The Gate is a single player modifcation with a difference, featuring a 30 plus strong team of voice actors, and authentic WWII weaponry and heart pumping classical music It has a feel of no other mod out there. There is a MP3 player coded into the Gate engine and we have genuine german voice actors playing the parts of the Soldiers. It is staged in Egypt and Northern Europe during wartime, and incorperates new teqniques for stealth and sneaking around which was thought inpossible with the Halflife engine. Coded into the Engine also is new kill characteristics such as one shot head kills etc. The Gate has been 16 months in the making so far and keeps growing and growing...

RSS Reviews  (0 - 10 of 97)

This mod may have an alright concept and game play, there are some good fight scenes although I felt like the difficulty was rather unbalanced at times and the stealth missions were just trial and error. The voice acting ranges from bad to just awful. Such little effort was put into the voice work its pathetic. The main character is just annoying and delivers his lines in such a cheesy manner. Poor quality mics and no lip-syncing didn't really help either.

Conclusion:
This isn't a mod that I really recommend. If you've got nothing else to do and want to kill some Nazi's than sure give it a try, but overall I think your better off avoiding this one.

I'll try and keep this short.

Immediately I was awestruck with the level of detail this mod provided. The general thought through the mod really intruiged me and I was hoping that the mod would become a blast to play. One of the legendary HL mods that you remember for a long time and even talk about when you meet other modders.

The story too is great, but there are some logical holes that degraded an otherwise nice story. For example, [SPOILER WARNING]

After getting to egypt he says he needs to find a weapon. 20 metres later you come across a perfectly good axe standing in a piece of wood. But you're not using that, instead you have to find a combatknife that is hidden inside a sarcophagus with no hints of it being there.

And not to mention the German resistance movement being in Egypt. Not wholly impossible, but weird strange them operate in Egypt on a rumor.

I'm also not a very big fan of 'trial and error' puzzles where every error means instant death like the spiked floor.

The biggest beef I have is with the difficulty and the Voice acting.

The difficulty is so unforgiving it's one of the things that made me quit before I got to the end. I felt that in my case it wasn't worth the frustration to make it to the credits. In particular I hated the Stealth section. The viewlength of the enemy plus the blink of an eye they spend to see you made that section hell to pass.

The voice acting. For one the technical quality difference could be smaller. Almost all the microphones used were of varying quality, and the colonel in particular used a VERY bad microphone.
The main character sounds like a cheery WW2 commercial announcer with almost no emotion or development stirring behind his shell at all.
In general the voice actors sound wooden and non-immersed with their character or situation.

I know for a fact that the quality on voice actors here on moddb has increased by tenfold if this was the most professional cast you could get back then.

The Gate REALLY wants to be a movie. You can tell by the developer calling himself writer and director, a score by John Williams taken from different movies, even calling the player character "the leading male". By doing this, the developer seems to forgot he's making a mod.


Some positives first:

The mapping is above average. There are a couple of errors here and there, some objects floating or clipping together etc. but generally, many of the maps are pleasing to look at, I liked the variety too.

The voice acting isn't that bad. The main character sounds fine, sometimes a bit too excited. Side characters aren't terrible either, some have worse mics than others but generally, it's passable. If you've played the amazing Heart of Evil, you might also recognize the voice of the colonel at the start too.


Now for the negatives:

The biggest problem that kills this mod is the difficulty, there is no balancing. Have you ever died to a leech? Even they hit like a truck. Enemies are deadly, a couple of shots and you're dead. Wouldn't be much of an issue if your own weapons were usable, they have extremely high recoil and not accurate enough, combine this with maps that are generally dark, filled with hard to see enemies and you are left with a very frustrating mod. There is a terrible section early on full of death traps and enemies you can't see due to shrubs, that area will seperate the two kinds of people who'll either play or drop this mod then and there. Reloading a save over and over isn't uncommon and learning the location of the enemies and and abusing the save system is what gets you through, which isn't fun.

Frustrating stealth sections, sentries see you a mile away. The only way to pass them is learning their walking path by losing the game over and over, it's all trial and error.

Why do I have to wait five real life minutes in a jail cell? Same thing with the aforementioned stealth section, why am I waiting that long for a truck to arrive? This isn't real life, you are the creator and have the ability to speed things up.

Cutscenes are sometimes too long. Another side effect of forgetting that this is a video game and not a movie.

Sometimes enemies drop keys, the game tells you to search a guard for keys early on for a locked door and naturally you assume it's a one and done thing. It's not. There are other sections where you have to do the same thing but the game doesn't tell you anything. The lock on the door is too small to see let alone the key that gets dropped, which blends in perfectly with the floor, making it impossible to know that it's there.

Objectives aren't always clear, the main character has voice lines for checking his mail but not something like "this door seems to be locked" or "a part of the generator is missing" etc. Besides the keys I talked about, one horrible example is towards the end. The mod wants you to smash the grate above a door to proceed but nothing tells you that it's breakable. A good mod shouldn't straight up say but give hints to the player about the objective, a part of the grate may be bent or broken for example, how is the player supposed to know what to do? I figured it out because I found a pushable and realized it must be there to reach something higher up.

There was one turret that kept firing even though the soldier using it was dead. While fixing that issue manually via map editing, I realized the developer made fun of the players who loaded maps, even restarting a map using console will display a message saying "LOADING A MAP??? TUT TUT! TOO TOUGH FOR YOU?" and you can't play the map. Well, too bad you simply put the player_start at a dark room that triggers the message and didn't code an actual punishment for it, I can just fly out of your cell :) I'd like to see the developer play his own mod. As you can see, even fixing the mod is a headache.

Something kind of funny, there is a very missable note that tells you a door code which you have to input manually. Well, I hope you can read German! Because the numbers are written as words.

