Story: HL2 mod continuing story of HL:Opposing Force character Adrian Shephard in a time set somewhere between HL1 and HL2. It brings you from a Black Mesa like base trough an outdoor environment and a Soviet marine base into a early combine citadel to end in a ancient alien location here on earth, the combine stumbles upon when creating a citadel. What you get: Intro and 5 playable maps roughly good for a hour of playtime. The mod includes custom props, textures and music but NO new weapons or NPC's.
The authors of the mod gave their best in terms of creativity, the environments are greatly designed and even if the mod can be beat in about 2/3 hours or less, they still managed to present a large variety of situations and warfare styles with a mix of urban,environmental and futuristic fight scenes. Extra points for features like the portal to the citadel (i don't really like the part where you couldn't enter the portal before the elite combines came out, it would be a lot better if they simply weren't there), the strider eleavator on the foundations, the submarines on the artic port and the excellent mapping used on the underground antlion captivity.
The story of this mod is pretty good at all. The simple fact of a continuation to the history of Adrian Shephard already amazes mostly of the HL fans, the intro is also really interesting, the combine invasion into a rebel base is something everyone wanted to follow up closely as a spectator since the events at east of Black Mesa on HL2, and this time we could do it, but i seriously expected more resistance from the rebels, i gotta say it's extremely odd not a single elite was taken down even with the absurd quantity of RPGs the rebels were carryng.I didn't quite like the idea that shephard was taken directly to the antlion infestation place only because every path turned out to take him there, i think a g-man interferance would fit nice in the transition of the citadel to that place. I also add extra points for giving a origin to the antlion occupation on earth since we never got to see them on xen. However i was very disappointed about the voice acting (simply pathetic in about every character) and about the NPC animations that could be drastically improved; there's not much to say about the gameplay, it's balanced and don't drag you too long with exhaustive combine fight scenes or abusive zombie encounters but the mod gains another extra point for a plausible origin of the use of a Gravity Gun.
Final Score: 8,0