Reviews - Xandros_Darkstorm

Poke646:
Feels raw from technical standpoint.

Why author thought that idea of removing almost all hitscan weapons is a great idea? Have fun killing alien controllers on Hard difficulty with a shotgun, because nothing else hits them reliable and this is the only hitscan weapon.

Nailgun-machinegun is so weak, that i found myself using nailgun-pistol much more often, than i'd like.

There is a narrow corridor where i can consistently crash the game when i try to blow some soldiers in it.

Section with tentacles and narrow ledges: tentacles attack much further than they should -- they basically attack through walls.
Same with houndeyes -- their explosive attacks attack through walls.

Sometimes game displays no crosshair for zoomed-in crossbow. Console will be flooded with messages "Sprite: no pSprite!!!" in that case.

Level design is okay. Some things needs more work. I personally stuck on rooftops, because i failed to see a ladder in the dark.

Communication system in this mod is bad. Annoying beeps, messages change automatically with very slow pace and you cannot abort them.

Poke646 vendetta:
It works much much better than original Poke646. Instead of useless nailguns you now have an smg, which is reliable and has a grenade launcher (basically stock hl1 smg).

Level design is mostly not confusing, except for one situation, where i stuck, because the ladder i needed was not visually highlighted. It looked like almost like a 2D sprite, which is why i runned past it many times.

Annoying communication system has been replaced with laptops, which is implemented technically the same as old comms, but messages fit one screen, so you don't spend too much time waiting.

Overall i liked vendetta much more -- it really felt like something with effort put into it.

This mod is a low quality mod. I don't think it is low effort mod, but there are many things that are objectively bad.
1. Many times i encountered map bugs, where developer messed up some code.
2. Lack of health packs/chargers, but lots of enemies. It is almost impossible to beat at hard.
3. Custom voice, guiding the player is very poorly made. Too loud, sudden and too clear. Also save file doesn't save the state of played voice messages, so when you have several of them on the map and you loaded the game from save, where you heard two of them, you will hear them again at the same time.
4. Lack of creativity. Some maps look bland and pointlessly big.
I used an up-to-date Steam release (August 21 2020) to play this.

Currently doesn't support linux build natively. Can't give more than 3/10 because vortigaunts are still enemies and i don't see any "randomly generated rooms" like some of commenters have pointed out. The game just using original hl.so and works just like usual hl1. Map with grunts is pretty dark and confusing. Almost nothing to shoot. Plot is good, but because game uses original hl.so it is ruined.

I've played it a lot. The first game i installed on Linux. It is still very cool even in 2018.

Another GoldSource game, which is excellently made. Fantastic weapon system, pretty good graphics (comparing to Half-Life), level design...well this game just excites me :D

I played this game when i was 10 and still playing it with friends. Good graphics, nice music and interesting storyline turned this game into a masterpiece.
Multiplayer is pretty unbalanced, but big amount of players decreases this disadvantage almost to 0.
This game can even be modded, but it lacks some tools and some of existing tools are kinda weird. But still, there are two mods already: Nox Respawned and Nox Unimod.
Many features of Nox left inside its engine - developers thought they could implement them later, but Diablo beat this game so hard... First and last patch was 1.2, which brought a cooperative gauntlet mode, known as Nox Quest.

I wish we can bring back the popularity of this game.