TopAce
Attila joined
I mod FreeSpace. I am a mission designer - AKA "FREDder" in community jargon. I used to create some levels to Quake III and Jedi Knight 1 and 2. Also, to make it clear: I didn't pick a Nod logo as my avatar because I am a CnC geek. In fact, I own Tiberian Sun only, and I wouldn't have it if it weren't freeware. The rest of the series is unknown to me, except for their cutscenes which I watched on YouTube. The reason I picked this particular avatar is because I love this logo, and the atmosphere of the Nod campaign cutscenes in TS is astonishing. User is retired from the modding community, so he'll likely not answer any posts here on ModDb.
Reviews
Sometimes I wonder what the hell devs thinks of themselves. I have seen shameful, pitiful and humiliating attempts at degrading their players into emotionless machines, but this "game" is actually an open attempt at wearing down a human being into a nervous wreck. I have to put the word "game" into quotation marks, because calling this piece of binary a game is degrading to all games.
Every single fking time you spot an enemy it "spawns" in front of you, and 90% of the cases there is one behind you just to make sure you cannot do anything to prevent being damaged. Well, that's not entirely true; I believe things got unbearable at level 3. In many cases you find yourself surrounded in all directions in two seconds, you cannot move an inch, and your only hope is to have enough ammo and health to get out of that situation, then hope to find enough medkits to heal yourself up. Or use cheats, justifiedly, because let's be honest, folks, teleporting enemies around you to trap you in one spot is the most spineless dev move of all time.
Competent developers can use dark environment to enhance the atmosphere. In Doom 3, it's just another cheap and childish trick to make the game more difficult. Have I mentioned all monsters are unrealistically tough? You cannot imagine how much damage they can take before succumbing. Also your ammo count and firepower are laughable and - guess what - you have to reload in this game. This pretty much means the game is unplayable, unenjoyable and not recommended to anyone except the most masochistic psychos.
To me, Blue-Shift is the best expansion for Half-Life 1. It's long enough to be called an expansion, but not too long to regret spending time with it. Atmosphere is good, and the little tie-in with the Freeman branch is lovely. It is not as maddeningly hard as its prequels, which is a huge plus in my book (I dislike reloading the same save game 15 times just to survive the next fight ahead of me, only to reload 5 more times to survive with a high enough health to make the next challenge survivable.)
Unfortunately, the plot does not allow Barney (the player character) to access the higher-end weapons. While this makes the experience the same as the early levels of the old Half-Life, I would love to play through the Xen and the power plant levels with a high-end weapon. Since Blue-Shift is relatively easy, these weapons would probably be too powerful, but still, it would be cool to fool around with them.
Generally speaking, ST:R is a high-quality, traditionalist mod with some interesting plot twists. Some missions are too long, though, and typically, the longer the mission, the more likely it was designed to be won or lost in the last minute. That's ST:R's biggest defect in my view. Everything else is top-notch, including mission design and voice acting.
Recently I started to experience some problems with one of the missions, but since they weren't there when I first played ST:R, I don't count it as a flaw in the mod.
