From Combines - Mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two about combine soldier.
There’s an intro briefly showing the hero’s life before becoming a combine soldier, but as far as I know the story is never brought back up again and it serves no real purpose. Imo it’d be better not to have any intro at all.
The opening with Vortigaunts one-shot killing you and without any weapons was already a bad sign.
Mapping was pretty basic and sometimes I wasn’t sure where to go and sometimes there’s empty rooms and invisible walls for no reason, or props are set to static so that you couldn’t use them to progress. Same goes for some of the weapons, sadly.
The mod does somewhat decent job at making you feel like a combine soldier at times, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense how you are send alone to a mission. Also, having your squad mates die in battle results in mission failure.
One particularily good looking map was the one set on a cliff, too bad it was easy to take falling damage just by going the only path possible, and that at the bottom I got attacked by leeches by standing knee-deep in water. There’s also a mission where you have to turn on thumpers, Id like to note that they are located in completely random places like sewers and on a rock sticking out of a cliffside. In addition, buttons activating those thumers are either located way too high, or, ironically, way too low.
Environmental obstacles such as electricity which have to be turned off in order to progress have either invisible walls, push you away, or slow your movement down when you try to get past them so that you die. It doesn’t make much sense, especially since these could’ve been easily avoided. For example, instead of having a competely avoidable electric wire laying on the ground that slows your movement when you try to jump over it, at the same time hurting you, why not have a pool of electrified water large enough to make it impossible to pass?
At one point early in the mod I jumped down to a coridoor which was blocked by steam and I couldnt go back up to turn it off, which resulted in mission failed message as well. Well why not add a ladder so I can go back up and be able to progress?
At some point the AI on Combine soldiers and turrets decided to turn on me for no reason, and when the game told me to go to a chopper it crashed. Oh well.
You can’t use much weapons aside from AR2 and there’s neither melee attacks available nor any melee weapon at all. And you can’t even sprint.
So… Alright mapping, meh gameplay and no story. Not much fun, but honestly not that annoying either.
Many levels are poorly designed. You can't choose weapons freely. You can't even sprint, which largely destroys the game experience. The enemy's (especially Vorts) damage is terrible, they can kill you with one shock under normal difficulty!
If you want to play as combine, the Entropy Zero series are 100x better than this mod.
Very good mod overall, so nice to have such a decent amount of content and storyline where you get to play as a Combine, with alot of various objectives and teamplay, management.
However it's bad that some areas/puzzles were very unclear although I got around them except for one I'll describe, and few areas in some maps pretty empty. Mind you, I'm a Half-Life veteran so I'm by no mean a newbie or a "bad player", I'm used to this game mechanics and parkour.
A clear example of that is the part after the Nexus telep where you have no Health, no weapon and have a small train to get moving by destroying the wooden thing blocking it, it's very buggy, was so unclear and uses such obscure mechanics I had to look up a walkthrough... Which didn't help because the only one available was made on an older version of the mod so I couldn't directly get ontop of the train to make the Antlion unlock it the way he did.
I had to noclip to get a Pickaxe I had noticed behind a wall being clueless as how to get there and unlock the train myself with my newly acquired weapon as the script opening the door to the Pickaxe never worked... That's very unfortunate.
Hopefully version 1.6 got many issues fixed but not all of them it seems
Apart from this game breakin xp I had on that specific puzzle, despite some clarification issues others went smoothly and were sometimes very clever, and I loved the plot twist at the end of the mod. Loving the bonus maps as well. It's one of the longest and most complete Combine mod I've seen in a while alongside Entropy Zero. Great job!
cool mod
entertaining and decent.
not much impressive level design, but very interesting. some times it has a feeling of half-life 2 and the half-life 2 beta, you get in many places. i give a 7. i took 2 hours and 30 minutes
not bad
Loved it, make part two
So this is what being a combine feels like. (My only gripe is you can't sprint in this mod.)