Reviews - Loulimi

Great mod, very polished and fun.

Great mod overall.

In terms of visuals as in terms of gameplay, the mod deviates very little from the original Half-Life game, but it does that in a very good way. Both aspects are augmented: the gameplay with new NPCs and weapons (from Opposing-Force), carefully designed and original encounters; the visuals with new textures and models (mostly or all taken from other mods). As said in other reviews, some models or textures sometimes look off.

I wasn’t really impressed by the story nor the cutscenes though. I also though the ending was a bit repetitive, as was the number of times the protagonist is finished with a bullet to the head, yet survives. I also think this mod deserved voice acting for the main protagonist. I think we sometimes hear her voice, but too often it’s just some text. This didn’t really affect my impression of the mod negatively, but had and the story and the story-telling been good it could have made the mod really better.

A few quircks here and there, but they’re just small details, such as alien controllers leaving blood on the black sky.

Pros:
- Great, flawless mapping.
- Relatively original.
- Fun towards the end.

Cons:
- NPC fights are sometimes incredibly frustrating when some of them are on your side and you can't help them. Instead, you just have to Watch your ally bullsquids ignore their opponents and being killed in the most stupid way.
- Too many deaths you can't avoid without knowing the game. Sometimes ammo is dropped from the air (tripmines), sometimes it's a bomb the player is supposed to flee. I thought it was ammo and died. You get killed for not Killing the guard quickly enough, but how were you supposed to know that?
- Not enough autosaves.

By the time I got to play this I was already expecting something great. I had already seen the promising screenshots on ModDB and the reviews. And on almost all aspects, this mod delivered and met my expectations. Gameplay is mostly great, maps are gorgeous, and there has been a lot of work on the audio too, something that is equally important and yet so often neglected. All this make for a very atmospheric and immersive, mod, that often managed to make me feel tense or scared.

The mod suffers from a few minor and less minor gameplay issues and bugs. A few times the mod made me expect big battles, but I only had to fight a small number of isolated enemies. It's also not clear when the player is supposed to fight the gargantua or flee from it. As a result, I ended up wasting ammo for nothing. There are other minor issues and bugs, but none of these would explain why I'm not giving this mod 10/10.

What really ruined my experience is the predictibility with which all friendly NPCs die. You meet one friendly NPC, you can be sure they're going to die in front of you, either immediately or, in rare cases, soon after, while the mod makes sure you can do nothing about it. And everytime, the mod makes it as if you were supposed to be surprised by that. It happens just so often, and there is not a single exception. How could I be surprised? This is such a huge and avoidable blow to the convincing and immersive atmosphere of the mod that it really annoyed me. I was so annoyed because the rest of the world of the mod was so convincing. And then, almost at every corner of this convincing and immersive world, we find the same predictible cinematics of friendly NPCs dying. It really pollutes what would have been otherwise a very convincing, immersive and atmospheric world.

I just visited this page out of curiosity for complete washout.

A slightly-less-than-average mapping and a lot of gameplay problems makes the experience unpleasant and frustrating. The game often kills you or inflicts you damage in a way you couldn't have predicted if you hadn't played the game before. The complete lack of autosave is already a problem in itself, but combined with the issue aforementioned it just make the mod unplayable. There are also creates with a breakable-crate texture you can't break, crates you can break yet are necessary to progress in the mod, rooms you can go to but can't go back...

This mod was almost a pristine hl-vanilla mod, and I loved it. We can blame it's not original (it almost doesn't have new textures, no new enemies, weapons, places, etc.). That's true. But is that a sin? Yeah, it's basically HL with new maps. But the maps are mostly well designed, a very neat Black Mesa mapping, as in Blue Shift. The gameplay is HL's gameplay. But only the best. Yeah, if we love HL, we will love this mod. One of those mods not hard to handle, that don't bring a lot of new things, but are really enjoyable after a hard work day! I recommend it!
Bad points: a room with very high poly, some hull glitches, not enough health and grunts that snip you behind a fence.

This is one of those mods like Paranoia 2 where it clearly appears that developers have great potential and could have released something awesome, if there were not so many obvious problems. It's one of those mods where you have to be very tolérant towards awful flaws in order to enjoy the mod's qualities. To sum it up, one of those mods with very cool, new, original features ruined by very basic, annoying, obvious problems.
From grunts sniping you in the smoke, an RPG auto-aim system that forces you to aim 1-2 seconds towards an helicopter which doesn't wait this delay to kill you (and the auto aim sometimes fail), a garage door that takes ages to open when you are under the fire of an helicopter, grunts appearing all of a sudden sometimes behind you and shooting at you, an air vent that explodes causing you damages with no way of foreseeing it.