Slums 2 is episode 2 engine`s mod. Nine maps, dark and creepy. Nothing innovative in gameplay, but still good regular shooter. Slums 2 was created by only two men, who were inspired by Silent Hill, Condemned, FEAR games. Mod does not provide new weapons or some special features.
I played the original Half-Life 2 mod, Slums, before playing this. I hadn't realized that like Nightmare House 2, the first chapter of this mod is actually a remastered version of the original mod. I didn't mind though; it was really interesting to see how much the original mod, which was already successful in its own right, could be improved. While Slums looked very similar to the visual style of Half-Life 2 in the apartments section, Slums 2 has its own unique visual style that really sells the mod. Enemy placement and the pacing of encounters is much improved from Slums.
Slums 2 has a surreal, dreamlike quality to it, in part because of its strange short intro sequence in which you awaken from a nightmare in an apartment in City 17. The level design often seems impractical, as if it was designed specifically for the player to traverse through. In the specific case of this mod that isn't necessarily a bad thing; the game doesn't restrict itself to realism and the fact that the locations in the mod are under the control of the Combine gives some legitimacy to any unusual architectural choices.
The level design is very linear, with a few nonlinear loops that provide much appreciated relief from endless corridor crawling. Just like with the design choices, though linearity might be a bad thing in some games, here it's balanced out by the fun shooting mechanics and AI, just like in Half-Life 2.
The best aspect of Slums 2 is its visual design. The mod makes excellent use of lighting, particle effects, and color correction to maximize the grungy, desperate atmosphere of City 17. While the City might be familiar, the use of color and lighting in the mod make it feel new again, and this mod doesn't look much like most Half-Life 2 mods. The submachine gun and shotgun have been given newer, rustier textures to match the aesthetic of the mod, and it just works great.
Slums 2 has its own soundtrack, and while it's seldom used, it worked really well with the mod while reminding me of the Half-Life 2 soundtrack.
There are a few problems with the mod. Enemies never seem to drop ammo, which makes ammo extremely scarce. That made the mod a lot more challenging and really made me think about how to conserve my ammo, but it was also very frustrating. If I'm fighting soldiers with pulse rifles, why can't I use my pulse rifle? It really put the player at an unfair disadvantage. Thankfully, many enemies will drop health packs instead.
Another problem is that while the mod does an excellent job of switching between gunfights with Combine and survival-horror sections with zombies, there aren't a lot of encounters that mix up the enemy types besides those two groups. Almost every fight either has Combine soldiers and civil protection officers or zombine and headcrab zombies, with the possible addition of fast zombies or poison zombies. Occasional use of antlions or barnacles or even larger Combine enemies would have improved the diversity of combat encounters and prevented things from becoming predictable. There's one encounter that stands out as being one of a kind in the mod, but it could have used a lot more like it.
It was interesting to see Combine and Civil Protection working together. I don't recall if that ever happened in Half-Life 2, but I do know it's something I don't see a lot. Even though the AI is very different between those two enemy types, they were tied together really nicely in the mod and fighting squads of two or so CP officers with pistols, a soldier with an SMG, and a squad leader with a shotgun were a lot of fun.
The mod doesn't offer much closure. Since the first Slums mod ended abruptly, I thought that the Slums 2 would have some kind of resolution. Instead, it cut off abruptly after a section set in a metro tunnel. There wasn't any sort of final confrontation or resolution to the dream at the beginning of the mod.
Overall, the mod lacked a story. Any sort of clues about who the player was or where he was trying t