Reviews - xxFalconArasxx

Voice Acting: It's overall quite good. Some voice actors do a really good impression of the characters they are playing, like G-Man and Father Grigori. But some characters don't sit right with me. Barney and Alyx don't really sound the characters they are based on. Alyx in particular sounds like a teenager.

Map Design: Visually, the early maps look great, but I feel like the quality goes down later in the game. I think overall, many of the maps could be a bit less linear, and have more interactability. My trek through C17 in this mod felt incredibly on rails, unlike Dark Interval, where it felt like I was walking through an actual city. If you try to explore off the progression path, you will often find dead ends, conveniently placed obstacles, or even straight up invisible walls in the way, preventing the player from exploring further. The only time I recall being rewarded for exploration, was when I found the flare gun in Ravenholm. Oddly enough, Ravenholm was also lacking physics objects to play with. Many of props were frozen in place, and cannot be picked up by the gravity gun. This was a chapter that was designed as a physics playground in the original Half Life 2. It's fundamental not to mess that up. I think part of the reason why this is, is because a lot of the prop assets in this mod are taken from Left 4 Dead and Counter Strike, and the props from those games were never really intended to be picked up and tossed around, hence the frequent amount of frozen props. There are also some levels that could be expanded upon. The Manhack Arcade is like barely in the game. You just sorta pass through it, fighting some baddies along the way, and that's really about it. The Canals were also really short unfortunately.

Gameplay: It's great. It's pretty close to Half Life 2. They got some cool toys to play with and new enemies to fight. A lot of opponents though are things you've faced before with a reskin. You got your Zombies, Metrocops, and Soldiers, and they haven't really changed much function-wise. I did like the combat in the early game. Fighting against cops in the city, moving from building to building, while also being hunted by a chopper. Very tense, and the combination of clever scripting and good use of enemy AI really made it stand out.

Art Direction: That dark and gritty beta aesthetic is definitely here. The polluted atmosphere is especially cranked up, with the industrial sector of C17 literally "snowing" ash. I love it! Of course, it's not all a 1:1 recreation of the beta though. A lot of things were re-envisioned for this project. I think the devs wanted to make this mod their own, so they put their own spin on some of the designs. I'm kinda mixed on some of these. A lot of it feels like changing for the sake of changing things. The Combine Soldiers for instance don't really look like Combine Soldiers anymore. Best comparison I can make is the Replicas from FEAR 2. They also altered the look of the Headcrabs. Why? Black Mesa Source didn't even change the look of the Headcrabs. It's a design I feel is too iconic to meddle with. I think they should have just kept the standard look. Then we have Skitch, which actually does resemble "her" concept closely, but they also genderswapped her for some reason, apparently to fulfil a cliché trope about "girls with boy dogs" or something. I don't see how that makes the character any more engaging. Skitch isn't a dog, nor is she supposed to reinforce a gender stereotype. I feel like this is, once again, the devs changing things for the sake of changing things. It's not all bad though. I like the look of the metrocops. They still retain that white gasmask police look to them, and they brought back glowing blue visors that we saw in some concept arts. Should probably change their vests though. It no longer matches the rebel vests, even though the rebels are supposed to be wearing repurposed police gear. I also like the Airboat. Has a more durable design, which makes sense, given what it's up against. As for weapons, I think they look great. Very detailed, but still recognisable as their beta counterparts. I especially love the look of the MP7 SMG and the GR9 Emplacement Guns.

Conclusion: I mention a lot of issues, but I have to point out that overall, I love this mod. The technical aspects are incredible. It's got fun gameplay and it really does to some extent feel like a recreation of the old Half Life 2 that we never got, plus a modern spin to it. So, I recommend checking it out. Some people might be wondering how this shapes up to Dark Interval, a similar project. Well, I think RTBR certainly has the better production value. Their mod feels more polished and more complete, and has an interesting unique art style that people may or may not like. I think Dark Interval might be more for you if you want something that feels more like Half Life 2. It also has the better city in my opinion. RTBR is till great though, and can stand on its own right.

This mod is good, but it has a lot of flaws.

To summarise, you play as a scientist named Sohn, and you must fight through the horrors of Black Mesa. There is a wide variety of enemies, some pulled from Opposing Force, like the black ops and pit drones. Some custom ones, like these new mutated soldiers and snipers. Sadly, there are no new weapons usable by the player, even though you see NPCs wielding snipers and deagles. Level design is poor, and the plot is non-existent, but the gameplay is pretty decent.

