Reviews - EmoLevelDesigner

Continuation of Paranoia Half-Life mod which is famous for its very atmospheric and believable level design.

Part two certainly manages to keep up. The aesthetics of Russian underground complex and such original architectural style are present, the atmosphere is done so well - it makes you feel the cold of underground that comes from concrete around you. Lighting makes it better by providing some good colour combinations and beautiful lens flare effects.

The battle system is pretty original and interesting. The enemies are slow and easy to kill, but each hit takes away a lot of health and also makes you drop your weapon. And medkits are very scarce. The animations of enemies are pleasing to watch, the death animations too, which in my opinion looked even better than ragdolls would, so the quality of character animation here is certainly very high.

Closer to the end we'll see cloned soldiers that got out of control. Here's when our armor finally comes in handy. Insta-death from headshot makes shooting very rewarding, and the game forces the player to be calm at all times, because if you start to hold the trigger, you'll shoot often but the spread will be so high - chances of hitting anything will be low.

Rescuing Paulina is a great connection with original mod. Her AI is done very well: she is good at following the player and always stays out of battle.

I also liked the effect of hero's feeling bad, where vision gets blurred and the weapon starts to move around.

I noticed some flaws. If you hold right mouse button, and then press left one, weapon won't shoot. Emergency access card was hidden in decorative pile of papers and looked like one of them, so I only could find it after consulting a video walkthrough.

In the hospital if you look at the windows you'll only see clouds and nothing else. I understand that the engine has limitations, but the authors could make a 3d scene with some buildings and bake it into the skybox...

In the very end we see a city with magnificent architecture that's a lot more enjoyable than underground tunnels and laboratories we spent time in before. It starts to feel that everything up to this point was a prelude to something even greater that's going to start now, but instead, we see credits roll.

So, time to wait for Paranoia 3. Make it, please!