Reviews - Smiley_Riley

I got attacked by a band of roving cows and before I got knocked unconscious and captured, I shot my child to spare her the horrors of being a slave to her bovine masters.

An unforgettable experience, 10/10

2004 called, they wanted to make up for Shadow of Chernobyl's initial release with this beauty

If you haven't played this mod, you should; level design is tight, it looks great (surprising since it only uses what's there in the base Source SDK), and the gameplay is fast and solid

After 7 years this is still one of the best mods out there for any game, and shows that you can make a Source Engine level look good with default HL2 content without making it look like something from 1998.

I was a fan of the original Zombie Master so when I heard that there was a sequel in the works (back when ZM2 was called ZMI) I was excited to see what could be done. 3 years later, it finally comes out and unfortunately I was disappointed for the following things:

This is a Patch, not a sequel: generally when a game has the number 2 attached to it, you'll expect to seem some amazing changes (new art assets, greatly improved engine, new gameplay, new maps, revamped everything, etc.) and unfortunately this isn't the case. With the exception of Z3R0's custom content, and the under the hood engine changes (most notably the conversion to Orange Box), the game is exactly the same as its predecessors, down to the heavy usage of HL2 models/textures/animations and gameplay.

The game itself hasn't aged well: ZM1 was fantastic back in 2007, and I was excited to see if ZM2 improved upon its gameplay. Unfortunately little has changed in the 'sequel' so it feels like a fossilized dinosaur. Having default HL2 values for movement/damage/etc. for humans (with high powered guns) and pairing them up against crippled Zombie AI (one would think they made large zombie horde navigation better; they still get stuck on one another) = not fun in 2013.

Questionable Design Choices: The autopick up feature for guns/ammo was fine back in 2004 for HL2 (which had one pistol, one smg, etc.) but for a Mod that has multiple weapons for each category, it gets annoying when I want to pick up a specific gun only to pick up a weapon I didn't want which was closer to me (this is a big issue in massive gun piles). I had no clue which gun accepted which ammobox (the ammo looks pretty but there's no clear indicator to what gun they're matched up with). The default keybindings also bugged me (why is B = drop gun when it's G for every other game?).

I hope this project succeeds in the coming updates, I really do but at this moment it's simply a glorified patch masquerading as a 'sequel'.

Best mod to live out your Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan fantasies with your best friends!