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...
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.