Hardcore Single-Player Mod for Hl1 with 4 hour campagin. Your name is Alex Johnes. You're one of scientists caught up in the Black Mesa disaster. After being trained in a special Black Mesa self-defense course three months ago, you're unwilling to accept the sure death as your destiny. You will neither let the troops catch you, nor will they wipe you out. Make your way. Find Gordon Freeman. He is the last hope that drives you traveling on...
The mod has some things going for it, the custom weapons, custom grunts with desert camo, and one that had a sugegasa (bamboo hat), custom snow grunts and some unique locals.
But unfortunately its not enough to save it from the invisible wall syndrome. Many places that seem like you can go, you can't... alot of the time for no real reason. Like when you go down a stair way thats broken on the end, you can't even jump to your death.
A place where there was a a fairly large broken hole in the wall, you couldn't get through. Yet another obscure part of the wall that had a smaller hole, somehow the game had expected you to know that you had to hit it with your knife to make it a bigger hole... WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER NOTICEABLY LARGER HOLE?
Even regular snow terrain is difficult to move over because there seems to be invisible walls all around it.
But if that isn't annoying enough the game also has divergent paths that go to dead ends, meaning that you also have to backtrack regularly. This is a big no-no. Valve didn't put any backtracking in their game because backtracking is padding, artificial difficulty and makes the game tedious faster than anything else. Anyone who did not learn that lesson from valve shouldn't be making mods.
Another part that's close to the beginning of the game is where you had to randomly find a invisible ladder to climb up that made the game just a tad more frustrating then it already is.
There where some good ideas though, the voice acting was a nice touch that I actually liked (even though it didn't fit the mood that the name of the mod seemed to suggest), a more serious tone would have been fitting. Silent protagonists are the lamest things in games IMO.
I would not recommend this mod. Only because a patch never came.
Just played through this mod. It was funny and the makers are very creative. I really liked being away from boring black mesa.
Unfortunately I couldnt really enjoy this mod because of the bugs und design flaws. Non of these errors was really bad but the great number of them kind of ruined the expirience. I couldnt walk 10 meters without walking into a bug or another annoyance.
It feels like the game wasnt really playtested that much. Right now I give it 6/10. This game needs a patch. With all the bugs sorted out I would give it an 8/10.
Pros:
- Very nice mapping/Beatiful scenery
- Creativity: No boring black mesa
- New content: Textures, sounds, models, weapons, enemies
Cons:
- Bugs! So many of em
- Getting stuck in the landscape all the time (something wrong with the brushwork or the compilers)
- Dead ends. (Either make it a linear shooter or make it a non-linear shooter where different ways lead to the goal. But dont make it a maze with different ways but only one is the right one and the others are bad ends)
- English. Is it so hard to find a native english speaker to look over your sounds?
- Music. Music that you like ≠ good soundtrack
- No autosave. You must have autosaves. Especially after long cutscenes.
This is one of the most 'maddening' Half-life mods I have ever 'attempted' to play through: In many ways it shows a lot of promise and -for the better and the worse- seems to be a very 'amateurly-made' mod. It has a lot of creativity and originality going for it.
Right off the bat, I was unable to destroy a silo door -with the tank- at the very beginning of this mod. I looked at a youtube 'walkthrough' and I realized I did nothing wrong. For some reason, hitting the silo door with tank guns did nothing, so I had to use a 'no-clip' cheat to get through the door. The polygon count of this mod is very low -- as a result, I got stuck in certain places where I shouldn't have -- had a difficult time manoevering to evade soldiers' gunfire when I had to.
Within the first 20 minutes I had to use youtube walkthrough several times to figure out where to go. There were far too many graphical and physical glitches. I finally within a short amount of time gave up on this mod, altogether....it many respects it looked like it could've been a pretty good 'amateur' mod with some improvement and corrections.....
This game offers some good ideas. I like the new training. Leveldesign is good, however there some slightly worse areas. For example I have noticed doors that are on only one side of the map. You can see them through window of a small room in training but when you get to the other side of the wall where the door should be it is not there. Also there are some areas where you'll find yourself clueless. It's not clear where you should go next. What I also didn't like were the new models and especially their animations. Other things were good,I loved the idea of having a laser pointer on MP5 or the new hud. Overall it's solid 7/10
**** me, i really, REALLY wanted to like this mod...but this ain't it, chief.
THE GOOD:
-Training map is amazing and i really liked the ambush aspect of it. The turrets give you time to spot them.
- First chapter is decent enough, with some pretty detailed levels.
-Cheesy boss battle. Quick and painless.
-New weapon/enemies models.Gimmie, gimmie.
-I like arctic campaings.
THE BAD:
- Inconsistency. Some models are very detailed for a half life mod, while others look very bad. Some trees are fully modeled, while the rest are 2d doom sprites.
- THE HUD. IT'S BLUE SO WHEN YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE SKY OR ARE FIGHTING IN THE SNOWY TERRAIN YOU CAN BARELY SEE YOUR CROSSHAIR/AMMO.
- Weapons inconsistency. I get it, some weapons are good, others are bad, but ffs the deagle and ak are USELESS. The uzi barely works in close range. You will spend 90% of your time with mp5 and shotgun.
-Enemy placements. Cheesy turret spots and some are in corners of the map.
THE UGLY:
- Backtracking. Enough said.
- Map geometry is bad. I get stuck in everything. Some places even require me to noclip to get unstuck.
