Intolerable Threat: Engaged mod for Half-Life

There's two ways to look at this. One is to cover Intolerable Threat, the other is to look at the enhancements made in the Engaged edition.

We'll look at the Engaged enhancements first - they're pretty solid, even if most of the new features aren't all that useful. I never really needed the squad-based enhancements, for example, since you don't tend to have a squad all that often (and when you do, it's not for very long).

Nothing else actively harms the experience - at worst the changes are negligible - but for the most part the new things work pretty well and do enhance the experience. It's just a shame that experience is Intolerable Threat, which... well, it's just not a very good mod.

The mapping is the major issue, since everything is about three times larger than it needs to be and goes on for what feels like absolutely ages. I swear, half my playtime was just running through empty corridors getting to the next oversized room. And those rooms don't really seem to have any sense of logic to them. You'll go from one massive hanger full of storage crates to another... and another... and another, and then you'll be in a random outdoor area for no reason.

There's also a lot of set-piece moments that were clearly thrown in because the authors thought they were neat, and in isolation they might be, but when trying to string them together into a campaign they feel disjointed and random. When you can even figure out how they work, anyway. Don't get me started on the room with the respawning Controllers... took me AGES to figure out there's a wall panel near where the Torch Grunt blew up...

Additionally, there's a few new sounds for the grunts that are taken from Blood 2, the turrets sound like ones from System Shock and when Gordon takes fall damage he says one of Caleb's lines from Blood (specifically, the line "Make the hurting stop..."), which is VERY wrong. These were in the original version of the mod and are maintained here despite feeling REALLY out of place. Not bad per se, just... very, very weird.

Combat is fine, your standard Opposing Force sort of affairs, though the random appearances of Xen creatures AND Race X feels pretty weird, given we're not in Black Mesa any more. The story doesn't help explain this away - hell, there's no reason for the player to actually be Gordon Freeman, it just feels tacked on because... I dunno. Why not?

It's all just a bit amateurish, really... which is odd, because aside from being WAY too big, the levels are generally well made... there's just too many of them and they go on too long. It feels like a case of quantity over quality, which doesn't make for the best experience.

So. In summary: Intolerable Threat isn't very good, and while this Engaged version does add some nice quality-of-life features... I believe the saying is "you can polish a turd all you like, it'll still be a load of crap".

Did you add the sound effects from Blood 2 and System Shock? They're very noticeable (not to mention out of place).