In 1989, Roger's Hotel had already trouble with drug dealers and users, but it got whole lot worse when inhabitants abandon their rooms with stacking reports of terror inducing sightings, soon after Swat team was sent but never came back.
Great at building atmosphere and tension with sound and enviroment. Unfortunately the overpowered monsters (Blood Crawler and Rot to a lesser extend) made me stop playing after the 2nd level.
I think they are too fast, and deal damage too quickly as if someone coded them to attack every single tick. They destroy the carefully build atmosphere and incentivise savescumming. I understand wanting to make them dangerous but this is too much and there are different ways of doing that
i loved it
Good atmosphere and... fine gameplay (dude, I think you overtuned bloodcrawlers a little bit)
But the reason im rating this so low is that the game currently has an unfixed bug that makes you unable to progress past level 1 without cheating. At first I Thought I was the only one, but looking through the comments it seems that many people encountered the same issue.
Until this bug is patched Ill have to rate this much lower than it really is.
blood crawler dude is funni
This review is for HLC 4.6, on normal difficulty.
First thing's first, this mod is not Doom but a classic style survival horror. As such, you're not an nigh-immortal Doomguy but a guy in a hazmat suit and everything can and will quickly kill you. So, no run and gun deal here.
The game's premise sees you infiltrating a hotel building and locate a group of SWAT team that was sent in earlier and disappeared without a trace. Since this game is set in the infamous Backrooms internet mythos, you can guess what happened. Most peoples that went in got noclipped through reality and into the alternate dimension called The Backrooms, while some otherworldly lifeforms from over there got noclipped to ours. Hell broke loose and we're left cleaning up the post-apocalyptic scene.
Healing items such as pain killer, Snicker bar, Pepsi and Cocaine can be picked up and use later, providing a much needed flexible strategy. Unfortunately for some reason, only one of each healing items will be carry over to the next level no matter how many you have.
For weapons you have a rather mundane set of arsenal with typical reload system found in most shooter, no magdrop or anything fancy. A more fancy list of secret weapons and weapon upgrade (one that I know of) can be aptly found inside many secret rooms.
Monsters can be separate into three tiers: the lower tier fodders in which you can dispatches them in melee with ease. And the high tier enemies which are unreasonably tough, fast enough to be a jumpscare of its own and can one-shot or two-shot you regardless of your health and armor. Every encounter with these pure evil can be considered a miniboss battle. There's also enemies with firearms which is something of a tier of their own, in that they're highly accurate, hits realistically hard and can take as much hit as it can deal. Not to mentioned the stronger variant of these guys will actively strafe away from your reticle, making every firefight with them very intense.
Atmosphere-wise, this mod is phenomenal in crafting some of the most nerve-wrecking setpieces ever. You will travel through a hotel floor and a messy alternate version of it, an absurdly large indoor pool, a dark hell of rust and blood that immediately brings Silent Hill to mind and a very interesting take on the deepest level of the Darkroom: a dark valley suspended above the abyss where various massive otherworldly entities are floating and stomping around, minding their own business. A combination of labyrinthine hallways, aggressive droning ambients, fast moving creatures and occasional break into big fights make this mod an extremely intense experience from start to finish. There's nothing bad to say about the map design except for a rather box-y, jumbled and inorganic map design which seems to be intentional, making it in line with the actual Backrooms aesthetic.
However this mod is not without its flaws though and there's quite a number of them:
-Very high difficulty, even on normal. And like I said above, HP and Armor are useless in this game.
-The mod can be very taxing to play. The constant droning noise can put the player on edge all the time and can become extremely annoying, even if it stays true to what is described in the Backrooms. Unfortunately, the intensity is going to get worse the further you go into the mod. The Silent Hill level in particular genuinely makes me want to puke in a bad way due to how disorient combined with how dark it is.
-Monsters can get unfair. Not just from the monsters themselves but the map also actively working against you. Throughout the map, there are many holes that connect two hallways together that only the monster can use, ensuring that fast enemies will always be few steps behind you no matter where you run. "sleeping" enemies can also hear your gunshot through these holes and trigger their chase before you even know it.
-Unintuitive weapon hotkey placement is the biggest issue I have about gameplay. For example, a lighter "weapon" which gives you a much needed respite in the darkness are bind together with the knife (key 1) and require two presses in order to pull it out, instead of having a flashlight key of its own. While for some reason, The Fire Axe which is a more powerful melee weapon, is bind to the pistol slot (key 2). Another mildly infuriate example would be the secret Supershotgun that, instead of sharing slot with the Shotgun like it usually did, got relegated to the "big gun" key instead.
All in all, this mod would've been a perfect horror mod, if not for the glaring flaws outweigh the goods by just a slight margin. So I'll give this a 7/10