Reviews - Half-Life: The Infected mod for Half-Life

The release of Half-Life: The Infected came as quite a pleasant surprise when popped up out of nowhere. After I first started following the mod a number of years ago, it was one of those projects that slipped my flew under my radar after it went quiet.

Having said that, looking back over the media when the release date was announced, I was excited.

Having now completed the mod after a couple of play sessions, I can say that it was certainly a solid experience and was very challenging throughout, with just a few frustrating issues that soured the experience at times.

The first impression was great, with a pre-disaster section to explore as we have come to expect in Half-Life mods. There was also some nice voice acting given to minor characters throughout the mod, even if the players goal at seemed a little vague at points.

Once the action kicks off, the mod is extremely tight-fisted with it's ammo supply. Playing on hard, I found myself down to the last handful of pistol rounds, but to Neclipse's credit, I never actually ran out. I was a little too well stocked for health and armour though, often tripping over surplus medkits that I didn't need, so I never actually felt as though I was in grave danger.

At the halfway point, the balance swings in the opposite direction, ramping up combat encounters and loading the player down with endless supplies of heavy hitting weapons and plenty of ammo. However, it then starts holding back on health and armour. This lead to several occasions where I had all the ammo I needed to take down the enemies, but was only one or two hits away from death and this started to feel a little frustrating.

Towards the end of the mod however, things levelled out and I found myself with a decent supply of weapons and meds going into the arena style battles and the finale area.

Sadly, the ending is one of the sections that felt underwhelming, along with another portion that is usually spectacular, the disaster itself. The sudden simple fade to black in the beginning coupled with the abrupt ending mean that, despite the foreboding start and intense late game sections, The Infected is ever so slightly unsatisfying as a whole.

There are also some inconsistencies with the gameplay, such as having breakable crates and vent covers that are identical in appearing to those that are NOT breakable.

Overall, Half-Life: The Infected is worth playing. It fits in quite neatly into the overall plot of the original game and has a decent pace with plenty of challenge. With some more play-testing and a few adjustments for the sake of consistency and player guidance it could easily net a higher score.

Nice collection of vanilla-styled maps and somewhat challenging gameplay. Only downsides were the rather abrupt ending, lack of a coherent story and no soundtrack at all apart from the odd music choice during the credits. Otherwise a good mod well worth checking out.

With "The Infected" we're finally getting it's long awaited release. The release of a mod that's been under development - off and on for over 12 years. And let me tell you: The long wait certainly pays off.

The maps are wonderfully designed in every aspect and there are plenty things to look at, not surprising really due to a total amount of 28 maps to go on.

The mod is fairly well balanced and offers easily a playtime around two and half hours.

If I had a complaint about it then only that we barely get to encounter any HECU grunts which is odd as this seems to be playing during the early hours of the resonance cascade. But the quality of the maps and the well thought out puzzles easily compensate for that minor disturbance.

I'm glad that this mod has finally seen daylight and can gladly recommend it to every true Half-Life fan out there. Go and play it people!

Pro:

- Custom voices.
- Neat scripted npc sequences.
- Long play time.
- brilliant level design.

Contra:

- Black Ops en mass instead of HECU.
- Sometimes little barren regarding audio diversity and npc encounters.
- An ending that's rather abrupt out of the blue.

All in all a solid mod experience.

Really long and developped half life mod. You can see how much time, work and effort was invested into this mod. I highly recommend any fan of half life mods to play this one !

The Infected is a surprisingly ambitious mod that aims to capture the atmosphere of Opposing Force, but with a more survival oriented twist. And it does a fantastic job at that. Resources are few and far between, with the player being encouraged to outrun enemies and make each bullet count. There are dozens of foreboding moments, as well as interesting ideas, but ultimately the entire experience begins to gradually crumble under the weight of its own ambition. The overall design of the levels feels very maze-like, often being unclear where you are supposed to go and with little explanation to what you are doing. Another downside to this is an inconsistency with highlighting to the player what he can interact with and then keeping up with that visual language. As for the combat, that also leaves very little to be desired, with some encounters feeling very cheesy or simply unimaginative. But for those that want to be engrossed in the atmosphere of a more horror oriented Black Mesa, I would definitely recommend this mod.

This mod feels like you're playing vanilla Half-Life with Opposing Force slapped into it. Very challenging and fun gameplay albeit with an abrupt ending.

