Reviews - InAction

For the short time spent on this project by the students, it's a polished end product. While having Bastion as a reference, albeit a very high benchmark to look up to, it's a decent small game.

I would have loved some more balancing on the audio, as the music is barely noticeable when the action gets going.

Apart from that the game has a good consistency throughout, nothing that pops out like a sore thumb or a bug coming out from nowhere.

The score is based on time spent and the quality achieved.

This is likely one of the best horror mods to have been released to date. Team Psykskallar has made a story based horror shooter that is compelling to play all the way through. It's noticeable that the team has studied classics like Silent Hill when you hear the great ambience and sound work, and see some psychotic areas.

When you first enter the game you're dazzled by what Team Psykskallar has done with the HL Gold engine. The ambience gives you a positive feeling that it will be a great experience. The first person movement feels solid and the first time you use a weapon it feels like it has proper kickback.

However, the game is not without its flaws... Considering the high level of quality done with this engine, especially the level design of many areas and some character art, the lesser creations stand out like a sore eye. The biggest pain for me is to see such horrible animation work in the cinematics; a cat looks like a stuffed animal being moved around with strings, characters floats and slides, without anticipation, breaking most animation principles. The voice acting is also very bad, with a lot of awkward moments and delays. It becomes very hard to take the story seriously when you cringe for every second line in the dialogue. Somehow it felt like the voice acting of each actor got slightly better towards the end, as if they got more accustomed to doing voice over work. An update with new voice actors or a second iteration would make a huge difference to the game.

There were also some real gameplay frustrations. Certain platformer sequences weren't hard, by being designed hard, but because you got stuck time and time again, even though it was obvious you were supposed to take a certain route. Some gameplay elements, like the 'fetch missions', only felt like padding to increase the length of the game rather than contribute to it.

Despite its flaws it's an awesome mod and I recommend any mod enthusiast to play it!