Reimagination of a singleplayer mod "Azure Sheep" for Half-Life 1. With great exclusion, everything that does not correspond to the canons of the original game will be cut out.
amazing remake of half life 1 mod
The best way I can describe this mod is that some of the environment artists had good ideas, but for the most part nobody's grasp on their work was particularly strong, and priorities were in the wrong places. This extends to every department.
The beginning areas are laughably bad emulations of Black Mesa's clutter, not intending to make sense, but to look "detailed" at a passing glance. There must be a few dozen couches in the opening corridors. That said, setpieces later on start to look less soulless and I started to look at them and think "wow the highs are high!"
The problem is that they never facilitate good gameplay. EVER. Clutter's the name of the game here, and it doesn't make finding the path, solving puzzles, or fighting enemies a good time. This is at its worst during any firefight. It's always a long-range engagement in an environment where every square meter of wall is competing for your attention among the tiny enemies.
Map design is just bad. It's rarely sensible and only vaguely functional. I never found myself having FUN, or understanding my environment or what was happening or what I was supposed to do. I frequently accidentally ended up out of bounds, or sequence breaking purely because the maps weren't designed to guide me. Not even going to get into the constantly broken AI or punishing enemy placement.
Some ideas were decent, if poorly-executed. I wouldn't mind the talking protagonist if he didn't have the same voice as the people he was talking to. Plenty of "cutscenes" and viewmodel animations which are welcome if a bit rough. I appreciate the attempts at new scenes even though the writing and VA leave a lot to be desired.
Overall, the team seems to have ideas that they both haven't fully thought through, and lack the skill to execute. The maps substitute visual noise in place of detail, and has made that king. The result is a series of maps that are at times nice to look at, but never fun or comprehensible.
Anyways good luck with project!
This is... okay. I'd like to preface this (messy) review by first saying that, while I played the original Azure Sheep quite some time ago, and I don't really remember any of it - this mod could be an 'accurate' recreation or not, I'm not sure.
The level design could use some work (although the environments themselves look nice for the most part). Combat currently feels quite forced and aimless in some sections, the pacing is a little off, there are a lot of rooms that serve no purpose to the overall progression, along with whole bunch of filler too. Some of the set pieces were nice, but the player direction was pretty weak overall, as was the HECU combat. For some reason they're really dumb in this mod, not sure if it's a fault of the mappers or the default BM NPCs, but fighting them wasn't all that fun. Turrets and headcrabs are a bit overused compared with other enemies, and the mod lacks any proper puzzle or exploratory sections, mainly focusing on combat (which is a big shame). Optimisation was also pretty bad throughout, with a lot of the loading times stretching on for quite a while.
Weapons are a bit of a mixed bag on the whole, the starting pistol absolutely sucks - it feels horrible to use, and most of the time I stuck to the crowbar before I got another weapon (which for some reason uses wooden impact sounds, but whatever). The replacement models for the Glock and MP5 - a Beretta and an M4 - looked pretty poor on the whole. They're way too big, the textures are weird and their animations need a lot of work. If the devs are reading this - please just use the default BM guns.
For some reason the player character speaks (a lot), which was really distracting and stupid (e.g. he says "Nice, ammo!" whenever he runs out of ammo for some reason).
It's a 3-4/10 from me. The only reason I even finished it was because someone said the ending was cool, I guess it is, but definitely not worth playing through the whole mod for.
Best of luck for the future though, I hope the issues are resolved by the time the final release date rolls around.
Through out the mod i saw missing textures, t-posing models and other stuff.
The mod has some problems with directions, but when i learned the ways i did feel stupid. There are some problems with showing where there are weapon pick-ups.
I can't blame the developers for the voice acting and they are aware of this problem.
I don't know if the t-posing and missing models and textures are my problem with unpacking the mod and putting it in the right directory.
The mod is great anyways, Good mapping, decent pacing and for some reason i felt that the gunplay is better. The guns feel more punchier. It's good to see another perspective of the Black Mesa incident.
It's nice. my favorite part is the garg fight
I just finished part one, and so far there are some bugs in certain areas which kinda ruin the experience. For example, some lighted areas have a big square with a ton of black and purple squares on it, there are multi-colored containers in certain areas, some objects and enemies are replaced with the words "Error Success", and the Xen map is nothing but black and purple textures. Also, the voice acting could use some improvement, especially the female characters. All in all, I say this mod is okay, but needs improvement.
I played original Azure Sheep before this mod and to be fair, Azure Sheep (original) gets it's fair share of points only because of nostalgia.
While I feel like this mod (recreation) does not follow the original ideas or enviroment that much, I like devs's approach a LOT more. Maps feels vivid, you even get to visit Xen for a bit, puzzles are fine as well. To be fair this is definitelly one if not the best mod for Black Mesa I have played ever. Well done!
My score has NOTHING to do with this mod straying far, far away from the source material or questionable actions of some of the developers, just a heads up. That being said:
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Why bother remaking something if you aren't going to stay true to the source?
"Original mod had many non-canonical moments that will be replaced with more canon-friendly ones. Also we will add new chapter to close up some plot holes."
Really? Who cares about canonity in mods? This mod, while decent enough, has nothing to do with the original classic. Why invent things that weren't there instead of focusing on giving the already great but outdated foundation a facelift? Call the mod something else if it's going to be nothing like the original.
They focus on "canon" and things making sense so much that they slow themselves down and limit their creativity for no reason, obsessing over altering tiny things. They couldn't even accept the player character was just another barney, now "Just Barney" has to be "Justin Barnes", what a weird addition. The entire mod is built with this mentality.
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Also, I don't understand how can someone dislike something and then create another thing that has the same criticized aspects multiplied. You didn't like how the original maps were designed but create even more cluttered and hard to navigate ones? And don't even get me started on combat, it's almost always frustrating and never fun. And what happened to all of the fun set-pieces? Nowadays everything has to be "serious" and uniform. What happened to individuality?
And on top of everything, the developers can't handle criticism. I didn't forget how you attacked a user just because he rightfully criticized the mod. Criticism always follows when you put something out for public to see. Even if you don't agree with it you need to stay professional, not put people on the spot.
The effort is there, even at this stage the mod isn't short and clearly talented people cared about their work while developing it, of course I'm not going to brush that off, but even if you disregard the mod not having anything to do with the original, in the end it's not that fun of an experience with its forced combat, map design that lacks flow and somewhat frequent bugs and errors.