Generally good stuff. A couple of infuriating sections and I did get lost once. On the whole though it was very well constructed and enjoyable! :)

The Infected (I'm not sure why it's called that) by Neclipse is one of the most beautiful Half-life mods centered around Black Mesa that I have ever seen, it's up there with some others such as Focalpoint by Dimitri Vujicic or the artful Rainfall by Lady Jane Thrace, every location in The Infected feels like a real place, it's like Neclipse created their own vision of Black Mesa and then just let us play a campaign of Opposing Force in it. Neclipse portrays Black Mesa as an intricate and complex installation, I found myself wondering what was the function of each of these places I was visiting, because they all seemed to serve some function, like they were part of some design, instead of being fancy boxes connected together by L shaped corridors, I kinda want to go back and play this mod again with the notarget cheat on so that I can take in as much as possible from Neclipse's Black Mesa, I feel like that would still be fun, the environments are *that* interesting to me.

The overall balance of the gameplay, as UrbaNebula pointed out, had us scrounging for ammo, I never quite ran out (in Half-life you'll always have some bullets in your trusty MP5), but there were a couple instances where I found myself urgently reloading my Desert Eagle with a magazine I had *just found*, so that I could shoot at approaching enemies. On that note, I do like how Neclipse provided us with Desert Eagles as a source of magnum ammo, once I had found the revolver, I felt that I probably would ditch the Deagle, since the revolver does more damage and can finish enemies that the Deagle can't, but since I was always getting a new Deagle, it would sometimes conveniently refill the gun in my inventory, so it was still a reliable back up weapon to my revolver.

I do have a few criticisms regarding the visual language of the mod, you see, whenever I see crates in Half-life, this is what my brain tells me: I.imgur.com

It's a nonsensical reasoning, but that's what goes through my mind, unfortunately The Infected is really inconsistent about which boxes you can break and which ones you can't, sometimes you can break tarp crates, sometimes you can't, and that made my brain go insane ("noo, you're breaking the rules!").

There was one instance early on where we're supposed to interact with one of these panels to open a door, but then, after that, most of them are just decoration, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that: I.imgur.com
I kind of ended up just trying to open every door, unsure if I understood where Neclipse would have liked me to go.

I did understand what Neclipse wanted me to do about this one, at least: I.imgur.com

I was also unsure if I could break this: I.imgur.com
I figured I had to do something with it because I had never seen anything like it in Hal-life, eventually I just tried to break it and it worked, but I can't take credit for figuring that one out, I'm not quite sure how to make it more obvious.

I also felt that the end was very sudden, I'm actually okay with where and how it ended, I just didn't see it coming, I thought I was gonna simply move to some other part of the facility from where I was, not get out of Black Mesa entirely, so I was like "oh, okay". Maybe if we were led to a parking lot where Backman could get to a car or whatever, I feel like that would be a more solid "hey, you found a way out, congrats!" But I wouldn't blame Neclipse if they don't want to add any more maps, because they just want to move on from this project hahaha.

The Infected is one of the best Opposing Force mods and a very solid trip through Black Mesa, a must play for any Half-life fan.

My favorite part was when you enter this On a Rail area, there's a security booth with a button that says truck control, which opens a blast door just outside, you go there, next blast door is locked, but there's a pool of water to the left, with a hatch you cannot open, and as it turns out, what you have to do is go back to the security booth where you pressed the button, and you have to enter a vent that is there, because all that part after pressing the button was completely pointless.
And the entire mod is like that. Most maps are nice, but they are used in a crappy way. It's a shame.
Black Ops take up all of the human enemies, HECU are only seen dead or far away, and by the time they appear at all, the Black Ops have been fought many times already, which not only creates conflict with the game's storyline, which shouldn't be a case with mods at this point anymore, but it also makes it obvious that since this mod uses Opposing Force as it's base for enemies and weapons, the HECU would've been friendly to the player because of that. Though I am sure that is something that could've been solved in 12 years of development. Same as making fun gameplay.
There is also one part near the beginning where there is so much detail crammed in that the game started lagging whenever I looked in that direction.
There was one really fun part with Shocktroopers where level design allowed me to move around them and sneak up to them from behind, dodge their bullets and all, but the rest is just really standard, to the point of mediocrity, and sometimes really annoying in how deliberately misleading it is.

To start with:

It's solid and very well-polished. The game feels like it's in HL1 and hits the nostalgia vibe it was going after. I definitely enjoyed the environments and the challenge it threw at me, as someone looking for Half-life content.

There are some gaffs with how it handles its new characters, and it ends very abruptly. Also, the difficulty has some pacing issues, sometimes throwing the player into really hard battles with very little warning.

However, overall, despite that, it's a solid "8". It's not perfect, it may not be as memorable as other mods, but it succeeds at what it aims to do.

And that's reason enough to play it.