Originally published on my HLTB profile.
Originally written and published on July 28th, 2025.
First and foremost, in case you want to play this for some reason, I think a SEIZURE WARNING would be a reasonable thing to advise!
This Half-Life mod is apparently the creator's first creation, and it shows. I appreciate they were able to create something, but this isn't it. The first part is composed of recreating what's essentially the actual beginning of the original Half-Life, except in a much, much quicker pace and in a smaller location. What ensues is the second part, which is a dream, or rather a nightmare, sequence, which is just not good. Finally, the last part after the dream is just a pretty short escape, after which you get an ending cutscene and that's it.The whole story, despite being rather short, simple and iterative to the original game, manages to sneak in an exposition dump and a bunch of useless text-boxes. I feel like these text-boxes should ideally just not be there at all. I understand that just because it's a Half-Life mod, it doesn't need to follow its entire design philosophy to a T, but do you really need text-boxes to say that the door is locked, when I clearly see that it doesn't open? It is a small thing to complain about, but I still couldn't help it.
Let me say something about the nightmare sequence. It doesn't feel like there is any reason for it to exist rather than to pad out the playtime of this 1.5 hour long mod. The worst part for me were the awful high-contrast, nauseating textures, though. So, even in the first part, there is a lot of amateurish recoloring and simple texture edits, which is fine I suppose, but in the dream part, this is turned up to eleven. Every enemy is reskinned to have simple, flat, bright, ugly and almost eye-hurting textures. The environments are not great, and regarding their colors or art style, it's a similar story to the enemies. High contracts everywhere. In fact, it starts out with a sequence, which I think could genuinely make some people have a seizure. It definitely did hurt my eyes. In fact, it reminded me of Cruelty Squad. I suppose I can at least appreciate the attempt to create the candy-land aesthetic in one part of the dream.
As a whole mod, it's not that good. The only original part is bad, the rest is imitative of the main game, and even the training mission is very basic and is riddled with small game design issues. Seriously, why did there have to be a dark blue, barely translucent marker for the end of the maze, that obstructs your view of the enemies in the fort in such a way that the only way to get them, is to stand out in the open, barely being able to shoot at such high angle, like you're trying to get killed? The bit of "humor" that's there is mostly profanity, dumb sound effects and sexual references, but seeing the author was apparently only 15 when he made this... well, it explains enough. If something, then at least the level design in the first and last part of the mod was decent enough for being a first-time project, I think.
I appreciate the effort and I certainly wouldn't want some stuff I made for free, in my free time as a teenager, to get criticized. It's not like I didn't have any fun, and the content from his cancelled mod, that is shown as a reward for completing the training, looked pretty interesting. However, to put it simply, the best part of this mod is still that the core experience is good old Half-Life.
Overall rating: 25%
Playtime: 1h 47m
Played on PC.
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