The Citizen is set parallel to the events of the original Half-Life 2. The player takes the role of an ordinary man, pushed over the edge by the oppressive regime controlling his life. His home trashed, his family dead, The Citizen leaves his apartment for the last time. He seeks new friends, and a way to help the human resistance to smash the iron grip of the Combine. What follows is a winding tale of betrayal, determination and grief. Many obstacles lie in his path which require a sleek combination of agility, stealth, intelligence, and sheer violence to overcome
Oh Dear... if there is anything that made me more excited to play this, it wasn't the premise. I found it has potential, but its the reviews everywhere that made me think this was going to be revolutionary. As someone who's play alot of great hl1 mods I have high hopes for hl2 ones particularly ones with a dev team of more than one or two people. This really isn't what I was expecting.
The reason why HL2 worked well as a story is because it didn't feel the need to provide regular dialogue to the player instead if did what HL1 did and told the story through gameplay through the majority of it. Here we have a constant re-affirmation as to what your doing next. Here it kinda felt grating having to listen to the dialogue which amounts to just that. And when it isn't standard context, like the resistance speech on heroically taking on the Combine to assassinate Breen, it just feels flat. Like nothing we haven't heard of before and we just have to sit through it.
The difficulty is a tad on the easier side much like the original HL2. We fight mostly Combine but I expected this. If I had to make a recommendation, its to skip this and play the sequel instead or play this after you've already played all the good stuff. It'll feel less of a big deal by then.
+Moderately long
+Level design was decent for the most part, locations are what you'd expect. Mostly just City17 alleyways, houses and underground areas.
-Voice acting
-The story, If you can call it a "story". More like just a bunch of stuff happens and Breen gets away as expected.