Why is the general a cigarette smoking, breast rubbing prostitute?

Spelling mistakes everywhere. Fixed a ton of them myself this time around.

I'm a vanilla guy first, I believe experiencing media as they are initially before going crazy with alterations. I like to play what the developer intended instead of instantly changing things I don't like before giving it a chance, that would make the thing I'm playing something completely different. So, believe me when I tell you to edit the skill.cfg before playing this mod. As is, this mod is torture. Extremely difficult enemies, subpar weapons and trial and error gameplay combined with other questionable decisions pulls what could have been a fantastic classic down.

I say this total conversion deserves trying at least once. If you want this but done correctly, try Operations 1942, another HL mod. Or better yet, play Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

5

This mod seriously a hit or miss.
It tries way too hard to be a movie and movie video games not worked well (The Order 1886 is a good example for this).

This mod don't even know it's a movie or a video game. Things like you waiting way too much in some sections like the stealth section.

Speaking of stealth, Half-Life never intended to be a stealth game and this mod really shows, the guards spot you instantly from far away and it's trial and error and it feels really bad.

Anoher problem is the game's level design is quite confusing and it never tell you what to do, much like En Route 66. There's zero clue about what you're supposed to do and to the point I had to watch a playthrough video on YouTube to see what I'm supposed to do.

The voice acting ranges from decent to terrible, the Colonel is the only good one but sadly he's only had a small screen time and he's voiced by Wintermute, who voiced Barney from Heart of Evil, another HL mod. The quality of voice acting is also inconsistent as well, some of them has good mic, others have bad mic (the Colonel is a good example for this).

Finally, the biggest issue.
THE ARTIFICAL DIFFICULTY of this mod suffers from.
Nearly every single shot from soldiers registered as headshots and because of this, you can easily die. The overabundance of soldiers and especially MG42 machine gunners. In one chapter where you supposed to go down to sever via breaking the sewer door, the machine gun will easily kill you and it keeps shooting, even if you kill the gunner. I was so frustrated to the point I had to use godmode to get past to that part. Later, when I checking the skill.cfg file, I found out why soldiers can instantly kill you, because of the headshot values are way too high, first off they are multipliers and the dev has no idea how they actually work (the multipliers are 6, 7 and 8 on Easy, Medium and Hard, respectively) Just set these values to low so they can't instantly kill you anymore and make the game easier. I also suggest to decrease soldiers' health as well.

This mod is a prime example of how fake difficulty ruins games & mods and movie with video game combination not work really that well.

The ending is also anti-climatic, all you do is activate the teleporter, kill Hitler and sabotage the ship's systems. The cutscenes are way too long also, of course this mod trying too hard to be movie but video games trying to be movies didn't worked that well as I said before.

There are some positives too like the map design is not half-bad. They are confusing and some places are too dark and I had to use flashlight, A LOT.

Another good thing about this mod is it really has a lot of Indiana Jones and Wolfenstein vibes to it, I even felt like playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein at one point.

And the sequel is, literally no any better, it's just even worse.

прекрасный мапинг

7

This was an enjoyable mod. I downloaded the remod when I realized I was not happy with the weapons or NPCs as they were. The path was not too terribly difficult to discern. However, the combat was very difficult. No armor, just health. A few times, you have to juke armed enemies without any weapons, even after having passed up a perfectly good tomahawk or hammer… Looked and felt a lot like Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Some of the lines sounded like something from a 70s film. There were parts where the dialogue was very clichéd. Him: "Where will I sleep?" Her: "With me, I hope." My eyes rolled a few miles at that one. After all, most non-escort women, especially from the 1940s, would have totally been willing to hop in bed with a complete stranger she just met. Not to mention this nut claims to be a time traveler. Admittedly, I thought it was sweet when she came to see him at the end, even if it does create a hugely inconsistent plot hole, because she'd be at least an octogenarian by that time. Unless she followed him through the gate or something…that makes more sense. Lastly, it was very satisfying putting a bullet through Adolf's skull. Overall, a great play if you keep your eyes half-closed to the dialogue.

That mod included: good voice acting, interesting level design, different gameplay mechanics. I was satisfied!

good one

When I fire up a new mod, the first thing I'm looking for is some reassurances. The job of every modder, early on, is to imbue the player with confidence that this is going to be a fun experience, and that they, the player, are in the hands of someone competent.

I got no such assurances from the makers of The Gate. First off, I found that this thing has two installers. Apparently you need an installer for the installer??? I skipped the first installer and used the second one, and the mod ran okay. So, once installed, the mod's intro (that is, intros, since there's two, apparently so the mod creator could credit himself twice) kept me sitting and waiting, and then sitting and waiting, and then sitting and waiting, for the action to start.

When the main character is called in to talk to "the general" about his mission, the model used for the general is a chain-smoking ****** who constantly feels herself up. Was this ineptitude? A bad joke? A bug? I don't know. But I know that at this point and several points beyond, The Gate's creators were reaching beyond their grasp.

The failings of The Gate would be easier to take if the production team had eased off on the hype. I was really expecting a lot, but what I got was the same bad guy with an MP44 over and over, and a lot of characters whose lips didn't move. And they were all packed into dark rooms with junk to obscure my vision. It's not fun to get wasted by enemies you have no hope of seeing.

Judging from the rating here on the MODDB, The Gate Project Director C J Beattie was far more confident in his abilities and far more in love with his creation than the rest of us. When are modders going to figure out that all the fancy stuff --voice acting (which isn't that good in The Gate, btw), cut scenes, new textures, etc, just don't make up for poor level design? The Gate Production Team wanted this thing to seem like a movie, but I wanted to have fun. It seems they were so busy trying to impress me that they forgot to entertain me.

With all the really fun, well-made Half Life mods out there, my advice is to give The Gate a miss.