Reviews - 1187 mod for Half-Life 2

I just loved that game, the end was freaking awesome! PLEASE make a sequel 10/10.

PS, This was Valve quality work, good job. I smell a sequel. Please. Sequel

I had really fun playing this mod, i found it original and challenging which made it great. Keep it up.

Awesome, you haven't just made a mod, you've re-enginered a lot of the game and made it a new game experience. That must of taken a lot of work, and time so just letting you know, you're good.

Just finished the game, the levels are great, the story is great,
the work put into this game is great, its just great for a fan-based project.
It can be buggy at times, and sometimes the fighting sequences tend
to be a bit on the hard side, but overall managable.
This is a true Episode to the Half Life Universe wich earns to
be played and then replayed.
Just try it out, its completely free and easy to install, like a
regular game (restart steam after install).

My final verdict is an 8.5
download here: Moddb.com

this mod bets a lot on one word: fancy. it differs from vanilla hl2 in its seldom seen setting among mods and the load of "realistic" features added such as iron sights replacing the crossair, body awareness, head bobbing ect. majority of the assets were made from scratch, from textures and models to sountracks and voice acting. not to mention you'll see quite a few different places. in short, you could almost call this a conversion.

now, i say "bet" cause it's not mind blowing either: both the features and mapping show noticeable imperfections such as clipping or blockiness, and more importantly they may not be for everyone. if i see these attempts as fresh air after playing several mappacks mods, some have called it unfitting for a hl game.

the story is on par with what you see in most mods: you're a common folk pushed into survival. you meet several people along the way and a few twists appear here and there, but that's not groundbreaking. i didn't feel so invested in neither the plot nor the characters, albeit the voice acting isn't bad for the most part.

however, if you aim to PLAY a great mod, you better think twice about this one. firstly,the features may throw you off as again they're much different from vanilla half-life and bring their own issues.
then, 1187 is crippled by its level design. you may struggle a lot to find your way out of a level especially if you don't follow the dialogues (which don't have captions, btw) or are used to thorougly seek keys hidden around. in combat situation, enemy placement doesn't feel intelligent and more than once you're just swarmed by anything spawning from anywhere, whether it's alien or not. i suspect there even is a part where they spawn unlimited amount of grunts ordered to go at your position, meaning you can't even hide. i've read several times that the sidekick is useless, but to be fair i found him pretty handy to draw enemy fire or serve as a meatshield.
speaking of the enemy, a large part is okay but the meat of the "challenge" is plain obnoxious. vortigaunts and grunts are reskinned friendly npcs from hl2 turned against you, but those clearly aren't tweaked to fight the player. in case you're a fledging modder, please keep this in mind: use the combine soldiers as a base for your human enemies, not the rebels! the latters are stupid lemmings either just shooting or suicidally running to the target until it's in sight again, but they're more accurate and have inhuman reaction time when engaged. the counterplay is already meh with combines, here it's just even less engaging. be also careful with vorts although to a lesser extent: their zap charge time is noticeably shorter than in first hl so don't just spawn them out of nowhere when the player is in the open. when adding this on top of level design favoring numbers over intelligent placement, it's more a matter of spending time save scumming than an actual challenge. if you want to get these mediocre fights over with in a reasonable time span, you better stick to easy difficulty and abuse glitches or even cheats when at its worst.

overall, you'll want to play this mod more for the sake of an okay adventure in a relatively unique setting. don't expect much if you've got high standards in fps combat or even seek the finest of hl2 mods.

This is a great mod. Good length and enjoyment. I turned off most of the additional affects u created except for alternate hud, because they were mostly annoying, a huge head bob while meleeing with knife and other weapons made me avoid melee attacks at all costs. At first i didnt like the iron sights but in the end i liked it. I ended up putting the game on easy after i got sick of needing to shoot little hound eyes a million times to kill them, which i thought was just rediculous. For these reasons i was going to give the mod 8 out of 10 but then the ending was awesome so i give it a 9 out of 10 :) i look forward to the next installment

I remember playing this a long time ago and having a decent amount of fun with it then.

However, nowadays (2018), so much of the core mod is broken down and difficult to play. If it wasn't for a lot of help from the comments section for this mod, it couldn't even start it up without immediately crashing.

