Reviews - DD64

I've been waiting for some form of playable version of this mod for at least 3 years now, watching and waiting with nothing but hype.

First of all, I want to say that the atmosphere is just absolutely nailed perfectly. While it's still unmistakably Half Life, in the 3 chapters I played I already found myself enjoying this art style and direction far better than vanilla HL2. I cannot wait to play the whole thing simply because of the world building and little environmental story telling elements. I was actively exploring all over the place just to fully explore the world, which was something I didn't do much in the vanilla HL2 games.

On to the main meat of this. Level Design seems to be a conflicting area in a lot of peoples reviews. To be honest, I don't see what those offended are. Honestly some areas are a little blocky, like before Kliener's lab, or some areas in the intro after the trainstation, but really, I've seen more variation in the first 3 chapters of this mod than in most other source engine games. I don't mean to keep directly comparing to HL2 2004 but The opening chapter in this mod is one of the best examples in my opinion. After the first loading screen when you are walking around, coming up from the staircase, and you get out on the city street. Just gives you a sense of scale and how depressing this world is.

A lot of the combat areas in Chapter 3 encourage you to use cover a lot of the time and really I felt like the City area was just far bigger in this one demo than I ever did in the base HL2 game. Good job on that aspect.

Models are well designed in my opinion. I've always liked the art direction on the weapons, and I like the variation on enemies like HeadCrabs. Might sound like a broken record but the art direction on this mod is just phenomenal.

Audio is pretty great as well. Music tracks creeping in at perfect moments is why I'm speaking so highly of the atmosphere.

Voice Acting is really the only low point for me. Gman was a good performance, Barney wasn't awful but the mic quality differences cannot be ignored. Thought Mossman did fine as well.

Overall I'm just extremely pleased with what I played. I cannot wait for the full mod to be released and wish the team luck in they're endeavors. Dedication and hard work is shining through this for sure.