Reviews - HALF-LIFE: Operation Rift mod for Half-Life

I must say that this is by far one of the best HL1 mods I've played in recent years.. In my personal opinion it's even superior to the previous mods "Operation Rosenberg" & "Escape from Area 99" of this author.

Pro:

+ Fantastic level design.

+ Fantastic gameplay, plenty of brilliantly executed scripts running. Your ears and eyes are mostly entertained.

+ Plenty of secrets and Easter eggs.

+ Well balanced mod experience.

+ Amazing storyline even though some things are off lore wise.

+ Plenty of custom voices and texts adding significantly towards the story line.

+ No Black Mesa this time, kinda refreshing actually.

+ Very long mod with 26 maps plus and several hours of game play.

+ Unique charm and plenty of amazing new ideas implemented.

Contra:

- Few story elements that ignore events of the Half-Life Lore but don't necessarily contradict it either. That's open for debate. Alien Slaves for example...

- Few maps were not so well polished which resulted in FPS drops.

- Several voices lines were recorded with a silly monotone sounding Computer voice. Still better than having no voice at all.

- Some sections throughout the mod were not so well balanced such as the end fight for instance.

- Sometimes it wasn't so clear on where to go to next but such cases were rather rare.

- Few texture glitches remaining here and there but nothing serious.

- Ugly Level transitions happening next to black walls. Something that needs time getting use to.

Conclusion: In general I can strongly and gladly recommend this mod to any true Half-Life1 fan out there. There were times I felt like I was playing "TheyHunger" as the design in some maps was very similar to that of the Classic TheyHunger mods. But that's actually a good thing and should give most of you an idea about the direction this mod is taking. Later on I felt like playing Point of View when exploring vast mine shafts.

So it can be said that this mod offers a stunning scenery change. Something that not to many Hl mods provided in the past. This just adds to it by not letting the mod appear repetitive in any way. And to be honest the author succeeded with that strategy.

Both game play wise + story wise does this mod know how to convince and it's more than a worthy successor to "Escape from Area 99" & "Operation Rosenberg". The previous mods of this one here. If you don't know them yet. Make sure to play Rosenberg first & then secondly Escape from Area 99 and ultimately "Operation Rift".

I certainly hope that we will get to see a 4th mod installment of the mod series.

My congratulations towards the mod author on a job well done. Your mod is stunning and brilliantly executed. Fix the few remaining FPS drops, balance few of the tougher spots in game and you Shall see my 10 of 10. It's so close to perfection!

Go and play it people.

It's a pretty good mod, should take around 3-5 hours to complete. You'll mainly be fighting XEN and Race-X aliens. The level design for boomer town looks great and actually fits well with the look of small towns around Black Mesa. The custom models are cool, however some of them look inconsistant with the setting. My main issue with the mod is the awful nightvison range and the placement of enemies in long dark areas. The last level where you hold off a wave of enemies is kinda bad and can go on for way too long.

...

Pros: lengthy, intense, atmospheric, interesting puzzles that require to explore levels and get info from radios and pda.
Cons: Repetitive levels, enemies are often placed in open spaces which makes them weaker. Too many dark maps (requires Nightvision to be turned on for about 90% of the game). Text-to-speech voice lines ruin dark atmosphere that mod tries to create. Some battles were very difficult to survive (I played on Medium).
Operation Rift has many really good ideas but execution could be better.

A good mod with a few hiccups.
The level design is nice (except the level transitions) and it's pretty intuitive, so you won't get lost much often, it's also pretty long and I enjoyed most of the experience. However, there are a few problems. Sometimes the scripts were breaking and there were places that you could softlock the game and get stuck in the geometry. I'm also not the fan of used HD models, but that is a minor problem.

(SPOILERS)
The worst part was the last battle. Although the idea was good and it looked nice visually it wasn't balanced in terms of gameplay, there's no place to really take cover, it's just a big open field also there are those wierd stations that emit this purple gases on the sides of your battlefield so you sometimes get killed just because you try to strafe and doge projectiles, and it makes it unfair especially when several vortiguans are ready to attack you from both sides, It forces the player to savescuming but for some reason there's a chance that the saves will break during this fight pretty often and result in crashing the game, so getting thought that section is pretty painful and more of a burden I also think that it's a little too long by a few minutes (The constant crashes and lack of any options while running with low hp constantly being sniped by vortiguans when I didn't have any ammo left forced me to use god mode in the last minute of the fight).

Other than that, it's a well-made mod that's worth to check out and see for yourself.

I liked Operation Rosenberg but I must say the developer dropped the ball with this one.

- Scenarios are pretty good looking at first but as time goes on they repeat themselves way too much. It's always the same empty street with a building or two or a cave of some sort. It certainly doesnt help that the entirety of the mod happens at night.

- Voice acting is just as awful as it was in Operation Rosenberg with the same robot voice for certain characters and stiched together lines from other HL games for others. This often gets in the way of gameplay as some of these characters directly tell the player what to do in some sections and it's hard to make out what they are trying to say.

- Game design as a whole is disastrous. I lost count of the amount of times I got stuck in a section without knowing exactly to do. This is due to the mod poorly explaining the objectives to the player through the awful voice acting. Then there are other sections where you are provided key details through PDA's that you cant keep in an inventory or archive of some sort (like in say Resident Evil), which means that if you forget the PDA's contents or you forget to take a picture of the text with your phone you are probably going to die a few times.

- The final fight is really unbalanced. They expect you to hold on for 10 minutes against a neverending wave of aliens with a small platoon of marines that usually gets decimated after less than a couple of minutes (a single pit drone is capable of taking down the entire unit by itself!). To add insult to injury, the developer doesnt provide the player with the proper equipment to deal with this situation where, instead of giving the player ammo for useful weapons like the sniper or gluon gun they are actually given shotgun shells even though the shottie is completely useless during the fight due to its low damage output and the huge amount of vortiguants that spawn every few seconds. Speaking of vortigaunts they are a huge design issue in this fight as the game spawns too many but there is almost no cover which means that unless you kill them fast enough with a long range weapon like the sniper or the magnum you are most likely going to die to them a lot. At any rate I had to beat this fight with godmode as it is literally impossible to last for ten minutes with the poor equipment you are provided.

All in all I am pretty dissapointed with this sequel. Operation Rosenberg had its flaws but at no point did I felt that it was unplayable at times like with this one. This mod retains all of O.Rosenberg's shortcomings and adds a bunch of its own making the experience quite mediocre and frustrating, which is a shame as I am quite fond of the prequel.

Skipped through a few maps - they looked nice, custom NPCs and the weapons are nice.

But like the first part, Operation Rosenberg - it's far too buggy/glitchy to play properly.

Example: in the first few maps alone - the fan that needs to be deactivated with the satchel charge. You're given one - and it only stops the fan maybe 5% of the time.

Same issue with the roadblock/gas canister.

If it where polished and important actions needed to progress actually worked then it would be worth playing - but, unfortunately as it is there's far better mods out there worthy of your time.