You are Gordon Freeman, a scientist working at a top secret government laboratory. Your team is working on discovering the implications of the Chaos Theory, but so far the results have been inconclusive. However, you have the feeling that today’s experiment may provide answers one way or another… This was originally created by Stuart Maine. His website has been down for awhile however.
During an experiment everything goes wrong yet again and you're teleported to various different levels. There are five maps besides the intro and outro maps, all of them have different gimmicks:
You'll fight a gargantua while searching for weapons, teleport to Xen to defeat six gonarchs, clean an office building from soldiers, have a helicopter battle outside a storage area and finally get through a zombie infested valley. The whole point of the pack is to make you play unrelated maps from the creator, so there is hardly any story. The mapping quality is nothing special, some good brushwork here and there, nothing I would call bad.
Overall, a good enough mappack that can be finished under twenty minutes. However, there have also been much more varied and better crafted packs for HL, compared to them, Chaos Theory falls short. Though, I'm adding one extra point to my score because of the release date. For 1999 this has better looking maps than many of the competitors.
A really short mod that felt more like a mappack because each level feels completely diffrent and there is no story really...
it jumps from challenging to easy to hard. the level design isn't bad.
Chaos Theory is from a simpler time, and should be judged as so. Doing otherwise is quite frankly, unfair.
The mapping was certainly eye-catching for the time (A nice change from generic kill-boxes) and the pacing and combat was well done and balanced, if not odd in some areas.
Give this a try if you are dying for some old-school fun :)