Taking place in the world of the 1993 Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series. Your mission is to infiltrate a highly defended construction facility housing the highly dangerous MK.II Flamer Bot and conduct acts of espionage with a side of sabotage.
The Robotropolis Project is a short Half-Life mod based on the Sonic SatAm cartoon. I discovered it while looking for reference images, and it was pretty cool to experience as an appreciator of the Sonic game franchise.
The game-play is purely stealth-based, so expect to take your time and explore carefully. You play as an unidentified freedom fighter, sneaking into Robotropolis to steal some information about a new robot being worked on. Your mission starts you off in some chilly-looking caverns, which gradually give way to more industrial environments until you emerge right onto the streets of Robotropolis. The game's artists and level designers did a really nice job of capturing the gloomy feel of this dystopian city form the cartoon, and you'll even see Robotnik's familiar egg-shaped main base and get to visit his computer control room as well.
The gameplay can be pretty challenging, as you don't have radar like in Metal gear Solid, and just have to rely on your own judgement as to if any of Robotnik's patrol-bots will spot you or not. Thankfully, since it's running with most of Half-Life's original features intact, you are free to save anytime and anywhere, which helps cut down on frustration.
The sound design is pretty nice and seems to take after Half-Life's own atmospheric style - most of the time you'll just be hearing ambience or an eerie silence, but occasionally there will be orchestral musical cues to add to the tension of sneaking around (or being spotted!). Some Half-Life sounds are clearly reused, but the enemy bots do have nice looking models, and all of their foot steps are loud and metallic to help you know when one is close by.
I did encounter a few bugs running the mod. In one area of the city streets, you can encounter some graphical issues with models/polygons vanishing when you view them from certain angles/distances - but thankfully this didn't affect game-play. At one point when loading the mod, my screen got stuck in a tiny resolution and I had to start shutting down Windows just to get the game to close! To be fair to the mod, this may have been a Half-Life issue and not the mod's own fault. Either way, if you're playing on steam, entering "-full -w 1024 -h 600 -freq 60" into the launch options should fix this.
Overall, I recommend this mod! It's a cool treat for anyone who wishes that Sonic SatAm could have gotten a video game adaption, getting to experience a 3D interactive version of Robotropolis. And if you're not into Sonic, but like Half-Life, it's still worth checking out for it's challenging stealth game-play and unique visual/audio assets. The mod currently ends with a cliffhanger, sadly, and I hope the creators will release a part 2 soon!
i have played the mod till you collect the blueprints then it seems to end? id give this mod a 7 because i had MANY Headaches from the vision and stomach pains playing it
Good Parts:
- the mapping seems to be Top Quality
- fun storyline
- Stealth game
- custom enemy models
- the Hacking part gives it a feel of tactical to the stealth (can you tell me how this is done? consuela#1581 at discord)
Negative Parts:
- the Horrible lightning, its VERY dark and even turning the brightness to 100% i couldnt see **** and had to guess where to do it hurts my eyes dramatically
- theres no medkits, medstations or anything anywhere, so once u aquire a weapon u cant heal when being shot at
- theres just ONE custom weapon wich is a mp5 with a sonic muzzleflash and M4A1 sound surely a bit of custom weapon could not hurt? theres a easy tutorial at TWHL for weapon coding
- no credits file?
- models are partly very basic like the medkit or battery or that rockets coming from a sonic gun?
if any questions pm or Discord consuela#1581
Be still my heart, for we finally get a decent Half-Life mod involving Sonic content. Even better that it is the SatAM universe. Well done!