Reviews - GoreTech5

Combine Destiny looks like a good mod for its time. Not many Combine-related mods were out there back when Half-Life 2 was recently released. However, it's not perfect.

/Level Design (6/10)/

The levels are okay, but often feel mundane. Some levels have interesting architecture, make no mistake, but there are other times where it's dull and feels unfinished, such as the cavern after the town level. Also, a lot of the levels are pitch black, which doesn't help with the ****** Half-Life 2 flashlight (I can't blame the devs though, since this mod was released before Episode 2).

/Gameplay (6/10)/

The mod could have used more variety. For instance, 85% of the mod is about shooting headcrab zombies (especially fast zombies), 5% antlions and 10% rebels. I know there aren't many enemies around once the whole line of Combine NPCs are your ally now, but rebels should have took a more important part in the mod, not zombies.

Another thing that bugged me was the lack of other Combine soldiers in most levels. Sometime, you encounter them, but either they can't follow along anymore (or at all) or they die for whatever reason. When you have Combine soldiers following you, it's mostly just two or three of them. Other than that, you're on your own 80% of the time. My point being, they should have been here more often. After all, you're a Combine soldier, which means it's strength in numbers, but in this mod, you mostly feel like a Combine Gordon Freeman (even your viewmodel is a blue HEV suit). I was relieved when I saw Combine soldiers and even elites at the end.

/Plot (6/10)/

The scenario is pretty generic. Rebels took over a town and a Combine installation, the Combine shelled the town with headcrab canisters (which would explain the insane amount of zombies, except for the ones underground) and your and other squads are ordered to mop up the rest. This sounds like the first mission of a much bigger game, like just the warm-up of the mod. Unfortunately, it's the whole mod.

Now tell me, if the Combine shelled the rebel town, why risk dispatching Combine squads to infested areas? The zombie influence is so high that the rebels have little chance to survive, especially with low supplies. Hell, even the commander (I assume the guy messaging you from time to time is the commander in charge of the operation) was surprised when your squad encountered zombies at the beginning. The Overwatch should have just called it a day on this one, because y'know, they didn't need to send soldiers when they shelled Ravenholm, did they? There were no Combine soldier corpses around when Gordon passed by, after all (the Combine soldiers from E3 Ravenholm don't count!).

Anyway, after spending countless time killing zombies on your own, the whole sweep operation ended up being a total ****-up and you eventually had to retreat. Before you could do that though, rebels knocked you out back in Installation 34, carried you in a truck and left you in a house filled with decayed bodies while keeping you untied and leaving a crowbar for you to grab. Why was this even necessary, why couldn't they just kill you? No, instead they grab you and drop you in an unguarded house without even checking if you're dead. They could have used you as hostage, even though it won't work against a merciless regime like the Combine Overwatch, but they took the James Bond villain route. Pretty lazy, if you ask me.

So after that, you wander in a Ravenholm-like town, a Ravenholm-like cemetery, then a Ravenholm-like cave. Finally, you're inside another underground base, you encounter more Combine soldiers and zombies, you run toward a dropship for extraction and..... To be continued. Yeah.... The only satisfaction I got from the ending was the fact that I didn't have to shoot zombies anymore. I was hoping Combine Destiny 2 would come to revive this mod and majorly improve the series, and it looked really promising, but the whole thing went radio silence since 2011, which is quite a downer.

/Conclusion/

To conclude this, the mod is still average. Of course, it's a mod from 2005, so you shouldn't expect something big like Human Error and Entropy: Zero, but I certainly hope the devs would make everything better in Combine Destiny 2 (if they ever come back to it eight years later). Y'know, kind of like that mod created by different devs: "The Citizen: Returns", which was an improvement from its old 2008 predecessor, "The Citizen".

Nonetheless, I still recommend it to whoever wants to play a Combine soldier campaign without caring much about the details.

This is a huge improvement from the last mod. As someone already said in a different review, this is close to what "The Citizen" should have been in the first place. Let's see what we got so far...

