Reviews - Skunky~

Overcharged is right, because it's Overcharged with bloat and so on, but for real: An interesting way to play through Half-Life 2 (and its Episodes) again for sure, but it's sadly a "quantity over quality" kinda case with this mod. Plenty of weapons and new enemies... that barely fit in at all or make zero sense or serve no purpose at all. Race X being in this seems cool and all, but they barely offer anything interesting or fancy, and obviously feel extremely out of place. There's a few cool times where they are fighting with Combines and stuff, but that's about it. Some of the new effects are also neat, though the FX options are extremely overwhelming, most of them don't do anything or are pointless, so it feels just weird to have these options there.

I can barely tell that the AI is improved, apart from them jumping around now at times, and using the SMG grenade launcher more often (which is how I died A LOT.) There's also the fact that the difficulity in this has been spiked up just by dumping down a lot of NPCS or using those ****** Combine Snipers that can kill you in one hit, and you won't know they are here until you get killed by him atleast once (or he somehow misses).

The mapadds are alright, nothing to write home about though. Bit disappointing there wasn't more apart from just "there's a weapon or ammo here now". Barely any cool NPC things or whatever, I can probably count them on one hand. I think the biggest disappointment ot me tthough is that they have edited some of the original maps. I was actually kinda excited when I heard about that, and saw that they re-added the Docks for Ravenholm. And near the end, you even get to destroy the 'Big Momma Pod' with the Digger, which is all based on the HL2 Leak... but that was basically it for map changes, apart from there being a tunnel you can explore during the Airboat section (which is just a cut and paste job of an easter egg area in the OG HL2 anyway). There's also a few new scenes in Episode One that were cut, so I was also super excited to see if they maybe did some changes related to that... but nope. Nothing. Huge disappointment on that, honestly. The only other noteworthy thing to me was the section where if you end up in the Lost Coast levels (via the Displacer or by straight up going into the water at the beginning of Highway 17), after you finished it, you had a funny little scene with some citizens finding you near the Coast with your Buggy. Also, the ending for HL2 gets interrupted by the intro forEpisode One (the one with the purple Vortigaunts saving Alyx and stuff), kinda neat, but also a bummer that the G-Man speech is gone because of that. That's about it though.

Honestly, this mod is just such a mixed bag for me. So much cool stuff that could have been sooooo much more, but they kinda didn't do much with it. You had the possibility to edit the maps and **** around with them... and yet they barely did **** with it. The new weapons are mostly pointless, because why would I use some of them if I can just keep using the normal SMG or OICW or AR2 or whatever? I almost never touched any of the other weapons I had available, especially because Ammo was also shared for some of them anyway. The new NPCs don't add anything to it, apart from pleasing the "HL2 Beta" fanboys or whatever, but even then, the more interesting NPCs like the Cremator or Combine Guard almost never got used anyway, so whatever. There's not much improved AI to see, and some of the new effects are neat. The kick and slow motion time are fun as always, but I can play BSMod or SMod for those anyway.

If you need an excuse to play through the Half-Life games again, then sure, no harm in playing this mod, that's why I did it. But after finishing all of that, I just feel like playing BSMod or SMod.