PARANOIA Mod for Half-Life Para No A.I. review

Let me get the goodness out the way to start with, cause it's all quite obvious. This game is gorgeous for a Half-Life mod. I think it’s easy to forget, with things like Crysis around, that this game is based on decade old technology, and so can never really be compared to modern all-the-tricks games. The textures and models are all of good quality and the flashlight reminds me a lot of the one is Half-Life 2, which is quite an achievement.

Voice acting is all of a decent quality, even if it is all in Russian. There are a few moments where it sounds bad (echo in the gasmask room), but generally the voice acting is fine. The voices do seem to be a bit mismatched with the characters though, as a lot of the voices sound too old for the young looking models they’re used for.

Moving on:

Paranoia puts you in the shoes of a Russian Spetsnaz (I will probably spell this 50 different ways, sorry) officer, who, as your comrades around the army base you begin in will tell you, has recently been promoted to major. The game is split into what are basically 3 seamless acts.

The first “act” of the game is spent in this Russian army base doing various tasks such as collecting a gas mask and heading to the firing range for some much needed practice with a rifle.

Finding your way around the Russian base is quite difficult, as all the helpful signs are (realistically) written in Russian, so it leaves you to hunt around for the location you’re supposed to be at without any help from the environment. The areas you’re looking for also tend to be through rooms that are far too easily overlooked. The firing range is the worst offender here, with the door you need being in a location that’s really too dark to see. I walked around for a good 10 minutes before eventually noticing a darkened passage to the left of some stairs.

At the firing range you meet up with your team. “Team”. I’m never really sure what part you play in this team throughout the game. It seems mainly that Major in the Russian Spetznas means “whipping boy”, as you’re pretty much told what to do by everyone else in the game. I can only sympathise with my character when I imagine how bad he must have had it when he was the rank below Major.

The firing range is the first area in the game that lets you try out the weapons in Paranoia. The weapons are all based on real world guns, and so are pretty much standard for any modern first person shooter. Throughout most of the game you’ll find yourself with a rifle (AK type, black/silver) and a pistol.

Secondary fire on all weapons makes your character use the iron-sights/scope on the selected weapon. While this is a nice feature, it feels very weak, and almost not worth doing, especially with the rifles.

I found myself not using the iron-sights with anything but the pistol. Actually I went through the game almost entirely using the pistol alone to headshot people at close to medium range. It seems to be the only gun with decent accuracy and recoil.

Along with weapons you’ll find yourself with 2 types of headgear: A gasmask for the occasional environmental hazard, and a ballistic faceguard to avoid getting shot in the head. While these add some variety to the colour of the scene in front of you, they seem to have been added mainly for something clever for the developers to do.

The faceguard is activated using the V key and chops off a good portion of your vision while it is down, in exchange for headshot protection. I’m not usually one to get motion sickness from a game, but the cut off sections of view in front of me did seem to have a nauseating effect after a short while playing with it down.

Moving on from item gripes, the real game starts at what I call “Act 2”. Your unit is sent to deal with a terrorist attack on... something. I either missed it, or what you’re defending is never explained. It looks like some sort of industrial warehouse.

While the textures are top-notch for a Half-Life mod, the level design and layout left me very confused at times. Valve knows that their level design can be complex, as long as there’s a clear focus. Early Paranoia maps suffer from odd level design that never really draws you in a direction, but towards the end the maps get much more tight and narrow, and help to push you and your eyes in the right direction.

Either out of luck, or generally decent (but sometimes appalling) level design, I ended up at the place the game wanted me I would say 80% of the time. The one time that sticks out in my mind as being the oddest, most backwards map design in Paranoia, is a section in Act 2 where you’ll find yourself in the middle of a huge warehouse type area, with a couple of steel containers that are functioning as buildings inside it. From the looks of the room, there’s no way forward. I would have no problem with that if there was something obvious I had to do in order to proceed. Clear a blocked door with explosives perhaps, or call in a team member (they were all suspiciously absent from this portion of the game) to help.

But the level design in question required me to somehow notice a ladder on top of one of these containers, and then jump my way up there from various stacked items around it. This works in Half-Life 2 because the rooms are designed as such to draw your eyes towards what you need to do. Paranoia doesn’t do that in this room and it’s blind luck if you notice this ladder. It’s probably because the room is so enormous that you focus on that there must be something in another section of the room, get frustrated, backtrack and repeat.