One of my biggest problems is the poor level design. One of the first puzzles in the game is an area littered with malfunctioning electric transformers. If you run through the electrified antenna that is front centre, you are dead, killed instantly regardless of health and armour. The area around the antenna is littered with explosive barrels, so you would logically think the antenna needs to be destroyed, but it does not work. No, the actual way to bypass this puzzle, is to use a magical region between the instakilling antenna and electrifying fence where you are immune to damage, and you will then find a ledge that is literally centimetres wide that you can somehow walk on to get to the door on the other side of the antenna. There is another puzzle where you come across a hallway filled with broken pipes spewing steam. There is room to crawl on top of the pipes where there is no steam, so logically that is how to pass through it, but no, some invisible force will continue to drain the player's health. How do you actually get through? Honestly I am not entirely sure. I just ran through it, and tanked the damage, since it does not kill the player instantly. Many of the maps also suffer from repetitiveness. The parking lot levels are just duplicates of each other. The level design looks void of detail, with lots of boxy rooms and empty hallways. Skyboxes are nonsensical. There is a part late in the game where it transitions to night time, then to morning, and back to night time in a matter of minutes. I mean like literally 24 hours pass in universe with in 20 minutes of gameplay. The original Half Life starts in the morning, and it does not transition to the next morning until Apprehension, a chapter that takes about 6 hours of gameplay to even reach. The weakest parts of the game occur around Xen, where most of the maps are just corridors filled with aliens to shoot at.

Residual Point does not seem to have a plot as far as I am aware of. If there is, I have not noticed it. None of the characters are voice acted. They just say random bits of vanilla dialogue incoherently pieced together. Now you don't need voice actors to tell a story. Life's End is a good example of a mod that tells its story through readable documents and visual cues, so I don't know why they could not do the same. The game is inconsistent with the timeline of Half Life and it's expansions. Right from the beginning of the game, we encounter pit drones, even though Race X isn't supposed to show up until Gordon is at the Lambda Complex, which takes place on the second day of the incident. In fact, this game does a complete reversal, and Race X just downright stops appearing in the second half of the game, when they logically should be more prevalent. We also get audio recordings telling the HECU to forget about Freeman early in the game, which again, is supposed to occur during the second day, much later on. The ending is just a lazy cliffhanger. I would tell you "spoiler warning", but honestly there is nothing to spoil about it. All that happens in the ending is that you enter a portal, the screen goes black, and it rolls credits. The game just ends abruptly with no closure.

I will admit that there were some merits to this mod though, hence the above average rating. Gameplay is pretty fun at times. There is plenty of decent action. Some of the best parts is being caught in the crossfire of the Black Ops and HECU. Most mods I have played do not acknowledge the events of Opposing Force at all, even when they logically should based on the timeline. There is definitely some effort put with the custom and ported NPCs in the game. There are no silly additions that completely break the immersion. It is unlike Sweet Half Life, where it decides to throw in Grey Aliens half way through the game, and become a 1950s alien invasion movie. It is unlike Azure Sheep where they have weapons that are taken straight from Alien and Halo. Residual Point has a little restraint, and tries to be a more serious Half Life game. The only exception is the main menu art, which has some anime themed cyborg girl in it, and a creature with a spiky head. I don't know what these drawings have to do with the game, since at no point do you ever see these characters in game. I guess the developer just wanted to show his art skills? But don't let the art fool you. The game plays like a traditional Half Life game.

(Edit: Some of these have since been fixed, raising the score to an 8) A few things I'd like to criticize about this mod in its current state. I think it's great, and would probably rate it an 8, but it needs work.

1. None of the arms dealers seem to sell rifles or machine guns.

2. Most soldiers and companions have 0 Firearms skill for some reason. Kind of strange, considering the fact this mod is centered on armaments of the 20th Century. Every other skill tends to be filled in appropriately.

3. Many skills and proficiencies are kind of useless. There are virtually no weapons dedicated to Crossbow and Archery proficiency. I also only found one shield in the entirety of the game so far, and it is was a "Cracked Leather Shield", so the Shield skill is very negligible. I think you might as well mod these skills/proficiencies out, or repurpose them (like Star Wars Galactic Conquest and Gekokujo did).

