PARANOIA Mod for Half-Life PARANOIA Review review

NOTICE: This review was written prior to any updates after the initial release. 

Intro-
I am going to start off by saying, this mod was great. But it lacked in so many ways that seemed it would succeed in. From what we had seen, it looked like the mod was going to be amazing, but it falls through on that.

Overview-
You start out the mod as a soldier, and that's all you really know if you don't read the journals lying around through out the game. You begin waking up in a dorm at a military base, and you realize that there's no English dialogue. Now this is not a major issue, unless you're like me and can't for the love of god focus on the image and the subtitles at the same time. You explore your dorm and find a journal that hints at a previous accident, which i will not explain. But not because it will ruin the story, it is completely pointless and makes you wonder why they added it in the first place. There are several Journals throughout the game that i chose to ignore for the most part. Why? Because its a video game, i don't think i should have to read pages of text to get the story.

After you find your way out of the dorm and around the base to several locations to learn about your equipment that seem to be on the opposite side of the base from wherever you are. Your final location puts you into the HQ where you're given info on your mission. You basically are sent to a specified location to kill these bad guys, not much of a story-driven first mission.

When you arrive at your first location, you finally get to see what the squad hype was all about. At first, they seem to be pretty well set, they go to their tactical locations to get ready to break through. You enter the gunfight, the metal starts playing, gunz-a-blazin, and then you realize your guys aren't shooting. After you take down the extremely bullet-resistant enemies with sketchy hit-boxes pretty much by yourself, you start to realize that the game looks beautiful for a HL1 mod, and that's about it.

The rest of the game lacks storyline from about here on out (even though it should be where the story picks up). An explosion takes place, and you get up out of the rubble and find that you are several floors below where you wanted to be, in a abandoned genetic engineering research lab. Now, you would think it sounds like a great concept, and it is. But they didn't run with it, it ends about two thirds through the game, and about two more stories join up after it that don't really tie in at all. And to finish it off, you finally get an ending that literally makes you go, "WTF?"

Summary-
The mod definitely is a cosmetically beautiful game, but that's about where it ends. It seems that they took sub-par story and game-play and wrapped it in good looks. It seemed to have several issues with crashes, mostly at the start of a new battle of such. The soundtrack was great, but very repetitive, basically playing anytime an enemy was nearby. The AI seemed to do good in the beginning but basically came down to something that shot a few rounds and got stuck in your way, and then would yell at you to move. The enemies seemed to take anywhere from one bullet to two clips to take down, which, as realistic as it is with the zombies, the humans should have fallen faster at medium difficulty.

Worth The download? Definitely. Even if it isn't the jack of all trades, it will certainly give you a great experience and a beautiful glimpse of what the golddsource engine still has to offer.

(+) Amazingly beautiful for a HL1 mod
(+) Great models, textures, animations, etc.
(+) Interesting concept

(-) Flawed storyline
(-) Frequent crashes
(-) Repetitive soundtrack
(-) Buggy AI
(-) Difficulty level issues