Reviews - ChrisBryant

The best way I can describe this mod is that some of the environment artists had good ideas, but for the most part nobody's grasp on their work was particularly strong, and priorities were in the wrong places. This extends to every department.

The beginning areas are laughably bad emulations of Black Mesa's clutter, not intending to make sense, but to look "detailed" at a passing glance. There must be a few dozen couches in the opening corridors. That said, setpieces later on start to look less soulless and I started to look at them and think "wow the highs are high!"

The problem is that they never facilitate good gameplay. EVER. Clutter's the name of the game here, and it doesn't make finding the path, solving puzzles, or fighting enemies a good time. This is at its worst during any firefight. It's always a long-range engagement in an environment where every square meter of wall is competing for your attention among the tiny enemies.

Map design is just bad. It's rarely sensible and only vaguely functional. I never found myself having FUN, or understanding my environment or what was happening or what I was supposed to do. I frequently accidentally ended up out of bounds, or sequence breaking purely because the maps weren't designed to guide me. Not even going to get into the constantly broken AI or punishing enemy placement.

Some ideas were decent, if poorly-executed. I wouldn't mind the talking protagonist if he didn't have the same voice as the people he was talking to. Plenty of "cutscenes" and viewmodel animations which are welcome if a bit rough. I appreciate the attempts at new scenes even though the writing and VA leave a lot to be desired.

Overall, the team seems to have ideas that they both haven't fully thought through, and lack the skill to execute. The maps substitute visual noise in place of detail, and has made that king. The result is a series of maps that are at times nice to look at, but never fun or comprehensible.

Conceptually fantastic, there's some real gems here that on their own easily warrant a 10, but there's also an abundance of rooms that don't do much more than have you find a keycard/do the same old HL1-style combat in uninspired environments.

The highs are high enough that it can be easy to forget the lows, but the lows are low enough that it's hard to want to do full repeat plays.

Clearly not tested well. Full of bugs, newbie level design errors, general instability. Couldn't even complete it because I gave up half a dozen crashes in.

While there were some neat ideas here and there, most of the mod is just awful enemy placement that's absolutely brutal, random props strewn about the maps to look "destroyed," and lighting made to be just dark instead of atmospheric whatsoever. It's especially unfortunate that the enemy placement is awful because 95% of what this mod does is place enemies randomly throughout the Hazard Course. There's actually not a whole lot of effort put into new stuff, just enemies and darkness everywhere.

A lot of the "new" areas are just copy-pasted areas of HC placed behind every random door. The few that aren't are incredibly bland, not detailed or badly detailed. It's very easy to tell what parts of this mod are original and what's part of HC.

I'm biased in thinking HC was a good mod (I'm a lead developer on the team), but I honestly think our HC work comprises pretty much the only high points of this mod. Looking at screenshots one might think "Oh, cool," but if you take away our HC work so that they can't piggyback off of it, the whole thing is indistinguishable from most other sub-par Source mods, only it crashes a lot more.

Overall the mod is clearly the work of a team of newbies who made no effort to test or polish their work. This is not really worth a play, and had I not been a developer of BM:HC, I wouldn't have.

They didn't even build cubemaps, dammit.

Very conceptually adventurous, in some ways awesome, some not so much. There are many "arena" style battles which are usually done quite well. It's a bit difficult, but nothing anyone who's been playing Source mods for a while can't handle. Maps range from mediocre to quite nice. The story is kinda "eh" and doesn't really have much direction for the latter half but it's still a fun play.

First and foremost, I want to be fair in that this review is based off a Beta build. However, Beta being a near-complete state, I doubt too much will change in the final release.

Unfortunately, some very pretty level design is this game's only real saving grace. And that's all the level design truly is: Pretty. It doesn't play particularly well, objectives or purpose is pretty much never conveyed and some obstacles aren't obviously obstacles until you figure it out by accident. For example, you may not know you need to go through X door until you stumble across Y button, and later realize X door is open. Not to mention an instance where a once-closed and locked door opens for literally no logical reason. Or perhaps you didn't know you needed to pick up a key that looks like plain decoration. There's lots of this type of stuff throughout and it's incredibly annoying.