There’s no reason why you would look up in this room, that’s what I’m saying. No visual clues apart from the ladder. I noticed the stacked items long before the ladder, I even climbed up on them, but it did not feel like it was what I was supposed to be doing, as the ladder is behind you when you get to the top of the stack, so unless you’ve noticed it, you’ll think nothing of the climb.

I think it’s also in part due to logic. My eyes may have noticed this ladder before I realised it was important, but because it’s in a location that there’s no logical reason to have a functional ladder, my mind may have ignored it.

Generally though, the levels are pleasing to the eye, and follow some sort of logic that guides you along. While playing I did have to remind myself that this is indeed a Half-Life 1 mod. While it’s nothing eye-meltingly beautiful, I was never left feeling that I was playing something designed on top of a game that’s a decade old and seriously ugly by today’s standard. It’s clear a lot of effort has been taken to make this mod look as good as it can.

The music in Paranoia adds a lot of tension to the game, especially during the more horror based Act 3, where creepy music is accompanied by harrowing moans and the ominous knocking of creatures trying to break free.

Opponents run unrealistically fast, making aiming a complete pain when they move. There’s also a lack of reaction from all opponents when you shoot them. You can never really be sure you’re hitting someone until they die, which is quite discouraging.

Intelligence wise opponents are omniscient and there’s no way to sneak up on them, but to balance this they’re rather stupid in every other manner. I did not notice a lot of these flaws until “act 3”, the horror part of the game that introduces zombie creatures that have no ranged attack, so must get close to you in order to do damage.

The majority of monsters in this act of the game simply can’t cope. I could forgive a couple of A.I mess ups that stopped creatures from attacking me, but nearly every enemy in the later part of the game will fail miserably if you retreat. They get stuck on walls, doors, nothing. Some of the first zombie type creatures I encountered came from two different directions at a sort of Y junction in a corridor. I retreated up the long part of the Y and as the enemies converged they walked into each other and stood there, doing nothing, until I stabbed one of them with a knife you find later on in the game.

You’ll play a good portion of act 3 with just the knife. I remember killing at least 5 zombie creatures with my knife before getting more ammunition for the guns. While I was annoyed to be having to use a knife to begin with, I later realised it to be a godsend. I am a headshot ho, basically. I aim for the head with guns whether the head does more damage or not. And these zombies lurch from side to side at a frantic pace, making it near impossible for me to shoot zombies in what I know is the correct method, with a couple of well placed bullets to the head. It’s the accepted method of zombie slaying. The games insanely fast animation cycle makes it impossible to hit them properly, and even if you do they seem to take more headshots than they do knife hits.

It took me a while to realise that there was a secondary, more powerful attack with the knife (no iron-sights on a knife, duh), and once my brain clicked on that there was a good section of quite intense zombie butchering action, one of the highlights of the game.

Human opponents fair a little better as they’re given guns and are seemingly 100% accurate the second you pop your head up into their line of sight. If you don’t panic though, and you make sure to put your visor down, you should be able to take the human opponents out in 1 or 2 headshots, which results in you taking less damage than if you were to fire off 15 or so rounds into their chests with one of the rifles. The recoil is just too high, or the bullet spread. Whatever it is, it makes rifles near useless. I can’t stress that enough.

Your A.I. controlled human allies will do nothing but guide you in the right direction. While they will also draw some fire away from you they stand very little chance of ever killing anything. Unfortunately they’re invulnerable, as at times I really did wish them dead. The 70^th time you hear/read “You’re in my way!” during a battle, you’ll turn and waste a clip on them just for the sake of it, believe me.

In conclusion, the game is nothing super special. It has a lot of flaws, but it is enjoyable. There are moments of frustration, and the irritating super speed of HL1 characters makes the realistic FPS it tries to be rather frustrating when you start and takes a while to get used to. It could do with patches to improve A.I / path-finding, and tighten the mapping in certain places, but all in all is well worth the download, and the short time it will take to complete.

It is worth it just for the couple of times it will make you jump, and the general level of creepiness that the later parts of the game conjure up.

With further tweaking I’m sure this game could go down as a classic “must play” mod for any Half-Life fan. 

Good Stuff

+ Decent storyline

+ Creepy atmosphere

+ Headshots count against human opponents

+ Textures and models are good throughout

+ Sound effects and music good in general

+ Fantastic English translation.

 Bad Stuff

- Inconsistent audio levels

- Poor weapon design (damage, accuracy of rifles)

- Lack of enemy response to damage

- Battle music too loud and noticeable

- Friendly A.I. characters will make you want to kill them