Review by Dr.Doozer - Station 51 mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Station 51 falls into the same issues I have with many what I call "Citizen" mods: they just exist. There's no real change in the formula to warrant a higher rating, but the mod can exist on its own sufficiently.

STORY

Non-existent. That is a big problem I have here: at least mods like The Citizen, Precursor, and Triage tried to include story elements. What I got from this story was a brief almost uninspired message on a radio that told me to get moving. The story needs more to go from than that. There was a lot of potential to tap into, yet I felt like it missed that.

GAMEPLAY

Though I found nothing heavily wrong with it, gameplay amounted to running from arena to arena and fighting off a horde of enemies or the random Hunter Chopper or two. What really got to me was that the enemies were relentless: they just kept coming. It's not that the enemies were too challenging in their behaviors, since the rooms were set up as arenas, but they never stopped. I never really had a chance to recover before being thrown into another fight. Maybe try including a puzzle or two; Source engine is superb at physics puzzles. Weapon pacing also was strange. I get a pistol at the start only a few rooms later to get a shotgun, only a few rooms later to get a Rocket Launcher, only a few rooms later to get a Gravity Gun? Slow it down! Let a curve happen, like there was in Half-Life 2 or the episodes. It's why they had it. Mapping was solid, I must say. I'd love to bring the mapper onto another mod.

OVERALL

Design choices and a lack of a concrete story do muddle what would have been another Citizen-style mod quite a bit. If the lead were to go back and almost touch it up a bit, adding in a concrete story with real characters and redesign a lot of the pacing in the mod, it would be a lot more solid. At the moment, it is a little shaky for someone who wants more than just a chain of arena rooms.