Reviews - Sylaro

Jesus I tried really hard to like this mod but the gameplay is just atrocious. The enemies deal way too much damage, gunplay feels really off (the pistol has so much pullback it's almost impossible to aim properly and there no ironsights of any kind while the AK deals even less damage than the pistol for some reason and has too much spread) and progression is really unclear. The section with the bombs was where I decided to quit, it's just an absolute disaster and I can't believe the developer actually thought it was fun dealing with 30 + mercenaries on a timer with the total dreadful gunplay and the enemies pinpoint accuracy killing you almost instantly (the enemies AK's have way better accuracy than yours).

Can't say much about the story, it really didin't catch my attention and the lack of subtitles didin't make things easier when trying to comprehend what the characters were trying to say.

If there is one thing I can give kudos to this mod is the graphics. The scenarios look really pretty and detailed though the city itself is pretty devoid of life other than the dozens of mercenaries trying to kill you and that woman over the radio ordering you around and nagging for the most part.

In conclusion avoid this mod at all costs. The only thing im going to remember from this is the headache that bomb defusal sequence gave me.

A pretty short but sweet adventure.

This mod continues the story of Adrian Shepard after he was put in Xen by the Gman at the end of Opposing Force. There honestly isnt much to this tale, you get out of Xen, you fight your way through some aliens and you escape the remnants of whatever was left after Black Mesa was nuked.

Level design is probably this mod biggest strength. Every room is filled to the brim with detail from the corpses of the diseased Black Mesa personel and HECU Marines to the items that you can find in them. It's like every space has a story to tell of sorts.

The fights you can find are not very exciting but they are well balanced at least. You are provided with enough resources to get by fairly easily even on Hard dificulty and the toughest enemy you will find is a single Voltigore on a very open space. Once again nothing groundbreaking but at least the encounters are not buggy or unbalanced.

Unfortunely this experience is very short. An average player can most likely clear it in less than a hour even on Hard dificulty. It's a minor grip of course but given the quality on display I was left wanting for more.

To sum it up it's an excellent albeit short episode. There is nothing revolutionary about its gameplay but the amazing level design more than makes up for it. Kudos to the developer!

Half-Life: Dark Future is the final installment of the Operation Rosenberg trilogy, and unfortunely it ends on a whimper.

First off I am not a fan of the timeskip. I think the story should've stayed on the HL timeline and wrap Collins story there. What even happened anyway? at the end of Operation Rift Gman puts Collins in stasis and then decides to release him a few years later to do...what exactly? I guess we will never know since this is the last chapter in the story and Collins ends up joining the resistance in the conclusion so whatever he ends up doing there is up in the air.

Graphically it looks pretty good. Im impressed on how the developer was able to emulate the HL2 look in Goldsrc. Whoever, the environments look pretty uninteresting as a whole and just like in the previous mods everything starts to repeat itself a little too much as time goes on.

Gameplay wise im stumped on how the developer keeps commiting the same mistakes over and over. Fights are either completely unispired or just unbelievably hard. The initial fights with the combine are crazy due the low amount of health packs and batteries provided. After that every fight is exactly the same against waves and waves of zombies and it just gets really boring fast. The final fight is the worst of them all as you have to deal with a whole platoon of combine assasins (the female spy replacement from HL1) and I dont know whether the modder gave them a buff or not but I swear they are near invulnerable to hitscan weapons and once again, just like in the final fight of Operation Rift, you are not provided with the right equipment to deal with the situation (you should be given explosives here like grenades or satchel charges instead of regular ammo which for the most part proves innefective against the indestructible assasins). I was almost ready to quit the mod at this point but I persevered through sheer force of will and save spamming.

It's a shame really. Operation Rosenberg wasnt perfect but it had its moments and you could tell the developer really put a lot of work into it. Then came Operation Rift and it was a huge dissapointment both in gameplay and level design. Finally we have Dark Future and while it's not a mess like it's predecessor it could've been much better if the modder would've learned from the mistakes commited in his past projects. If he ever decides to revisit this saga I can only hope that he takes a long hard look at the missteps he committed and produces a worthy sequel to Operation Rosenberg as I feel both Rift and Dark Future simply didint land the mark.

I liked Operation Rosenberg but I must say the developer dropped the ball with this one.

- Scenarios are pretty good looking at first but as time goes on they repeat themselves way too much. It's always the same empty street with a building or two or a cave of some sort. It certainly doesnt help that the entirety of the mod happens at night.

- Voice acting is just as awful as it was in Operation Rosenberg with the same robot voice for certain characters and stiched together lines from other HL games for others. This often gets in the way of gameplay as some of these characters directly tell the player what to do in some sections and it's hard to make out what they are trying to say.

- Game design as a whole is disastrous. I lost count of the amount of times I got stuck in a section without knowing exactly to do. This is due to the mod poorly explaining the objectives to the player through the awful voice acting. Then there are other sections where you are provided key details through PDA's that you cant keep in an inventory or archive of some sort (like in say Resident Evil), which means that if you forget the PDA's contents or you forget to take a picture of the text with your phone you are probably going to die a few times.

- The final fight is really unbalanced. They expect you to hold on for 10 minutes against a neverending wave of aliens with a small platoon of marines that usually gets decimated after less than a couple of minutes (a single pit drone is capable of taking down the entire unit by itself!). To add insult to injury, the developer doesnt provide the player with the proper equipment to deal with this situation where, instead of giving the player ammo for useful weapons like the sniper or gluon gun they are actually given shotgun shells even though the shottie is completely useless during the fight due to its low damage output and the huge amount of vortiguants that spawn every few seconds. Speaking of vortigaunts they are a huge design issue in this fight as the game spawns too many but there is almost no cover which means that unless you kill them fast enough with a long range weapon like the sniper or the magnum you are most likely going to die to them a lot. At any rate I had to beat this fight with godmode as it is literally impossible to last for ten minutes with the poor equipment you are provided.

All in all I am pretty dissapointed with this sequel. Operation Rosenberg had its flaws but at no point did I felt that it was unplayable at times like with this one. This mod retains all of O.Rosenberg's shortcomings and adds a bunch of its own making the experience quite mediocre and frustrating, which is a shame as I am quite fond of the prequel.