Reviews - SpazJR61

An underrated classic.

The Challenger Deep 2, despite of the "2", is not a sequel of the original, but rather it's a remake.

It's a massive improvement of the original as the original is, let's just say, very janky and aged poorly.

The maps are really well designed (typical DocRock) and they're quite large.

The mod extensively uses the cut item, Air tanks. The air tanks restore your air supply and you can swim longer.

Now the issues.

The level design, while good, it's confusing in some parts as there's no hint for what you need to do or where to go and they suffer from poor pacing. Also, some levels have quite poor optimization where you get low framerates.
The scripts in some levels are quite broken, for example where you need to escort the scientist.

Other than that, it's a well made mod, you should play it.

Low effort Crack-Life clone but it's more cringe than any other low effort Crack-Life clone

A future classic...
It has a plenty of problems like repetitive combat, little to no supplies and an anti-climatic ending.
Overall, it's a good mod and you should try it out.

This mod is really one of the, if not the worst Half-Life 2 mods I've ever played.

Lemme start with positives.
The level design is okay at best, it's not the best level design in the world but it's okay.

The voice acting is all around improvement from the first game and now mic quality in voice actors is much more consistent.

And now the negatives, oh boy, It's gonna be a juicy one.

First off, the mod's size. It's literally a WHOPPING 10 GB, which is ridiculous for a Half-Life 2 mod as it literally takes up more space than Half-Life 2, HL2:EP1 and HL2:EP2 COMBINED. Turns out the developer put a ton of junk that never used in the mod, cjb you seriously have no idea how to make a mod and it shows.

A lot of problems are from the first mod are carried over to the sequel, but this time, they're even worse than before.

Like the first game, this game doesn't even know it's a movie or a video game, there's a ton of way too long cutscenes that has no effect to the game and story. Seems like cjb DIDN'T LEARNED ANYTHING from previous mod by giving us a pointless prison level (again) where you do nothing THREE TIMES and you need to go to the fight area twice. They can take 45 MINUTES in total. I had to use the "host_framerate" command to speed things up. This is just a lame way to pad the game.

The story, what is even "story"? This game's "story" is all over the place. Nazis, zombies, DPRK soldiers, terrorists, space station, aliens and dinosaurs. This game's story filled with a mismash of bizarre stuff and they clash one and another. The first game is an interesting story about Nazis found time travel, akin to Timeline trilogy. But this mod tries to crank up everything to 11, but fails every way possible.

Fake difficulty. Although, it's not as much as the predecssor, this mod still suffers from fake difficulty a bit, such as enemies having more health, better aim and there's very little medkits.

Like its predecessor, the levels are quite confusing and it never tells or giving you little to no hints for what to do and there's zero clue for it. I had to watch a playthrough video on YouTube to see what I'm need to do. There's also a lot of bad design choices that make the experience really frustrating.

The scripts in this mod is also quite broken as well as you can break the scripted sequences quite easily and can't progress further. It happened to me many times through my playthrough.

This mod also uses a lot of assets that literally all over the place, like facehuggers from Alien as fast headcrabs, SWAT truck and police SUV from GTA San Andreas, FlyUs box from GTA IV, reused weapon models from Half-Life 2 with zero changes (expect for the sound effects) and even Anna is just reusing the Alyx Vance model with zero changes even though she was from the French Resistance in 1940's. cjb just grabbed assets from GMod website/workshop and the credits already says that.

The soundtrack is just taken from other movies like Indiana Jones and they are copyrighted as well. If you're a content creator, this mod's soundtrack is not good for you and what's even worse is that even if you turn the music volume all the way off, the music will still play because they using normal sounds for the game.

Finally, one of the lamest ending I've ever seen in my life. After the game said "the savefile is not valid error", I decided to scrap my playthrough and watch it on YouTube because I don't want to suffer again. The last part involves you to go back in time and deactivate nukes from launching. Once you did, you just go back to down and he just dies the lamest way possible. That's it, that's the ending. The reason why cjb put such a lame ending is he didn't wanted to make a trilogy from it, while it's understandable, it's still sounds like a lame excuse to make that lame ending to me.

Final verdict, stay away from this mod. Repeating the same mistakes from the predecessor again and make them even worse, this mod is really not that well made. If you want a weird and universe travel mod, just play Mistake of Phythagoras instead.

This mod seriously a hit or miss.
It tries way too hard to be a movie and movie video games not worked well (The Order 1886 is a good example for this).

This mod don't even know it's a movie or a video game. Things like you waiting way too much in some sections like the stealth section.

Speaking of stealth, Half-Life never intended to be a stealth game and this mod really shows, the guards spot you instantly from far away and it's trial and error and it feels really bad.

Anoher problem is the game's level design is quite confusing and it never tell you what to do, much like En Route 66. There's zero clue about what you're supposed to do and to the point I had to watch a playthrough video on YouTube to see what I'm supposed to do.

The voice acting ranges from decent to terrible, the Colonel is the only good one but sadly he's only had a small screen time and he's voiced by Wintermute, who voiced Barney from Heart of Evil, another HL mod. The quality of voice acting is also inconsistent as well, some of them has good mic, others have bad mic (the Colonel is a good example for this).

Finally, the biggest issue.
THE ARTIFICAL DIFFICULTY of this mod suffers from.
Nearly every single shot from soldiers registered as headshots and because of this, you can easily die. The overabundance of soldiers and especially MG42 machine gunners. In one chapter where you supposed to go down to sever via breaking the sewer door, the machine gun will easily kill you and it keeps shooting, even if you kill the gunner. I was so frustrated to the point I had to use godmode to get past to that part. Later, when I checking the skill.cfg file, I found out why soldiers can instantly kill you, because of the headshot values are way too high, first off they are multipliers and the dev has no idea how they actually work (the multipliers are 6, 7 and 8 on Easy, Medium and Hard, respectively) Just set these values to low so they can't instantly kill you anymore and make the game easier. I also suggest to decrease soldiers' health as well.

This mod is a prime example of how fake difficulty ruins games & mods and movie with video game combination not work really that well.

The ending is also anti-climatic, all you do is activate the teleporter, kill Hitler and sabotage the ship's systems. The cutscenes are way too long also, of course this mod trying too hard to be movie but video games trying to be movies didn't worked that well as I said before.

There are some positives too like the map design is not half-bad. They are confusing and some places are too dark and I had to use flashlight, A LOT.

Another good thing about this mod is it really has a lot of Indiana Jones and Wolfenstein vibes to it, I even felt like playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein at one point.

And the sequel is, literally no any better, it's just even worse.

no way

What is this?
This is not even the official release of BHL.
And the account creation date of the person who posted this "mod" here says it all
Is there any moderator here?

another day, another low effort crack-life clone aka half-life reskin

before low effort crack-life clones, there were crappy "hd" mods like this

Firstly, Leon put a lot of effort to the mod because I like the map designs and the play time is rather decent too.
But there a lot of changes that really ruin the immersion of Half-Life universe such as HECU soldiers as Metrocops and soldier models from F.E.A.R. and the new weapon models are too out of place as wel. Also the out of place music choice and cutscenes just ruins the immersion.

My final verdict is 6/10