/Level Design (8/10)/

Once again, excellent level design. I still feel like I'm playing in an urban area, every location is unique and rebels are present more often, which is awesome. There are still some balancing problems between the amount of resources and enemies, but it's fine other than that. I ABSOLUTELY loved the (SPOILER ALERT: Breen Reserve factory levels, it was so beautiful. On top of that, the prison guard Combine soldiers have a new skin instead of the recycled Nova Prospekt one, this is amazing!). However, I'm not sure if it was necessary to add a (SPOILER ALERT: haunted casino with puppet zombies that can't be killed with bullets)

Unfortunately, it has its shares of bugs. The most memorable example is at the hockey arena level. If you kill every Combine soldier in the area, that's great, but if the rebels run toward the double doors that happened to open, make sure you run with them. If you arrive too late, one of them is missing in the next level, which prevents the scripted events to trigger, A.K.A you're stuck here because one of the NPCs won't activate the door to move ahead. What you need to do is change level while staying close to the NPCs, the medic will suddenly turn into a regular rebel, then the scripted event is triggered. It's bugs like these that made me wonder if they even tested the maps completely, and I almost left the mod in frustration many times because of this.

/Plot (7/10)/ (SPOILER ALERT, duh)

The plot has improved a lot in terms of the player's position in life. The HEV suit is gone, Gman doesn't show up anymore and you're actually just another rebel in the cause, as it should be. Some parts actually stood out this time, such as the rebel assault of Cathedral Square where you have three different approaches to start the assault to save the rebel leader Larry. The Breen Private Reserve factory was also a good choice for the plot, since Nova Prospekt was already taken care of by Gordon. I still wasn't sure when did this take place in the Half-Life 2 timeline, but according to the ending, the entire mod took place before Gordon Freeman blew up Nova Prospekt, which in this case doesn't make much sense to have the rebels fight openly in the city.

You get some character development here and there, but the characters are still generic and forgettable, especially when I mostly rely on the color of their subtitles to remember who they are since they all sound and look the same (no racism intended). Who's Agento? Well, turns out he's dead, so don't worry about him. Who's this guy with the green subtitles? Who knows, we haven't heard of him since. Is the medic at the beginning an important character? Could be, but he never showed up ever again. The problem is that all the main characters have the same generic rebel character models. Some characters actually have a unique model like the one that looks like a young Odell and male08 with white hair, but they just appear once or twice in the mod and that's it. Even the rebel leader Larry is a generic rebel. Why? If there's a character that should look more different than the others, it should be the one that shows up in 90% of the mod! I mean sure, he looked generic in the last mod, but you could at least change his uniform or add scars and combat wounds to look apart from the rest.

/Voice Acting (4/10)/

The voice acting here is an improvement from the last mod, but that still doesn't say much. They're easier to understand, thanks for the subtitles, but they're still quiet and generic. I'm not going to use audio quality as an argument since not everyone is rich enough to afford a good microphone, but the voice actors need to be more into their characters. Larry's voice actor still sucks. Once again, Larry is way too chill. "Oh no, I'm being captured, I'll kill you ********". "Hey, thanks guys for saving me". "Oh no, we're being attacked. Let's get out of here". "Oh no, we need to manually blow up the factory, I'll do the sacrifice". Whoever is Larry's voice actor, I'm sorry, but you need to do better than that. Not trying to bully you, but please be more emotional in your future voice acting.

/Conclusion/

Even though the same problems of the last mod still occur here, it's still a huge improvement from its counterpart. I highly recommend it and I hope to see the devs' next work in the Half-Life 2 universe. That is all.

Even though reviewing a 2008 mod is pretty useless, especially when it had a sequel, I'm still going to point the rights and wrongs.

/Level Design (8/10)/

First of all, let's talk about the level design. Atmosphere-wise, the maps are excellent. The level designer nailed the urban atmosphere and I really felt like I was in an actual city. You have varied locations like a garage, a grocery store, a church, a basketball field, a cafe, etc. Basically, the map architectures are amazing.

However, it's not that good gameplay-wise. For instance, most of the maps are filled with small rooms and cramped hallways (the airboat part was the worst), you're way too outnumbered or outgunned to fight back the threat and the enemies will often kill you unless you know their EXACT positions. Hell, there's a button at the beginning where a red button, completely in the open, opens a trapdoor and lets out a manhack to kill you. What's the point of this, beside being an immersion breaker? There were also roller mines, which you can't destroy unless you have a gravity gun to throw them in the water, which never happened in the mod. Yeah, thanks a lot.

