Heath Games' Second installment of the Horror Mod series, "Half-Rats". Taking place in July of 1883. Soundtrack courtesy of Ague. Beware, this mod is pretty much NOTHING like Half-Life.
9/10 - - 9 agree (9) - 1 disagree (1)
Awesome mod, quite a few improvements and additions over the previous 'Half-Rats: A Fever Dream'
The story is pretty interesting and the maps feel a lot less linear compared to the last mod. It even has a cool little tutorial which is pretty helpful and not many mods do that. It really is one of a kind and the most work I've seen put into a Half-Life mod in the past couple years.
The enemies were pretty well designed and were indeed very difficult especially if you're standing still. It was quite a fight even on normal difficulty. The only problem with the enemies is that their idle sounds were really loud and sometimes made it hard to hear the character dialogue.
Around the beginning of the mod I wasn't doing that well and there were not as many items lying around as I would have liked, I had way too much ammo and not enough health. Later on there are items galore however and more than enough to survive.
The weapon alt fire modes were pretty cool as well, that's pretty rarely done in Half-Life mods, only problem with them is they were a bit glitchy like they kept popping in and out like an overlapping texture or something, also sometimes the shotgun's alt fire didn't work. Aside from that they were pretty good and headshots do seem to matter.
A big feature in this mod is the ability to purchase items and have them in your inventory to use at any time rather than pickups that are used immediately. This is pretty useful because you are able to manage your health much easier. You have to go around picking up cash to buy stuff though but that's fine, usually you find enough money to buy what you need. There was a glitch where I bought a cocaine lozenge or something and it charged me like $500 instead of $150 or whatever it costs. That was the only real problem with that system as aside from that it worked pretty damn well I must say.
The bosses were really fun, unique, well designed and quite a good challenge aside from being a bit trial and errory. There are some parts of the game where you'll get stuck and have no idea what to do so I think some of the puzzly things should be more obvious however most of the time as long as you listen to the character dialogue you'll know where you need to be.
The lantern is a big issue in the earlier parts of the game because its so dark even with brightness and gamma all the way up so you absolutely need it. Only problem is it runs out so fast and there isn't enough oil around. The later parts of the game aren't as dark though so you won't worry about that as much but it is quite annoying at the start.
The only other issue with the game I really found is invisible props and I'd say where they were but that would probably be a spoiler so I'll leave that out. Overall this is an absolutely great mod, has some issues and bugs but I'm sure they will be fixed and it's very well done and detailed for a half-life mod and I'm glad people are continuing to make great goldsrc mods.