4. Almost half of the villages are empty fields when walking around the village center. Civilians just stand around out in the open. It's really bad if you attempt to attack in any of these villages, since the enemy spawns right in front of you.

5. Most of the bandit enemies are ridiculously underpowered. This is mostly due to the "Crappy Rifle" that a lot of them carry around. This gun deals a measly 8 damage which is about 10% that of most Army Rifles in the game. The second weakest gun in the game does about 24 damage, and fires quite a bit faster. It also just feels unrealistic to have hundreds of bullets constantly bouncing off your bare skin as you charge in to slaughter them with your medieval sword.

6. Some weapons need to provide more statistical details before you purchase/loot them, like ammo capacity and reload time. I tend to choose weapons just based on damage, only to be disappointed when I find it holds 5 or less bullets.

7. "Hunt Troublesome Bandits" quest seems impossible in some cities. The quest states to kill bandits in the vicinity of the town, but you could end up searching half the continent, and never find them.

8. Once the Albion Fight soundtrack plays, it stays on a loop, playing over and over again, until either your ear drums explode, or you restart the game.

9. Speaking of soundtrack, I don't think the "Good, Bad, Ugly" theme, and "Fallout New Vegas" theme fit this genre of game, but that's just personal preference. I'd recommend using music from some royalty free content creators, like Kevin Macleod or something.

10. There is an unusual abundance of medieval melee weapons (like longswords, falchions, choppers, battleaxes, spears, etc.). Maybe Caladria developed a bit differently than Europe did, but it does seem a bit odd. I would've at least liked more modern melee weapons. There was a Trench Shovel and Cavalry Sabre that I managed to uncover later in the game. I would have liked to see more of those, than those cleavers from the Maciejowskie Bible.

Conquered the Romans with an army of cookie monsters. 10/10!

Half Life Point of View is just one of those incredibly good mods out there that every Half Life fan must play. It has you play as an alien. There are new weapons, enemies, gameplay mechanics, etc. The mod was created by those involved with Azure Sheep. The campaign is on the short side this time around, being about 4 hours long, but still fun.

So you play as a Vortigaunt named Xonxt. You are a slave of Nihilanth, genetically modified to be the supreme worker. The mod was made by the creators of Azure Sheep, and the universes of POV and Azure Sheep are connected. You will pass by familiar areas from that mod as you progress. The universes of the original Half Life and Opposing Force are also connected to POV, and you will revisit some of their locations. I don't know how, but they managed to come up with a way to add a whole arsenal of weapons without utilizing human firearms, which is very well done. You are not restricted to just claws like in that Decay game mode, but you cannot use human weapons other then stationary turrets. Unlike Azure Sheep, this mod tries to put a little emphasis on plot and lore through the introduction of a journal feature. It is not very good though, and you might as well ignore it. They do try to make a lot of interesting "fan-made" explanations on Xen's origins and its species. The journal tries to explain the origins of Xen and its species, and gives you some info on Black Mesa from a Vortigaunt's perspective, but one big issue with their attempt to expand the lore of Xen, is that in Half Life, there is very little information given about Xen and its inhabitants. The mod also came out before Half Life 2, so there are contradictions with it. Some of the entries are completely false, like "Girl Power", which suggests all Xen aliens are males, and reproduce through artificial cloning, even though Gonarch from Half Life, and Lamar from Half Life 2 are clearly females, and in the case of Vortigaunts, Mark Laidlaw has confirmed in a 2007 interview the existence of Vortigaunt families complete with husbands, wives, and children. Honestly, the journal would have worked, if they were at least a bit more ambiguous. The story should have focused on the Black Mesa side, rather than the story of their home world.

The gameplay is amazing! It functions fluidly in fact. There are no major bugs to speak of, so they definitely must have had extensive play testing. There's a large variety of enemies and about 3 bosses (Railed Tank, Panther Eye, and a Robot). They are a bit basic and had some exploitable weaknesses, but what can you expect. It's not a AAA game, and it is a 12 year old mod. I love the weapons. Sure, there are only a few, but I'm surprised they actually have more than one weapon at all. All weapons are alien themed, and fit perfectly. I especially love the dual wield Hornet Guns. Enemies require a bit of strategy to take down, and since you are an Alien, you cannot heal yourself with human technology, and must resort to using your electric attack to drain the health of targets. The game even tries to mess with you by placing rooms filled with medkits that you cannot use, often times after a difficult fight. The game seemed hard at first due to the fact it seemingly lacks an armor system, but you actually receive a temporary damage resistance boost when charging your electric attack, making your claws quite possibly the most useful weapon when fighting out in the open. The lack of crosshair makes aiming annoying, and the light source you get is pretty much useless, not only because it is too dim, but the scanning lines can make it even harder to see.

