You are Bob Dewey, Black Mesa janitor. You arrive at the research facility for another day at work: cleaning up the mess those smart ass scientists leave behind, refilling the soapboxes in the toilets, listening to Barney's stupid jokes and reading Penthouse Magazine. It's not the most exciting job in the world, but it pays good and you get lot's off free donuts. As usual, those scientists create black holes and open gates to other alien worlds filled with creatures who eat human flesh for lunch. Nothing special, but this time, they really messed it up and those aliens found a way to our planet. And guess what, you are in the middle of all this. While Gorden Freeman kicks alien arse, Corporal Adrian Shephard fights Freeman and Barney Calhoun tries to save some scientists, you just try to save you own butt and get the hell out of Black Mesa. It's a bigger mess you have to clean up this time...
I usually love mods that look different to the rest, and this one delivers highly on the detail, each place looks like it was polished to some degree that looks somewhat different from the last, even though most of those places are corridors.
Enemy placement is the main problem, it just doesn’t seem to be much thought or difficulty in it.
Its what makes this mod lower on the scale for me, is that it doesn’t challenge the player. Every encounter seems to be very tame, either one or two headcrabs or Islaves or a small squad of grunts which your always stocked to the teeth with to take on.
You have that crossbow since early on and then grenades, which I didn’t need to use because of all the AR grenades we got piled with mid way in.
And you’ve always got enough health and energy.
It doesn’t have any big battles except one comes close where you take on about 6-7 grunts, but I didn’t have much trouble. The trip the Xen was very short but I sort of liked it, and was far better than any of other mods that attempted it so far.
The upside down angle was also a nice short sequence that I personally don’t like nor think it makes any sense, but I’m sure some might appreciate its novelty.
The color scheme isn’t exactly great either, its rusty canal/water station (which I’ve never liked), a small sewer sequence, and then grey corridors of a storage area and a lighter grey lab areas.
It has no story or scripted sequences but most mods are like that :P
You get a vague notion of being a janitor from the text file, and a texture pack you can get reinforces that, but its just a novelty.
It has no secret places but once again most mods are like that, in fact Half-Life mostly didn’t have much of that unfortunately.
It also has a sort of anti-climatic ending where you reach the surface (again?) but this time ambushed and die by, well an amount of grunts you’ve easily taken on in the passed and are fully equipped to deal with :(