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...
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.