The Xen Campaigns mod for Half-Life: Opposing Force

I played this baby just now, and boy was it tough. While I love mods with a challenge, there are a few things that don’t sit right with me. First off while the environments are never empty, they are all to big. You literally do not get to see a small area apart from one small base located on the alien planet, and it was just one hallway, you also go down into a area with more hallways with a moderate amount of space to move around in. While I actually like times where we get to fight in open space to maneuver effectively (especially important here) there isn’t enough variety in the environments. While to be fair it set in Xen and its never easy to make them interesting, it just felt very bland how the enemies where set up, just alot of them, some on high areas with no way to get up there ect, it feels very bland how these environments are set up.
It makes the game feel more linear… eventhough hl mods are linear, the trick is not to make them feel linear by giving the illusion of a greater scope and a sense of progression.
Here we go through the areas than we go into our space craft & fly to another without any real reasoning, the briefing could have done alot more to tell us where we are going and why…

The amount of weapons and ammo we get is decent though at times health can be scarce, especially batteries. Overall I had a tough time with the many shock troopers you take on.
The game just needed more ideas and more variety in level design, it was moderate in length of about ~30.

6/10