Caltrops - Half-Life II ???





	[quote name="Rafiki"]You can tell this wasn't made by fans of the original because they made Xen 5 hours long. Nobody wanted that, they just wanted Xen to be less trash. They fixed Xen by getting rid of the springboard floating moving platform bullshit jumping puzzles and turning it into proper navigable levels that make regular use of the long jump in non-obnoxious platforming. They also gave it some admittedly impressive visuals, although I think they went a bit too far by making a whole segment into Pandora. They then immediately ruined new Xen by making you run 10 miles while pushing buttons to unlock doors and plug electrical cords into sockets 50 times. While the original Xen levels were some of the worst in history, they had the good grace to be mercifully short. Black Mesa was way too impressed with their artists, so you get an end game that is so long and boring that I uninstalled it before I even got to the Interloper chapter. You know what else nobody wanted? The fucking Gonarch fight to be an hour long. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHKUVdb5YTM">Here</a> is a playthrough of the entire game, Xen starts at <a href="https://youtu.be/KHKUVdb5YTM?t=15902">4:25:00</a> and Gonarch's Lair starts at <a href="https://youtu.be/KHKUVdb5YTM?t=18551">5:09:10</a> Even though the guy knows where to go and what to do, it still takes half an hour. The same arena fight 3 times and endless running through a haunted house "chase" scene, crawling through tunnels and lighting cobwebs on fire. Half-Life was levels that were short and to the point punctuated with dozens of unique set pieces to keep things interesting. The reimagined Xen levels are the worst of modern games with endless sprawl that have the same 3 puzzles repeated ad nauseam, no new set pieces to break up the monotony, nothing but wave after wave of houndeyes, and a damage sponge boss fight. Oh, and remember the tripmine warehouse? You get that 2 more times now. The reworked main game is fine, but I don't know that I'd really recommend it beyond the novelty of seeing what's different. The level layouts remain largely the same with HD textures and more elaborate detail. It looks nice. They generally didn't expand the size (beyond just physically larger rooms and hallways) or complexity of levels, but when they did, I found it made them more confusing. I'd sometimes get lost or disoriented, which never ever happened in the original. It's like every time they tried to add or alter something they just made it worse. The gameplay changes I found throughout were mostly unwelcome. They added some puzzle where you hunt down a valve (GET IT!?) and reconnect it to a pipe and turn it on/off to advance, which they repeat half a dozen times. They added more enemies in places, which is <i>sometimes</i> ok. The worst one is the lobby at the end of Questionable Ethics. In the original, you escort a scientist to a scanner to open a door and nothing happens. In this one, you get to the hallway right before the lobby and a scientist says, hol' up, this seemed way too easy. We're going to stay right here and let you go on and scout ahead, Gordon. <i>OH HO HO HO!</i> What a clever setup to the painfully obvious raid that is about to happen. Sure enough, music blaring, soldiers pour in and the difficulty spikes far in excess of anything up to this point. After dying and reloading 4 or 5 times, I move on to Surface Tension with about 23 health. There's a soldier ambush right in front of the building, so I die because I have no health. I get past that and move on to another ambush on a road, which was ok because it was in the original. Then I round the corner that leads to the dam and, oh hey, another wave of soldiers. Then I get to a compound in front of the dam that wasn't in the original, a gate closes, and I fight more soldiers. Then I climb over top of a truck in front of the gate to finish off the turtling soldiers (I think I'm supposed fire all of my submachine gun ammo and scream RUUUUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA while doing this), and a garage opens up and more soldiers run out. Then I wonder if I accidentally launched Call of Duty instead of Half-Life. Speaking of soldiers, they can nail you from across the fucking Lambda complex and will lob a shipping containers' worth of grenades to flush you out if you try to take cover. Sniping is right out because their accuracy will knock the camera around constantly, so your best option is to just charge at them for close combat. They neutered the heavy alien grunts by changing the bees so that they don't home in on you. Instead, the bees just fly in a straight line and can be easily strafed. I don't know if they couldn't code it correctly or if they just decided they didn't like it, but rather than the grunts being deadly end-game enemies they're completely useless now. The ichthyosaur in the original seemed buggy as hell and couldn't really do much unless you sat perfectly still. In Black Mesa, it has no problem finding a straight line right to you and it will absolutely chunk the living shit out of you. Like, 2 hits and you're dead, and you can't outswim it. You have to bend over backwards to avoid going in the water until the very last pixel of land. Black Mesa is a good contrast between a company that spent a lot of money on playtesting and a volunteer group that didn't.[/quote]