Mr Freeman has once again been “recruited” by the elusive and stone-faced G-man to handle a “situation’ that could prove catastrophic if not handled immediately. It seems that a rift in the space-time continuum has allowed the minions of Xen to establish a stronghold inside one of the main reactor cores in the Lambda Complex. Somehow they have figured out a way to tap directly into the complex’s nuclear power grid. They are using this energy to continually widen the rift to allow more and more of the Xen inhabitants into our world.
OK, so I can see now why some people say this mod is a HL1 classic. Because, back then in 1999 one year after HL1 was released, I guess this mod sure it was impressive. With a coherent story involving Gordon having to achieve an epic goal and the whole combat against grunts and xenians, and also some puzzles along the way, this mod sure blew the minds of many gamers whose desires for more HL1 maps were big.Now its been 13 years after and to me it doesn’t look great, actually I had terrible troubles to find the crowbar at first place, sure or maybe it was my mistake and I didn’t see it in the first maps at all, I just found a glock which it was practically useless due to the amount of enemies you have to deal with at the first steps.Also I believe the whole map design sometimes feels boxy, and some areas are just too narrow, so it felt that after some years of HL mapping some mods were definitely better than this one, compare “smart decoy” to this one and you see what I mean, the former is an almost perfect HL1 map, or kind of closest to the HL1 perfection in map development terms, also the celebrated Adam Foster’s “Some Place Else” a prequel to “Minerva” was also between the really well done maps for HL1.The previous doesn’t quit credit in this mod, because it was one of the first in HL1 mod universe back then when Planethalflife or Halflifefiles were the big and almost unique HL1 dedicated mod spaces. Also the coherent story tell of the mod and some clever combat parts make this mod worth to be played.