Reviews - Diet-Coke

NOTE: The performance issues I mentioned in previous version of this review should be fixed in latest v1.1 release. It's all in the changelog, so make the judgement yourself.

The "Meh":
If you haven't had enough of Ravenholm in "Raising The Bar: Redux" then this mod is for you. But don't expect much from it, as it's mostly the same recycled Ravenholm levels from RTB:R (with some alterations here and there, for story reasons). You basically play Ravenholm chapter in reverse. The "schizo-flashbacks" that Grigori is experiencing at certain points of the story look very out of place. This simply feels out of character for Grigori, imho.

The Okay:
I should mention that you get a couple new "features" in form of a kick attack ported from Entropy Zero 2 and a reskinned S.L.A.M. (these "nail bombs" work exactly the same way - you throw it and then detonate the thing with "+attack2").

You also get to use Grigori's rifle "Annabelle" more than in RTB:R, so that's nice I guess.

The Good:
For the good things I will point out the atmosphere (but like I said earlier, this is just Ravenholm from RTB:R).

The voice acting is tolerable, close enough to "temp" voice acting from the 2003 leak.

Overall, it's not bad, but nothing special. Just a short adventure for an hour or two. You can squeeze a couple extra hours by challenging yourself to beat it in one go on "Deathless" difficulty, if you really want to.

The Bad:
My main issue with this mod is the 6 GB of dependency bloat (you can't install it as a standalone mod, you need original RTB:R installed first). I'm not a fan of this approach to releasing mods like this. It should've been released as an update to original RTB:R in form of a bonus chapter instead. There is no excuse for it to be released like this, aside from engagement farming on ModDB.

I understand that a lot of time and effort was put into this mod, but you could do better than releasing a glorified "DLC" as a standalone mod.

Mod page being used for political propaganda. I've seen enough here.

Do not support the schizos that bring politics into gaming.

Another fun experiment from creator of Modding Bleeds. You don't see mods like this every day. It's kinda insane what people can do with this engine sometimes.

Of course it's not perfect, but the issues I had with it were so minor that it didn't really take me out of the experience, it actually gave me more of that "janky oldschool survival horror experience", which was very accurate to original Resident Evil games from PS1.

Some people mentioned the AI-generated voices used in the dialogue, but personally I think they are fine, they do their job and it's not the same level of bad text-to-speech we had years ago.

Now to the annoying stuff. There was a section with a tunnel that has large fast zombie torso that one-hit-kills you, it's certainly a challenging part, but having to reload multiple times was kinda bothering me. To be fair, it's a part of original survival horror experience, so it's not impossible, just very difficult.

Next thing that annoyed me was the boss fight with Antlion Guard (nice dynamic camera with npc_cscanner, btw!). Then there is that super long and boring ladder climbing after the Antlion Guard. I had to use host_timescale and stopsound, because that song from MGS really annoyed me, sorry :]

The last thing I would list as a negative point is the zombie sounds taken from Left 4 Dead, they just don't fit in this mod, imho; So replaced them with the original zombie sounds from RE1 on my end.

So yeah. Despite all negative points I mentioned, it's a very fun and unique mod.

A well crafted walking simulator mod with a well written story set in its own universe.

It seems to be taking inspiration from Dead Space a bit, but doesn't copy anything from it, aside from the space horror setting. That only makes it better. There are not many HL2 mods that explore the space horror to its fullest potential.

If you want a short adventure to relax and enjoy for a couple hours, this is the mod to try.

I was going in with open mind, but I can say now that this mod is very boring and repetitive. Just running around and shooting your typical HL2 enemies with different skins (just zombies and soldiers).

The gun models are not bad, I liked the animations (except for crowbar replacement, it's ugly).

The squishy sound effects are just not fun to hear all the time throughout the whole game, so I had to swap them out with my own, I get that "flesh" is a theme of the mod, but come on, your guns are still supposed to sound like guns.

The "eyeoverlay" staying on your screen all the time was very annoying. so I had to bind "ent_fire eyeoverlay stopoverlays" in order to have a clear vision throughout the game.

It's good that this mod is very short, because my eyes started to hurt closer to the end due to amount of red color on the screen.