A big facet of level design is to use some cues, either obvious or subtle to nudge the player - often subconsciously - in the right direction. That never happens here. You're essentially left to your own devices and end up simply walking into areas you haven't already walked to and hope you end up somewhere new, or something happens. Even things that should be easy to get right, such as whether a door is locked or even usable or not also follow no obvious standards. A usually unusable object is now usable with no indication, an invisible wall on obviously surmountable objects, that sort of thing.

Asset quality ranges from high-quality, to low-quality, to outright stolen. Some models and textures were clearly made by a very competent designer, others either horrendously rushed or placed in the hands of a beginner. With that in mind, I'm very conflicted on game's visuals. On the one hand, a lot of the maps are pretty nice to look at, but it's hard to see passed the overblown lens flares and insanely opaque explosion and smoke/dust particles. Firefights are hell because you can't see anything.

Additionally, some rooms don't look detailed so much as dirtied. It seems every ceiling is covered in dirt, every floor is ridiculously broken and papers are everywhere.

Sound design feels like an afterthought. As does music, which is usually unfitting or badly timed. Soundscapes are basic, but at least present.

Big points for Xenian enemies brought back from Half-Life 1 era games, but I have to take some of them away considering they were never used in ways they should have been. It seems the enemies weren't placed in spots where their behavior is complemented by the environment, they were just placed at random. Obstacles slapped into environments at random as an afterthought. A lot of the enemy placement is strange like this.

Story is non-existent. Any information about anything comes from prior knowledge of Half-Life games. You're just wandering and killing things trying to kill you. I can count all of the friendly NPCs in the game on one hand and none of them have anything to say.

Overall, some ideas were nice and I can appreciate the projects scale and ambition. I'm a sucker for total conversions. Buuut it's hard to have fun amidst the level design frustration and big issues with visuals. I understand the team put a lot of effort into the game, and I hate to dock points with that in mind, but it's just a very conflicting, frustrating experience. The game's worth a play if you want to look at something nice for an hour or two, but don't expect to really enjoy playing. Level design is aesthetically far above average, but too much else is sub-par to warrant a high mark from me.

Lives up to the first with its great level design and puzzles.

The first 60% or so seems like a Penumbra/Half-Life hybrid which was really nice, horrifying and creative. A lovely mix of eerie atmosphere and puzzle solving. Not many mods handle it this well.

Then we finish off by getting thrown right into some action, classic Half-Life style. It's a bit difficult, though. Possibly even for those who've been playing Half-Life for years. I do wish the ending didn't come so abruptly, like the predecessor, but that doesn't take away from the mod as a whole.

I encountered some small issues throughout (like an annoying vent grate, or couple lighting bugs, etc.) however nothing game breaking.

Definitely worth a play, a proper Half-Life mod.

The quickest way to summarize it I think, is that the engine is seemingly designed to slow down workflow in favor of looking complex and cool. I really feel like this was designed that so it looked really good in promotion, but in practice it's just not great. The wording in descriptions and the site is very particular, making the engine sound far more pleasant and robust than it is (though I suppose you can't expect developers to do anything but that). I mean, really, "Our renderer redefines realtime with image quality more like a cg render than real-time games of the past." Come on.

First and foremost, the documentation is puny. It's hardly worth mentioning. You will be learning how to do everything through trial and error.

The few included functions and "features" are very basic.

UI:
The UI seems to be designed to look robust and complex and useful, as it's mostly simple operations spread out and often duplicated in menus. The console at the bottom isn't useful much of the time and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of hiding it, and so a large portion of your workspace is taken up. All of the tabs at the right side of the window take up way, way more space than they require, using up even more space. Even after familiar with where everything is, finding everything still feels like a game of Where's Waldo. Don't even get me started on texturing brushes.

Asset Integration:
This is actually one of the few things that Leadwerks had me smiling about. Importing assets is incredibly easy and quick. The conversion from source file to engine compatible and usable file is so quick and automatic. I really, really like the integrated material editor. Props for this.

I've got a decent amount more to say, here: Goo.gl

Nice puzzles and level design. There were a few issues (the keypad was annoying to use, some vents were awkward to get into), and the action is a bit difficult from the get-go, but overall very fun. I only wish the ending wasn't so abrupt.

They clearly had some good ideas and concepts if mind, but the execution falls pretty short, and the difficulty isn't "challenging" so much as "unbalanced," and "untested."

Almost every single voice line has a voice line and they're all accurate. They can be a little difficult to read at times, but otherwise it's very good work. Very useful.