Rock 24 Mod for Half-Life 2 Rock 24: An Excellent Little Mod review

“Rock 24”, produced by Mint_Sauce, is unmistakably an excellent little mod. The game starts on a rebel ship in a foggy ocean landscape, where the player quickly learns that his goal, as Gordon Freeman, is to rescue an important rebel ally from Rock 24, a combine prison island. The ship is spotted by a scanner and the player is quickly immersed in an action sequence, having to fight a couple of combine helicopters. After this you arrive at the prison without your suit or any weapons, and the game slows its pace a bit by having you solve a little puzzle before you can get back into the action. Little breaks in the pace like that give the player a chance to breathe, and it’s really smart that Rock 24 does this.

Another impressive feature of the mod is the abundance of original voice acting (accompanied by a pretty good script); it is not incredibly professional but certainly decent amateur work, and it’s so much better that they put in the effort to make the characters say what they need for them to say instead of stringing together lines from the original HL2 and trying to adapt them to the situations in the mod. On top of that Rock 24 has some really great scripted sequences such as an ally sneaking up to and eliminating a combine guard from behind, an APC ambush, or simply a rebel buddy speaking to you from a combine monitor screen. It's got some custom models and skins, and it also has really nice level design—maps with atmosphere, mood, and purpose.

The mod does well with gameplay, featuring puzzles and intense fighting sequences, and makes an immersive experience by having the player receive instructions from, and having to protect npcs. But there are some small bugs (an especially bad one is when you move after the teleport sequence; you’ll know what I mean) that can intrude on your experience, but only temporarily if at all. Also, it can be confusing about where the player is supposed to go next, or what he’s supposed to do. Sometimes it’s quite evident that the level designer tried to give hints as to where the player is supposed to go, but these aren’t always sufficient and you may have to wander around a bit before you can finally say “ohhhhhhh, okay”. Over all though, these things are not enough to break the fun.

Rock 24 is definitely worth playing; it’s short, but you won’t forget how good it is.