Reviews - Cpt.Steel

What a great mod. One of the best, in fact.

Where do I even start?

Lovely mapping is something I believe everyone expected since the pre-release screenshots spoke volumes. And indeed, the maps are fantastic. However, the author didn't stop there. Their care for details and impressive scripted scenes made the environment feel alive and believable.

For reasons stated above, the atmosphere is great and the whole experience immersive. The pre-disaster beginning is a nice introduction to your (not so) average day in Black Mesa. There are funny scenes and conversations that brought a smile to my face. The post-disaster part starts as a really creepy walk through the ruins of the facility where your only option is to run. Slowly the mod becomes more focused on action, but never loses the forementioned atmosphere.

You play as "Candidate 12". What exactly that means will become obvious at the end. Even though the story itself is yet another "try to escape Black Mesa" matter, this mod also contains some interesting nods to newer games in the HL series. I'm not going to spoil it though.

Gameplay part of the mod is solid. There's a good mix of puzzles and action and the whole experience never feels boring or tedious. There are some minor changes to weapons, but nothing significantly deviating from your regular gunplay.

Nothing is completely flawless though and so I've got two issues with this mod - one minor and one major. The minor issue is that, from time to time, you can notice some model inconsistencies where some models are SD and some other are direct PS2 ports. It's nothing that would ruin your experience though. What might ruin it for you is the major issue. Some parts of the mod are slightly unstable and you can encounter crashes. I was forced to noclip through the wall in some large underground chamber with roads after crashing several times. Never figured out why it was happening.

As you can see from this and other reviews, it's a well-crafted mod that, in my opinion, deserves a place in the Goldsource Hall of Fame. I'm giving it 9/10 due to the crashing issues. If these issues are addressed and fixed, I'll change my rating to 10 because this mod definitely deserves it.

EDIT: While I cannot check whether the specific crashing I experienced has been fixed or not, I see the author released two new versions of the mod with bug fixes. And that's good enough for me. I'm changing my rating to 10 as promised.

Good:
New units

Bad:
Absolutely unbalanced
Plain unfair
AI artillery spam

Even though the mod adds a huge variety of new units, it severely lacks any decent balance, so AI always has a huge advantage. Defences are absolutely pointless since enemy always spams Stuka-zu-Fuss halftracks which effectively destroys every emplacement with pretty much one unrealistically direct salvo. Some units (like volksgrenadiers) are ridiculously overpowered and enemy engineers capture faster than any unit in the game (it's just a matter of seconds). This all makes the mod a very frustrating experience. In your next patch you should focus more on the balance rather than adding more stuff.

EDIT: There was a huge 2 GB patch 5.0.0 or whatever. Wow, gotta admit that for such an outrageously oversized file it sure did nothing to gameplay. Oh wait, it did. Your anti-tank infantry and cannons (basically the only semi-useful thing against tanks) have been severely weakened. Great move. Carry on like this and I might aswell lower my rating.

I thought this would be interesting, but instead it only was short, boring, quite ugly and also crashed twice. What the hell...

I've been looking forward to this mod because it looked interesting. Yesterday I was happy to see it released, so I spent about 2 hours downloading it.

The first thing I found out was the fact that the game always resets my controls settings which is bloody annoying. After many tries I finally managed to force my own settings by editing the config file.

The next thing I noticed was the horrible voiceacting with strong fake Russian accents. As such I'd be expecting Russians to be listening to Russian songs rather than German songs. That's just a detail though.

The design of maps sometimes seems quite strange for some reason. For example, the city at the beginning looks very unnatural. The second map is much better.

Now that I mentioned the second map, I can describe my experience. Driving is quite fun, I admit. But the fact that the game already crashed at those public toilets was annoying. Thankfully, it wasn't so far from the beginning.
So I started again and avoided the toilets, just in case. I reached a small house with some items and a savebook inside.
I saved my game in case the game crashed again. And it did, because I changed my video settings to lower AA since the mod suffers from bad FPS.
I launched the game again just to find out my saves were gone. I thought it was actually the crash that had caused it, so I got to that point and saved again.

I restarted the game to make sure it worked. It did not. The saves simply aren't there.
That makes me assume that I've got to beat the mod in one sitting, which is in no way appealing to me.

EDIT: Settings, saves and the bathroom crash seem to be fixed. The fix came out quite fast too, which confirms that the author really tries to make it all nice and smooth. Carry on like this and your mod could be a gem one day.

I really liked this mod, so I originally wanted to give it 10. And why didn't I do that? Because trying to press correct buttons on the code pad annoyed the hell out of me. Apart from this minor thing, I can only recommend it.