/Plot (6/10)/

Honestly, the plot was pretty average. The whole plot is just a big cliche "citizen becomes rebel and kills Combine" scenario (though it probably wasn't as cliche back in 2008), yet it was so rushed that it felt unnatural. For example, right at the beginning of the mod some girl downstairs suddenly talks to you about joining the resistance, even though you're just a complete nobody who happened to pass by, but just because your home was raided, you're suddenly fit to be a resistance fighter. Yeah, just talk to some idiot to become a rebel, that would totally work! It should have been more subtle than that.

But it doesn't end there. Not only are you suddenly the big hero to become a rebel, but everyone's relying on you to do about anything. You have to kill everyone, you have to sneak in the office building and kill every Combine soldier by yourself, you have an HEV suit, which is ******* stupid (good thing it was fixed in The Citizen: Return), an advisor pops out of nowhere and almost kills you as if you were a big threat, and on top of that, Gman showed up in the end and talks as if you changed the world (did I mention the ending is pretty disappointing?). Come on, I thought I was just some random guy in City 17, just like the intro said? If that's true, why am I considered Gordon Freeman 2.0? Hell, there was even a part where Civil Protection units raided a grocery store just to kill you and a rebel with a shotgun, and even the Combine soldiers arrived at the party. Come on, it's just me and a store clerk, there's no need to send the S.W.A.T team just to pop some guys eating cereals! What this mod needed was more stealth levels than just three, force the player to think strategically in order to fight the enemy without dying (I'm not talking about being outgunned and endure cheap deaths, but to at least think like a rebel in terms of survival), y'know, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the plot has some potential, but it seriously needs some polishing here and there.

/Voice Acting (2/10)

Oh ****. I'm sorry, but the voice acting is just so bad. It's terrible. They either speak too quietly (wish they had subtitles) or they lack any motivation to do VAs whatsoever, especially the character Larry. He. Is. So. *******. Emotionless. He's so monotone that it sounds like he's just reading the whole script on the mic without being aware of the context. No emotion at all, nothing interesting. Honestly, I don't recall anyone with a decent voice acting. I'm not sure if it's because of poor direction or low experience from the voice actors, but they need some serious improvements.

/Conclusion/

Overall, it's still worth the try. The mod was good for it's time. It still has its flaws, but it's not complete garbage. In the end, I'm giving this mod 7/10.

As much as I'm not too much into horror games/mods, They Hunger still stands out for me as a good mod. From the beginning to the end, it never failed to bore me.

Let's start with the zombies themselves, they're absolutely fantastic. Instead of being the average slow animalish zombie that grunts, the ones in They Hunger are basically acting like normal people, but have an uncontrollable urge of eating any living thing; most of them know how to talk, the zombie cops still use their pistols, the zombie sheriff still gives orders to his troops instead of being a dumb zombie, and an infected doctor still does his experiment. In other words, the zombies in this game are basically a mirrored human civilization, I like that.

As for the gameplay, it's more or less the same as the regular hl1 gameplay, except that some weapons have a different function, as well as having completely new weapons. The only problem, however, is that there's no armor anywhere in the game, which makes it harder to be finished without cheats or extreme luck. I know the player doesn't have an HEV suit, but have a kevlar vest or something. There's nothing much to say for the NPCs since they're basically reskinned and voiced differently from the original hl1 NPCs, well except for the zombie bull which is pretty much a fast and strong bullet sponge that easily wastes your ammo.

The audio quality, honestly, is cacophonic. The sound effects and voice are good, make no mistake, but it gets tiring to hear the same voice lines from the same enemy all over again. It might not seem so bad in episode 1, but once you reach episode 2 and 3, those ******* skeletons keep making clicking noise and talking in a high pitched voice because you didn't kill them yet, which is pretty annoying when you're trying to listen to a tape or a dialog in the game.

The level design, on the other hand, is really unique and intuitive. It's easy to get lost and have no idea what to do in your first playthrough, but once you know where to go, it gets better when you play a second time. However, scavenging is ruined for me: most of the rooms are empty (or if they're not empty, there's an enemy in there that has no purpose to be in this specific spot except to waste your ammo or health when you were looking for them), some levels have an insane amount of npcs at one place that puts your health to low in a fraction of time, which makes the level impossible to complete without save scumming or using god mode.