The level design is okay, visually speaking, but gameplay is simply boring and not fun, it feels more like a bonus entry in MapLabs mapping challenge than a standalone mod. The mod makes use of MapBase, but the features it uses are so minor that you might not even notice if you don't pay attention or you're not familiar with what is Source Engine under the hood. I do appreciate the Combine Elites being able to shoot SMG Grenades though, that caught me off guard a couple times.

The map where you fight the final boss is terribly optimized and wasn't fun at all. The boss fight is basically you running from point A to point B and breaking things before you can finally kill the boss (and the moment when you deliver a final blow to the boss is so anti-climactic that it might as well be just a cutscene after you break the last "heart" or whatever it was supposed to be).

Not bad, but needs a lot of polishing and improvements (there is barely any gameplay, like mentioned in the review by another user).

Granted that this is the restoration of scrapped maps of "Old Dark Interval", it's bound to have bugs and problems, especially since it's working off now obsolete Source SDK 2007 Base and using unfinished/broken maps as a foundation, resulting in bad optimization and lack of gameplay.

When it comes to expectations, I got what I expected and I'm fine with it. I expected to explore old maps in their original design by Cvoxalury and I liked what I saw, they are obviously unfinished, so I can't beat the original creator and author of this mod for leaving them in their current state.

I give it 6/10 for the effort and pain that the creators had to endure while working with the Source Engine.

The good:

+Great level design and good attention to details such as custom animations and sounds for small things that many modders usually would ignore and put a generic func_button and call it a night.

+High quality mapping assets (models, textures and some custom sounds). Even some of original HL2 props were remade (especially the vehicle models).

+The story is interesting, has a nice twist on the HL2 universe and lore. The multiverse idea sounds like a neat concept for another mod, too bad it wasn't utilized to its full potential in this mod, besides just one level where you have VNN voicing the guy that is helping you on the radio.

The bad:

-The weapons were kinda disappointing, but for a mod it's not bad, just feels lazy when you see some weapons re-using L4D2/CS:GO weapon animations and sounds. It feels very out of place, especially with some clunky edits for reloading animations (L4D2's grenade launcher animations for Sawn-off shotgun and flaregun made me laugh when I saw them, also the non-empty reload for AK74). Well, at least modelers and animators did a good job converting them for a mod.
As for the new weapons themselves, most of them weapons were pretty much useless gimmick weapons. The only useful guns for me were M1 Garand, AK74 (with no silencer), SPAS and Grenades.

-I praised the sound design on the levels, but the general sound design for weapons and player-related sounds give a bad impression (I am looking at you, Suit-Sprint and PDA sounds), as mentioned above using CS:GO and L4D2 weapon sounds is a tasteless move, adding loud and obnoxious sounds for stuff that you will hear a lot in the game is also not a good sound design decision (the gasmask section was annoying due to looped heavy breathing sound, yeah yeah, immersion, I don't care if it's annoying).

-While some features like antidote and PDA are interesting additions to base game mechanics, they are very underused. Antidote is used only at the very beginning, later in the game it just doesn't make sense to have it in your inventory. The PDA is absolutely useless and doesn't even give you any hints for current objectives, instead it's just some cheesy dialogue (it also has super annoying ringtone sound that I had to replace with PDA notification sound from STALKER. lol).

-The puzzles themselves aren't bad, they have clever scripting and are well thought out on a technical side, I appreciate that a lot. But the player direction is a lackluster to say the least, which is very frustrating especially when you end up just running back and forth in this damned bunker for an hour spamming E on everything like a lunatic. Good thing there aren't many moments like this in the mod.

-Both of the the endings are just anti-climax on top of anti-climax. I expected more than just a trigger that shows you credits.

Where to begin. The story? Well, it's not the most original story, but at least it is fine enough to keep you interested and play until the end. The voice acting wasn't the best part of the mod, especially the protagonist. Some of the dialogue felt very over-acted. I liked how the rebels at the later levels are voiced though.

