are going to charge at you, but if you make yourself slightly visible, they will be hitting you with near perfection the moment they are within medium range. You have to run back fifty feet until your gun is reloaded, at which point you must take cover, shoot and repeat it all again until they're dead.

Yeah, you must kite… on easy difficulty… In a 90’s first person shooter.

You cannot beat this game fairly; the enemies have made sure of that. You cannot have fun playing this game; the designers made it so.
It is an atmospheric, fine looking mod, completely ruined halfway through by bad design choices. This is a old high-profile mod that aged worse than the west.