In conclusion, the storyline is well executed and the mod in general is inspiring, but it still has a share of its cons. Nonetheless, these issues don't affect the experience that much as I give it a 9/10. The replayability value is high and I strongly recommend it.

Whoever made this mod is hell of a smart, that has to be the most interesting, unique and creative puzzle mod in history of Half-Life 2 mods. It's frustrating at some parts, but other than that, this mod is well done. Purely amazing.

Better than Half-Life 3

I want my episode 3

I don't know where to start, the 'Episode 3' of the title was just a bait for the mod to get popular, Leon claimed that he said that because the Borealis was in it, but since it's only 10% of the mod that is related to Episode 3, putting it in the title was pointless. I spent hours and hours raging, rage quitting, struggling and going try hard in order to finish that god damn mod, and I still am not impressed. Here's a list of mistakes that I'm going to point out below:

First of all, the assets. You don't put your custom files in a public mod, nor make players hunt for the specific files and delete them before playing, this is already the first mistake of the mod. P.S I also noticed that some of the models came from Gmod, like Gordon Freeman for instance, but unlike WC, their owners were properly credited at the end, so the Closure earned a point.

Second of all, the gameplay. Leon really wanted the mod to look like an movie-like game than a half-life-like game, the musics sound so much like hollywood musics, the cutscenes are so constant that they're pointless, like why make a five seconds cinematic of Gordon walking through a door or opening a med case? The cutscenes are also static and boring, nothing is dynamic, nothing is alive, it's just following the pattern and...... Yeah, nothing else. Musics and cutscenes aside, there are also easter eggs, which are hinted with a gnome, but let me break it for you, some of them are in the way, like you HAVE to see the easter egg before going to the next level, but the main thing is that the easter eggs are basically porn comics, so they're not really easter eggs, but whatever. My major complaint is not just the overextended levels and the excess of chapters, but the lack of friendly NPCs, having rebels and main characters fighting on your side is VITAL for a Half-Life 2 title, but because the friendly NPCs you find are either dead or not there at all, it made me crazy, the purpose of Alyx going with you in Episode 1 and 2 was to make the player comfortable with friendly NPCs (or something close to that line), but this mod was so cruel with that, he even made me kill vortigaunts while they were friendly in Half-Life 2 ;-;. The levels are also static, clusterphobic and confusing, but luckily, Leon noticed that and added hints and arrows when you were stuck in a room for too long, that's a plus.

Thirdly, the story. It's not really friendly with the Half-Life 2's story, but if you really don't want to be spoiled, I suggest you ignore this paragraph completely. For everyone else though, here's what I understood: Alyx is going through a major depression after losing her father, which forces Magnusson to abort the trip to the Borealis and ask Gordon to go find Kleiner with the help of rebels (who die right at the beginning), because Kleiner happened to be evil. Why is he evil? Because he turned into a zombie and becoming evil was a side effect. THAT'S NOT HOW ZOMBIES WORK IN HALF-LIFE 2, PEOPLE GET HEADCRABBED AND BECOME ZOMBIES, THAT'S IT! I didn't even see a headcrab on Kleiner's head when you see him through the mod. Back to the beginning, I noticed two mistakes coming from the main characters' personalities: Alyx wouldn't just sit there and cry over Eli after her loss, she should avenge him and fight the Combine with Gordon, the sake of humanity lies on them, she wouldn't give up now! Second flaw, Magnusson is not a hearted person, there's no way he would abort such an important trip as the borealis because of Alyx's depression, he would do everything for that trip to happen. Next to the list, how Kleiner wants to blow up the Borealis is contradictory from what he said in Episode 2, he wanted to use it against the Combine, Eli was the one who wanted to destroy it. In the main menu, it did say that it was not related to the Half-Life's lore, but in that case, don't put 'Episode 3' on the title next time.

Conclusion, the mod would be okay for the people who saw Leon's work before, but for those who expected an Episode 3 out of the closure, look somewhere else, this isn't what you're looking for. I used to put a 5 on this, but this mod did nothing but frustrate me to no end, what I just said above was not everything I had to say, there are so many things I want to rant about this mod, so I'll give it a 4 this time.

Even though I raged, used 1gb worth of saves and almost had a heart attack after most of the obstacles, I gotta admit, these are really well designed and creative maps we got there, I am impressed

Will this run on my 486?