Weekday Warrior Mod for Half-Life 2 Weakday Warrior? Nuh-uh! review

Weekday Warrior is quite the oddity.  When you think of the Source engine and mods for it, what comes to mind are first person shooters.  Big ones, small ones, ones mixed with real-time strategy layers (Zzz) but most definitely first person shooters.  Well okay, there’s the occasional strange modification that strays outside those boundaries, but in general you’d be pushed to find anyone who knows of one, let alone has played it.  Weekday Warrior manages to break out of the confines of its first person daddy (Half-Life 2) and into an area left primarily to smaller, foreign language speaking developers: the adventure game.

Once a proud mainstay of PC gaming, the adventure game genre has slipped under the radar and you really have to look quite hard in order to find one these days unless you’re into Sam and Max.  While they are certainly out there, they are not pushed by big publishers and gaming publications rarely give them more than a polite mention if it’s a slow news day.

Weekday Warrior centres on Doug, a comic loving office worker who dreams of being like his comic-book hero “The Mongoose”, who appears to be a Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid) type figure that uses stealth to accomplish his goals.  This information is gathered from one or two comic covers that appear through the rather short game and may be completely inaccurate.  Troubling is brewing between Doug’s office and the office upstairs.  It’s up to Doug (you) to save the day!

The game is played from a third person perspective, with various cameras set up around the locations to give continuous coverage of Doug.  This works well apart from the odd occasion where wandering into a blind-spot can cause a little frustration until you manage to get Doug back into view.  Navigating around the office is done with WASD or the arrow keys and gives consistent controls even when the camera angle changes suddenly.  Although the controls are manageable they feel rather like Doug is a formula one racing car instead of a person.  He glides rather than walks and moves just as quickly backwards as he does forwards.  While it’s not a huge issue, it would have been nice to have more realistic movement.

Being the Source engine, home of Half-Life 2 and its offspring, the world consists of 3D characters on 3D backgrounds.  In a genre where atmosphere is paramount 3D backgrounds will rarely cut-it, especially ones recycled from a game from another genre completely.  While there are adventure games that manage to pull off 3D backgrounds that retain all the atmosphere of pre-rendered backgrounds, more often than not it feels wrong.  Were this a gritty adventure game it would be a major issue, but as it’s a light-hearted, comedic game, it can just about get away without.

There are a few basic puzzles, an inventory, a mini-game or four and a stealth element as well as character interactions as Doug sets about completing his mission.  The puzzles are all incredibly simple and mentioning any of them would probably negate the need to actually play the game yourself.  Moving on, the mini-games are fun if a little shallow, but they’re mini-games, the name says it all.  How complicated can throwing paper into a bin really be anyway?  They add a nice little distraction, much like the whack-a-mole game from Sam and Max: Hit the Road.  The stealth portions of the game really need not be in at all.  It feels as if the game is being extended for no real reason other than it would be even shorter were it not in.  It also seems to be trying to forcibly insert the whole “Mongoose” theme into the game.  It’s not very subtle in its attempt, and feels a lot like the developers have popped round to your house with a loud-speaker during this section to chant “Mongoose, Mongoose, Mongoose!” over and over just in case you somehow missed the comic-book theme of the game’s stealth portion.  If it was a little more subtle, or even a tad better developed before thrusting you into it, then perhaps it might work.

Character interaction is a huge focus of most adventure games, (apart from those bleak Russian ones where everyone else in the world seems to be dead or trying to kill you) and this is where Weekday Warrior shines.  It’s nice to see a mod give priority to creating quality dialogue and getting talented voice actors to bring the lines to life.  Every character in the game is voiced to a high standard.  While it might not be anything award winning, it’s certainly refreshing to have voice acting be one of the highlights in a mod rather than a pitfall.

Weekday Warrior is not a bad modification at all, but in places feels more like a tech demo than an actual game.  As it’s a student project that may very well be the case, but it would have been nice to have more of a consistent feel to the game.  Chopping and changing from stealth to mini-games and then back to adventure game is a little grating for such a short game.  If the adventure portion was longer then perhaps the mini-games and stealth element would not seem as huge a part of the game as they currently take up, and make the mod feel like one game rather than 3 separate parts.

Throwing my lovely colour-coded Goods and Bads out the window for this review, I’ll just sum it up for you:

Weekday Warrior – while seeming like a tech demo more than an actual game in places – manages to bring an amusing distraction to an engine that is saturated with FPS and RTS games.  It’s nice to see a development team give some love to the adventure genre for a change.  It’s a short game that’s nothing ground-breaking, but it does manage to entertain.