Once that was fixed, however, the rest of the mod is riddled with difficulty issues, buggy iron-sights logic, an unreliable flashlight, and unexplained sudden lag spikes that will bog down whole sections of the main campaign and additional bonus content.

The 'story' itself is a bit hammy and difficult to appreciate too now, mostly because the other warts make it hard to look past flawed writing and flawed voice acting.

Unfortunately, because of so much having fallen apart with the Source engine and despite the efforts rebuilding this mod, it's too far gone to be enjoyable.

Just an unfortunate case of time moving on, and updates withering away at a once-promising part one to a series that never happened.

Unless you have a lot of free time (also patience) and a running knowledge of Source engine commands to cheat through the unfair bits, I do not recommend downloading this mod. But it would be great if these problems get officially patched to bring it back to working on modern day Steam. :D

THE FOLLOWING TEXT CONTAINS SWEARING, HATRED, AND FRUSTRATION

I've never played a mod that had such a bad combat system. You never know whether you'll hit the enemy with your melee weapons or not, and shooting requires using iron sight which partly disturbs player's vision. I had to switch to easy difficulty, but it was bareable only after I disabled head bumbing and all the motion blur, but even then there's other flaws.
The mod has a lot of potential that was wasted by bad design choices and execution, resulting in some inconsistencies. For example, in the opening area when you meet John, he prevents you from going out of the building a certain way, as it is, according to him, filled with zombies. So what you do instead, is you exit the front door, but you still have to fight a horde of zombies anyway. Why not, instead of forcing the player to go a certain way, let them go the way that John was blocking (if they want to), and have him congratulate the player when they succeed in defeating the enemies?

Some enemies are way too tough, especially the houndeyes (more than one pistol mag to take one out, wtf). The gameplay consists of way too much hunting for microscopical items barelly seen in the darkness. Merc enemies at the beginig look like their textures were made in paint. And John, AKA the "I've never seen anything like it!", "this place creeps me out", "it's locked, what a surprise", "hey, personal space" guy, Jesus Christ, this ****** is an insult to any game NPC ever *AND* to any player.

The mod pretends to have a "story" and some "mystery" going on, but why should I care if it doesn't conclude in any way and most of it probably never left the creator's head. Why are vortigaunts enemies? How come John has never seen them before, even though it's been 10 years since the Black Mesa incident? Why are some mercs shooting at us? Why is there G-Man? There's no reason for any of it to happen other than to give the player something to shoot at and to have some "intriguing" stuff going on to keep him/her interested. Well, it didn't work on me.

I wanted to give it a 5/10, because it has some nice parts, and I know someone actually tried while making it, but the end credits song made of John's quotes mixed together felt like I got punched in the face for finishing the mod. **** you, "dude".

****** epic mod loved every bit of it, ending was great everything cant wait for episode 2 Go get this mod now!!!

Well here is my review. I give it a 7 out of 10. Overall, I liked the mod. The voice acting was pretty good, the characters, although not on the level of some other games, were interesting and like-able.

Graphics: 9/10
Incredible. Most everything was normal mapped or had some kind of shader to it. The character models and textures were detailed, and so were the custom props. The only bad thing that I can say about this section is that some of the shaders just didn't look right. Other than that, 9/10.

Storyline: 7/10
Alright. For the most part, the story flowed pretty naturally, but I couldn't help but feel as though everyone in the mod besides John tended to ignore my character's presence. Not even after I killed what seemed like half of the world in the final battle, I never truly felt like I was participating in the story. Anyways, I liked all of the nods and explanations as to how the combine came to earth, especially a certain scene with a radio. I give this section a 7/10.

Music: 8/10
Top notch with this. The music always fit with the scene, and always got me pumped up for the upcoming battles. It was all very well composed and it felt like it was made by a professional composer. There was a bit of a problem though, as some areas that I felt could have used some kind of music were left with no music at all, namely the subway, the mansion, and the end portal. 8 out of 10 for this.

Level Design: 6/10
This is the only place that this mod falls short. I understand that with such big maps, there are bound to be some problems, but I often encountered many of them, which is not good at all. For one, the maps and building look pretty blocky at times and some are just plain disproportional. The levels often had a way of confusing me into going the wrong way, and it I lost my sense of direction a bit too often. Some areas seemed like placeholders, like the tunnel system before the forest. On this, unfortunately, I give a 6 out of 10.