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RSS Reviews
2

Half-Life 3 Citadel Unleashed

Mod review

With the patch attached, the game is completable from start to finish, however you *need* to know when to save to retry some of the NPC sequences multiple times as there is a high chance to softlock.

On top of that, there are a lot of rushed level design choices such as a corridor with just walls and chainlink fences, very cramped hallways and pathways (there's a door that can't even open fully unless it breaks a full, randomly placed table, and there are some random invisible walls due to lamps having huge collision behind them making it feel even more cramped). There's also a section with just trees growing from nearly flat sand ground...

The fighting is alright and well balanced, I really like the chromatic aberration effect upon hit. It's probably the strongest point of this mod.

The lag is horrendous. I tried to stream this game but it's out of the question, GPU jumps straight into 100% in the first map and it doesn't get any better. Sometimes it feels hard to navigate through the mass of props when your FPS is reaching very low on double digits.

The map overuses "hunt this battery". It's been seen in many mods, and it's fine time to time, but if it's your focal point, it gets repetitive. I also complained about the very-hard-to-see & unintuitive levers and valves you need to press, but nothing was done about it. I cannot say unbiased how hard it is to find all of them in current version as I now know exactly where to go, but during beta I was getting annoyed by not progressing in maps where the progress is ought to be obvious.

Despite some of the maps having very bad map design choices, some of them look pretty. But with the constant softlocks, lag, weird AI-voiced character lines, and everything else I cannot give this even a 3 due to it being a 2nd worst mod I have ever played. An attempt was made, but the polish was never done, it's a half-baked mess.