Experience Half-Life 2 like never before. Return to City 17, held within the iron grip of the Combine and the Consul. Reunite with old friends, and enemies. Traverse vicious canals, make new allies, and brave the horrors of the Quarrytown. Immerse yourself in a revitalised combat system featuring old arsenals made new again, with added features to raise the bar in gameplay. You've been waiting for quite some time, now. It's time to climb aboard.
I gotta say, RTBR is very consistent at being hit or miss.
Levels can go from really pretty to Timmy's 20th GMod map with ok lighting, certain levels can look incredibly flat due to textures and models used within them. Overall level design is either very good in one map or just ok in another which makes the AI be incredibly dumb most of the time.
The mod suffers from difficulty spikes aswell which are ******* horrible.
Voice acting is mostly ok to bad, depending on the lines written and the delivery of them, doesn't help when NPCs do not match the lines spoken when it comes to body language and overall emotions, lot of issues where they are talking to another but are looking at you because??? or they won't face you despite talking to you, instead just trying to look at you with their backs turned.
Barney is whatever, it's alright.
Consul sounds like a generic villain, no charisma at all.
Eli can't stop talking about how old he is but otherwise most of the lines and delivery is fine.
Alyx can be fine but become incredibly annoying depending on the situation/map.
Grigori is peak, no faults there as far as I can tell, very good impression and line delivery.
Gunplay feels good, nice punchy animations, vfx and sfx. Alternate fire modes are thought out decently well but that's really it. However the inclusion of NPC weapons like the Annabelle and the Alyx Gun is good on paper but execution ******* sucks, "here is my weapon Gordon, use it while I leave myself completely defenseless and call out to you 20 times because there are too many enemies to manage as they just keep spawning." Gee thanks Grigori.
The assets do not mesh well at all, everything looks either stupidly cartoony and rubbery or dipped in oil, sometimes very crude looking aswell. There's a few that look fine but the majority suffers alot. (Not to mention the fact that the mod uses vanilla and other source game assets that just contribute to it since they did not finish making and swapping everything out.)
Overall the mod feels like it's just going through a checklist and staying as close as possible to the events of HL2 but under the skin of the "beta."
The rating I'm leaving is very generous as there is some good in this but otherwise is very overshadowed by the bad. I'll probably update the review as the Divisions release but I'm not holding my breath.
Visually impressive, but pretty much everything else is mediocre at best.
I sincerely hope Ravenholm gets refined further because at the moment, it's not really a fun experience, especially compared to the retail version. The maps are full of cramped rooms, extremely cluttered spaces and so, so many locked doors. You see a couple of boxes stacked on top of each other and a wooden plank acting as a slope and it clearly looks like a path you can actually traverse. You get there only to realize that the area is completely blocked off by invisible clipping. I think the removal of such red herrings could greatly improve the quality of the maps. The last part with Grigori was terribly executed. Who thought that having Grigori give his only weapon to Gordon would be a fun idea? Because it isn't. Yeah, it was cool to use the Annabelle and all, but it was annoying to try and keep the zombies and Gonomes off of Grigori. Took me several tries to beat that section. IMHO, it didn't feel challenging, it was downright obnoxious. On an unrelated note, I love how the areas from E3 2003 were integrated with the rest of the maps. Well done on that.
My other suggestion would be to make minor changes to the airboat's model. It just doesn't make sense when you try to jump on the side platforms, only to be blocked off by the clipping.
I found the enemies weirdly tanky on normal difficulty (?) but I guess that's fine.
The shotgun was a complete let-down in terms of sound design.
The weapon animations are REALLY good, but overall gunplay just isn't satisfying.
Grigori's and Kleiner's VAs do such a great job. The problem with Barney's VA, I feel, is that while he does hit the right inflections, his voice simply isn't right for the job. Other VAs were fine.
Still, all things considered, this is a good attempt at a beta mod and I look forward to its completion while hoping for the necessary improvements to be made.
Hello ! I'd like to talk about a problem I had while playing division 1.2, and I don't know if other players had the same problem as me, at least I hope they'll understand my concern. The problem I want to point out is not a bug or anything like that, it's more a feeling I had while playing.
First of all, I want to underline that I had a lot of fun playing; discovering a new universe while finding familiar elements, it was a nice experience. However (and here we come to the subject I wanted to deal with) I found the game very long. That is to say that the whole introduction side where we sneak into the streets and buildings of City 17 seemed very redundant to me: we walk, we pass in the streets, we enter buildings, etc. Of course, that changes after the Kleiner's lab scene where the game becomes more dynamic and Barney hands us the Holy Crowbar.
I think comparing a mod with the original game is not the best way to criticize it, but it seems unavoidable for what I want to say. In Half-Life 2, we meet Barney after two to three minutes, and we end up in Kleiner's lab after about nine minutes. In RTB:R, we meet Barney after about twelve minutes and we meet Kleiner after twenty minutes. We notice then, if we synchronize the game times, that the meeting with Barney in RTB:R is well after the meeting with Kleiner in Half-Life 2. This problem also persists in the scene in Kleiner's lab, which can be summed up in a very long dialogue between our two friends, at the end of which we put on our HEV suit after having waited for ten minutes doing nothing (whereas the scene in the original game lasted only five poor minutes...).
I know I may sound ridiculous by giving you a lot of times, but please believe me that when you play the game, you'll feel it and it'll get boring. Maybe the developers have the answer to my problem, maybe they want to make our pleasure last, and that can be understood. In any case, I hope I won't feel the same when playing the next divisions. By the way, division 2 looks very promising, I can't wait!
Anyway I thank you for taking the time to read my post, I hope you will be understanding.