The gameplay features. I like the inclusion of the ammo-check feature, but it should have been just a HUD notification, hearing the same voice line over and over can get very annoying. Another fun addition was the fact that you lose bullets if you don't empty the mag before reloading. The iron sights implementation is very weak, though. The iron sights toggle is very unresponsive (that even killed me a couple times). Other issue is that while moving around with iron sights on, you still have the "viewmodel bobbing", which makes aiming down the sights impossible (my guess is that it's intentional, because it would make sense if you will lose accuracy while moving). The lack of a HEV suit is a nice touch and I like how it's played out by the narrative part of the mod, but there are some moments that need to be worked out. At the very beginning you are told that you can't use normal combine medkits (small health vials) and health stations, but in the later levels there will be moments where metrocops will drop the same medkits on death and player will be able to use them (this is probably overlooked by developer). This could be easily fixed if in Hammer you set a flag on NPC, that prevents it from spawning a medkit on death.

The level design. It's good for the most part, the maps are nicely detailed with all the props, brushwork, textures, post processing and what not. On the other hand there were moments where I got bored. The prison level wasn't fun to navigate at all. The "trash compactor" level was much more fun with all the vertical movement. The city streets were okay, but not amazing. The city levels felt more like it's more like Ravenholm than City 17, especially with the amount of zombies around. Some areas didn't make any sense at all. The attempts to tie the mod's locations (the prison in particular) to the HL2's locations just look weird and don't really work.

The difficulty. At first the combat with metropolice and combine soldiers can be difficult, but you will get used to it. The amount of enemies is fair enough, given that you don't have a crosshair and gotta use the clunky iron sights, the damage feels to be higher than usual, which can be annoying if you prefer to rush instead of sitting in the cover and take enemies one by one, thankfully they don't charge at you like in vanilla HL2.

A faithful recreation of the original mobile game.

There are some quirks and bugs in this mod, but it's still playable. I have played a couple builds already and I'm looking forward for a finished version with all features and locations restored/reimagined.

For the best experience you better play the original Doom RPG for Java first be it on an actual phone or emulator.

There are many little things that made me change my mind after years since I played it for the first time, why this mod is good and bad at the same time.

First, let's talk about the bad and get it out of the way, shall we?

Okay, what's bad? Well, the mod borrows too much content and stuff from other games. Most notably the models, characters, plot pieces and dialogue/voice-overs from Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It felt very bizarre to me to see all that stuff being cramped together into this mod's storyline. There are many models that were simply ported to San Andreas instead of being made from scratch, which lowers the production quality to me (doesn't deny the amount of effort put into this project though).

So, what's next? The original voice acting for CJ in this mod is atrocious. Why couldn't the developers pick someone who at least sounds like CJ from San Andreas instead of that annoying kiddo who was voicing him in this mod? or at least someone who sounds more like an adult and can act. The rest of the voice acting is okay-ish (the original part that wasn't borrowed from other games).

Okay, we're almost done here, what's next? The thing that cannot be avoided in any mod, the bugs.

Many missions are brilliantly designed to say the least, but they are very buggy and tend to ruin the experience sometimes (didn't ruin it for me, because I am not that easy to give up because of a couple crashes or game softlocking itself after you fail a mission). But I understand how difficult it is to program the missions for GTA games with the tools that modders have on their hands. It's not that easy to debug stuff just like that. After all, we don't have access to debugging tools that Rockstar had when they worked on RenderWare era GTAs.

Now, to the goods. The goods in this mod start right when you see the very first cutscene. The cutscenes may look primitive today, but for what San Andreas offered to modders at the time it was a blast to see the actual cutscenes with scripted animations and voice acting, even with bad voice acting at the times it was pretty fresh experience (there are too many GTA mods where all dialogue is just some lame subtitles).

The amount of custom content is stunning. The new map is amazing and well detailed.

Custom missions, side activities, new features, updated pedestrians, vehicles and weapons, all that just shows that developers knew what they were doing and damn they cared. Many missions have quite interesting designs, like I said earlier.

The secrets is another thing that I liked a lot about this mod.

Many references and humor add to the atmosphere.

It was clear that this mod is something in between of sci-fi adventure and comedy-parody kind of thing.

I enjoyed every bit of it, despite the crappy stuff that is in this mod too.