sharktamer

Just finished playing Get a life, a Half life 2 total conversion. Another mod I'd heard great things about...and another one I've been left disapointed with.

It starts off pretty strongly. The story is good from the beginning, different from the many "you are a nameless rebel" or "you are Gordon Freeman" mods. The action is broken up by interesting cut scenes, which progress the story as well as explaining the additional mechanics in the mod. It also introduces some nice new elements, including a very interesting health system, where you must heal different parts of your body that are damaged, as well as some nice custom weaponry.

These are really the only good things I can say about this mod. The common grunts are reskinned combine, which keep the combine voices, despite being unmasked. Friendly units have custom voice acting, which is frankly awful. However, these are minor problems which I could have easily dealt with.

It is very buggy, with the AI scripting of the enemies often messing up and different light sources throwing solid blocks of light that prevent the player from seeing anything beyond them. Even the custom health system is extremely tedious to use, if an enemy hits you and causes you to bleed, you will continue to lose health until the bleeding is stopped using a bandage. If you don't have any bandages, you're dead. This means you can be killed by a single bullet.

Once night falls, another shortcoming and very strange design choice will become apparent. For a while, you'll be left without any flashlight, which would be fine if the developers chose to remove it to help with dynamic lighting and a fear factor, except there are no fixed light sources and the most common enemy at this point are black spiders which are impossible to see in the dark or even dim lighting. A flashlight is found later on, but for some reason, the developers thought it would be a good idea to have the flashlight as a separate weapon. This means that you are unable to fire your weapon and light your surroundings at the same time. The flashlight can fire flares, but these do not help with lighting the surroundings at all.

It was at this point, I stopped playing, after a few hours, which was probably only a short way in, since this is meant to be a pretty long mod. I was just unable to continue on. The maps are very hard to navigate, with ladders and gratings always being the way to progress, which blend into the surroundings. The fact they are completely hidden in the darkness really doesn't help either.

In conclusion, this is a very poorly made mod, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone. It's a shame, the story and the custom content were appealing, I was looking forward to playing the rest.