This game is nearly 10/10 material, but it loses points for the otherwise subpar story. It has a few other minor faults, but it is still a damn good game. Expansion pack material right here.

This is surprisingly better and more expansive than even Blue Shift. It might as well have been the real Blue Shift. It delivers much new content such as new enemies, weapons, and gameplay mechanics. There's a pretty long campaign that can take 6 hours to beat on Hard. The game does a great job of keeping the Half Life look and feel. It might as well have been an expansion.

Now, unlike Blue Shift, where the character is functionally the same as Gordon Freeman, you actually do feel like a security guard in this game. The training segment, introduction, cutscenes, and your Kate companion were more than enough to remind you that you're a member of the Black Mesa Security Team. The game also has its own custom HEV suit (a blue one with a security style helmet). It surprisingly fits in pretty well with the game because of its aesthetic. The new Spec Ops enemies also have their own HEV suits. How? Beats me, maybe Black Mesa commercializes their products in much the same way Aperture Science does. The Spec Ops are cool looking, and pose a new challenge. The game connects other Half Life games together, such as revisiting areas from the original Half Life and Opposing Force. It also connects with the POV mod. You get to meet Gordon Freeman and Adrian Shephard in the game, but their voice acting kind of ruins it a bit. WHY IN THE HELL DID YOU GIVE SILENT PROTAGONISTS VOICES!? They both have the same voice actor too, and the actor that plays them isn't very good, so it all just breaks the immersion. The later half of the game takes place after Freeman goes to Xen, and you get to witness the events of Opposing Force, but there's oddly no sign or reference of Race X, nor are there any Black Ops soldiers other than the Assassins. I suppose the Spec Ops have taken the Black Ops role, as they are seen alongside Assassins and are enemies to the HECU, but it still baffles me how much of the Black Ops forces are absent. New weapons like the M9 Berreta, and that Kung Fu poolstick are cool, but the Pulse Rifle from aliens simply doesn't belong in this game, because it's not part of the Half Life universe. There are plenty of real life weapons the developers could have pulled instead, or they could have perhaps made their own fictional weapon.

Functionally the game serves its purpose. There are little to no bugs to speak of. Action is great, and the soundtrack is implemented perfectly with action sequences, although all the soundtrack reuses the original Half Life music, but that doesn't concern me. Although they did add new weapons, they felt kind of like reskins of the original weapons with some stat changes. The M9 is just a stronger version of the Glock. The Pulse Rifle is a stronger version of the MP5. The Chumtoad is exactly the same as the Snark, I don't even know why you made it a separate weapon from the Snark if it has no functional difference. Enemies are pretty cool though. There are new enemies and cut enemies from the original Half Life. The Purple Vortigaunts however, I don't get. They are just recolors of the normal Vortigaunts, and don't even have noticeable changes in health or damage. Also, what is the lore behind them? It looks like they come from human hosts, but we don't really get much more information than that. The new Kate character did interest me at first, but fell flat because of her lack of any meaningfull dialogue and crappy AI. The only interesting thing she does is when she saves you. There is this trope reversal, where at first you are trying to save her like a damsel in distress, only to find yourself captured and her freeing you. That was a pleasant surprise. One other problem with the game is that it can be a little hard to navigate the maps. Too many branching halls and corridors leading to dead ends and other insignificant areas.

The Ultra Definition addon looks amazing. I love that pseudo ragdoll effect enemies have upon death. Kind of wish the weapons weren't drastically changed though. I am sick of graphical enhancement mods completely changing the weapon designs. The Crossbow is turned into a Sniper that still shoots bolts for some reason. The MP5 is an M4 that still uses pistol bullets for some reason. The M9 becomes the Halo pistol, another out of place weapon to add to the list. Can you guys please just stick with the established art style.

Despite my criticism, this mod is 8/10 material right here, because it is of course a mod, and an early one at that (released 2001). It is not a AAA game. This is probably one of the best that I have ever played, and I definitely recommend it.