Recent reviews by Quesamo

"It's not my type of game" I said. Then I played it.

This game will suck you up and squeeze you for all the life you have, and it's amazing. I will never forget my first major period of being obsessed with this game, literally seeing conveyor belts when i closed my eyes.

In all seriousness, this is a very good game. You'll particularly enjoy it if you're into any kind of programming or engineering, but that's not required at all. Just remember to sleep sometimes.

Very fun F2P game with a lot of mechanical depth. Recommended for casual and competitive players alike

This game is pretty much Distraction Simulator 2011. You decide to do one of the countless things it has to offer, then suddenly see another thing to do that you do instead, and so on.

It's one of the best fantasy worlds ever created in a game, combined with a lot of great mechanics for stuff like leveling up and increasing your skills (looking at you, oblivion). It's an incredibly fun roleplaying experience, and has the gameplay and scenery to back it up. This is a game that sucks you in, and won't let go.

A true classic of a game, even 7 years after its initial release. Highly recommended, especially if you're looking for something you can keep coming back to. lov u todd

This is a very short but sweet mod.

It's only 2 maps long, but it really feels like something valve could have made. The combat scenarios are very well done, and showcase the combine AI better than a lot of actual HL2 maps do. The path you have to take is always clear, but at the same time, the puzzles do make you think a bit. It's also a very good looking mod. The lighting makes it very atmospheric, whether it's a lush summer day, or an underground facility.

The difficulty is perfectly tuned, i played through the entire thing on hard mode and felt challenged without it ever becoming too hard.

Not much about this mod stands out that much, but my impression as a whole, was very good.

If you like HL2 and the episodes and want more, this is for you. Papa bless whoever made this

7/10

Doesn't change anything from the original HL2EP2, it's just another 2 maps or so. But i've gotta say, it was really fun. More of the good stuff, absolutely. Level design was a bit confusing at times, but it still worked. Interesting environmental challenges. There's not much more to say here, except that it's way too short and the ending is anticlimactic and awful. Hence the "not optimal" rating. Still recommended if you liked episode 2!

I'd give it a 5 or 6/10.

The gunplay from HL2 has been changed a lot, guns now have different sounds and more recoil. The sounds are mostly pretty good, and combined with the time to kill (as i'll touch on later), makes them all feel fairly satisfying to use. The recoil
forces you to fire in short, controlled bursts, which is a welcome change when you remember how spray-y HL2's gameplay was. Sadly, the game doesn't give you any particularly interesting weapons, with the exception of a deployable manhack. When i saw the button for the gravity gun was bound in the game settings, i got excited and thought you'd get it at some point during the game (however that would work with the plot), but no, you're not given it. And it just feels weird not having it in a HL2 game.
The usefullness of the weapons vary much more than in HL2, too. The melee, a stun baton, is almost never used, as you usually have enough ammo to kill a small army. The AR2 from HL2 has been changed drastically, and is now OP as hell. Clip size and damage have both been increased, and it quickly invalidates the SMG and 9mm pistol. The only times you get to use either, is when the AR2 is out of ammo, which is very rare for the most part, as they straight up shower you in the stuff.

The game also uses a very different difficulty model than the HL2 games. In HL2 and the episodes, there were a lot of tanky enemies. Hunters, striders, venom headcrab zombies, and even regular overwatch soldiers to some extent, all required a lot of ammo to take out. They also did a moderate amount of damage to you. In this game, most of the enemies can be taken out in just one or two bursts with the SMG or AR2. The difficulty instead comes from the enemies doing a lot of damage to you, forcing you to shoot before you get shot, and rely on cover and mobility, rather than just running at the enemy while holding M1 and aiming at their heads as best you can. I played through the entire game on hard mode, and I found the combat sufficiently challenging without ever feeling like there was a part that was straight up impossible. Even parts like the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ turret section (which i'll talk about later), didn't feel like they were impossible to get through. All it took was several tries, and a lot of persistence.
But there's one major issue with the combat in the first part of the game that is just complete ass. If you look at the metrocop model from HL2, it's full of white to make it stand out so you know what to shoot. Same thing with combine soldiers, except it's glowing eyes. The rebels have nothing like this, their textures are mostly dark and with few features that make them stand out from the environment. This means they are very hard to spot in the tons of dark areas the game throws at you. Too often did i walk around a corner only to get gunnned down by a rebel hiding in the dark, instantly shooting me in the face without giving me any chance to react.
Speaking of dark areas, there are a lot of them. They carried over the flashlight mechanics from episode 2, but i think it now charges faster when not used. The only problem is that they changed its actual function, abandoning the plain flashlight of the core HL games for a night vision mode similar to the one in OpFor. Only problem is, it makes everything grainy and ♥♥♥♥, ruining the graphical quality of the game. I wouldn't have had such a problem with this if there weren't this many dark areas. You'll be forced to make your game look like ♥♥♥♥ for the majority of it, simply because of the bad lighing. This really takes away from the general experience of the game, which would otherwise be significantly smoother.

The level design feels vastly different from HL2, partially because it seems a lot more amateur-ish. Things just seemed slapped around at random, sometimes. But it's still good, in my opinion, though a little too open in parts where there was loads of combat. There are of course puzzles, too, as in any HL game. This is one of my major quarrels with this game, the puzzles weren't really fun. I felt as though the puzzles mostly fell into two groups: the "♥♥♥♥ you and your time, run around here for a bit until you get bored and look up a walkthrough because searching for a very specific object in a big area with no hints isn't fun" group and the "here is the exact solution to the puzzle" group. There's rarely any golden middle ground like in the original games.
There are also parts that just makes you say "WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥ WAS BREADMAN SMOKING WHEN HE MADE THIS?", such as the previously mentioned turret section. It's not fun, it's just poorly designed and much harder than it should be. Though it is very satisfying at the end of the chapter when you push a button and turn all the turrets over on your side.

Now for the story: what
It's never really explained fully, all you're given is small, incoherent tidbits of information, none of which ties together. Nothing makes sense.
Your character talks, which isn't actually as bad as it may sound, as it's mainly used to deliver Duke Nukem style lines during combat, which just makes him badass, and establishes that he's a massive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who enjoys being in civil protection. This all makes him kinda likeable, and the game actually does a good job of doing what people expected OpFor to do in the sense that here you actually are the bad guy. You raid rebel outposts and visit combine centres like you live there. But you don't, cause there's a plague or something that makes people into zombies or whatever. It's not really explained either. Either way, it sounds a bit like a fanfiction or something, à The Adventures of John Freeman.

CONCLUSION

This mod is pretty good, if you look away from all the minor, yet obvious flaws it has. It's short but sweet, and does what it promises to. I would absolutely recommend you atleast give it a try, because it's fun, original, and generally fairly cool. And hey, it's free, why not download it?

This is a must play for anyone with a pc. I think my playtime speaks for itself when I say this game only gets better the more you play it

If the other reviews didn't sell you: please buy this.

Though short, this game masterfully tells an amazing story. The gameplay is solid and varied, and the plasmids/vigors are fun and satisfying to use. They could have been better implemented into the gameplay like in BioShock, but come on, it's Bioshock Infinite. There's nothing real to complain about.

You play as a bunch of mutants blasting your way through mean mutants. 10/10.