-No autosave. Tedious.
- Music. Omfg the bitcrush for goldsource is really rough >:C
CONCLUSION:
It's a shame, really. It had potential, but it flopped really hard. One of the few half life mods that i will not replay again.
At first glance this mod looks like it's got it all: New models, sounds, textures, weapons etc. but at its core it’s very mediocre.
The mapping is hit and miss. Some areas look good, others are cramped and hard to navigate. Especially the outside sections are a mess, you get stuck in geometry whenever you try to proceed. The enemies commonly hide in far away places or worse, behind bushes or trees which you have no chance of seeing them and because everything, your weapons included, do tons of damage, they drop you with a couple of shots, it's never fun. Speaking of weapons, they are all new, some look weird (MP5 with fat grenade launcher and backwards thumb) and some are very poorly designed. The AK and Mac-10 have insane bullet spread, MP5 is always the better option. There is also a shotgun and a deagle which I have never used once.
The tone of the mod is very childish. Level names look like they've all been written by a thirteen year old trying to sound cool, they are all written like this: "ChApTeR 3: tHiNgS ArE gEtTiNg HaRdEr". Our protagonist speaks like he's the coolest man in the world and the dialog is horrible: You come across a room filled with rubble and dead scientists and our "hero" says: "What a mess looks a bit like my car heh heh" in an action hero voice. It’s awful. Then there is what the creator considers music. It's been bitcrushed to hell to work on GoldSRC, combine that with it being extremely loud and you have the perfect reason to quit the mod whenever it starts.
Some positives: There is a (very easy to break) final boss which is always a plus in my book, some decent textures and models (snow coat grunts). Also, this mod quietly recreated two cut enemies, namely the panthereye and human sergeant but does nothing with them. You only fight the panther two times and the sergeant one time! They die with ten or so bullets from the MP5. What a cool achievement that's been wasted.
Overall, I have played much, much worse mods than EFTD, but the fact that there is this much work that's been put into it and nearly everything about it misses the mark makes the damage even bigger. It reminds me of "Chemical Existence" in a way.
Try it if curious.
Escape from the Darkness, by Dieblein and Thief (are they the same person? I'm uninformed and dum, sorry) is a bit of a frustrating mod, on first impressions it has some pretty nice looking environments, they kind of don't make me feel like I'm in Black Mesa (I don't recall seeing so many palm trees grow in the new mexico desert, but I don't know things), maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, it's a refreshing take, at least.
Sadly I couldn't help but notice inconsistencies, for example, early on we see the palm trees I mentioned, they are very detailed for a Half-life mod, then later on we see some pine trees up close in another location, and they are quite literally the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts you'd expect to see in a game from the mid 90's, then we have the bathrooms, they do look very detailed and realistic, the problem is that they are in the wrong place, with graffitti all over the walls and assorted acts of minor vandalism, Black Mesa must have a pretty rowdy population of senior and middle aged scientists, who like to tag bathrooms in their time away from work (can we get one about being forced to wear ****** ties?), either that or the soldiers are just completely ******* nuts.
The inconsistencies also extend to the visual language of the mod, you have two sets of wooden boxes right next to each other, one is unbreakable, the other is breakable, and you are *supposed* to break that set to get into a vent and progress.
Then there's this bit... Youtu.be
Let's go over it together: so we're going through this office, doing the usual Half-life stuff, oh, door doesn't open (15:15), let's go through the bathrooms, there's a window overlooking the bathrooms from this office (15:30), that's pretty weird, but whatever, let's jump through, by the way, once the next map loads, don't check the door on the left, or it will literally swap between loading each map like 7 times, anyway, we keep moving forward and we get to this valve (16:06), we have no reason to turn it, but let's do so anyway, OH, uhh that did a lot! It also caused a displacement field to appear in mid air for some reason? But nothing seems to have changed... I climbed up into the space above the ceiling and found nothing there, that passage that had collapsed was still blocked, nothing opened up anywhere, I was here for at least 5 minutes trying to figure out this "puzzle", turns out that we have backtrack to the previous map (luckly our friend in the video already knows this), because the door that was locked earlier spontaneously exploded (16:29). You might think the door on the left (16:45) is the way to go, but it just takes you to a dead end, with an invisible wall that prevents you from moving forwards. Wild stuff. Special thanks to Youtuber ParkJinSung for this and their other playthroughs.
By the time I got to the part where soldiers were shooting me from behind the aforementioned 2d trees, in a valley with holes in the ground through which I could see the whole world, I decided I'd like to play something else, and so I did.
I imagine making this was a good learning experience for the author(s?) of the mod back in the day, it seems they worked on it when they were in high-school, I can relate, I wanted to make some Doom levels where you played as some souped-up Imp when I was in high-school. At any rate, despite my issues with this mod, I can tell that the developers are very creative! I hope they have held on to that creativity throughout the years, and that they will continue to do so for the rest of their lives.
A campaing that could do better if they put more effort and time to it. The team have the potencial but it looks like they don't care about perfection or quality, they just felt like doing a mod.
The maps don't make fncking sense at all, and have a lot of collision problems.
The gun play is a shame, just MP5 all of them, doesn't matter all the time to crouch to "get better aiming", it does what ever it wants.
This is more like a Hardcore mod but done really bad.
Good work but an "OK, but better not play it" mod.
My favorite mod when I was teenager, thanks for making this even if there's some issues about invisible flying walls or... Something which I have to crouch.