Recent reviews by Sirap

I was enjoying the game, until it started crashing with the message "ED_Alloc: no free edicts" close to the end. I noticed that a beta had been released on april 19 (four days ago) and reluctantly updated to it. Both unbelievably and unsurprisingly, the developers have not fixed the bug, and instead the game now crashes the instant I try to load my saved game. Now I can't finish the game...

Considering that players have run into this problem as early as 2020, which is *five years ago*, I think it's safe to say that you will get no help from the developers. The only conclusion is that I can't in earnest recommend you to buy a broken game that you can't play through -- if you want to play through the entirety of Half-Life then you can't do it here. I don't usually play modern games but I had thought that the general iterative development, improvement, and distribution process had improved beyond this old, sad state. Alas, Steam's "always online" and "forced updates" culture truly is only in service of DRM, then?

I enjoyed the whole campaign taking place inside Black Mesa, and it's a long game so that's plenty. The soundtrack does an excellent job in making key battles memorable (and available on Spotify, apparently). That said, here are the aspects of the game I was not impressed by and did not like one bit:

- The menu system is utterly awful and hasn't been touched by a proper interaction designer. Binding keys is a nightmare and takes 10x longer than it should have to.
- Spoilers for new players in the chapter picker
- Quickload is next to quicksave in the default key bindings (!) Seriously...
- Menu sounds can glitch and repeat indefinitely
- The time period inside Black Mesa isn't entirely captured. It's an odd mix of CRT-era PC cases mixed with blue LED displays on scientific equipment. What year is this game taking place?
- I get stuck in doors, in corners, after plugging in plugs into sockets...
- Crossbow bolts still get stuck in the middle of air near walls, so you still can't trust your eyes in firefights. Rule of thumb: If you can see an enemy but they aren't reacting, there's probably an invisible wall inbetween.
- Ladders are still a chore and will cause your death. Especially when you have to battle a f-in' TANK while climbing them. It just CAN'T be that difficult to ensure that "whenever forwards means UP, backwards means DOWN", but nooo....
- Enemies have superhuman vision and superhuman aim at any distance.
- Critical NPCs commit suicide (this is so old)
- The Xen chapter looks pretty but doesn't make much sense, with intricate puzzles shoehorned into an apparent wilderness.
- Invisible f-ing walls in Xen; they give you a jump pack, but instead of designing the level so that it doesn't invite you to jump they just lazily install an invisible wall in the middle of a chasm. I run for my life, make a jump, hit a glass wall and fall to my death instead of reaching the other side. Punishing the player for making quick and proper decisions is not a good look in any fast-paced reaction-critical action shooter, let alone while the player is being chased by something that will kill them in two hits.
- They changed the sound effects for the Snarks.

On a positive note I like what they've done with the Tau cannon and the Gluon gun. In the original they were quite noisy, and not in an enjoyable way. The crossbow change is also a good decision, the jump pack is easier to use, the flashlight doesn't run out of battery, and suit-zoom is just a nice detail.
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I have since worked around the bug and finished the game, and will give it a thumbs up when it's clear that players won't have to exit the game (ok, to be fair, the game does that for you), fire up a web browser, search for an error message, enable the dev console, enter commands and hope for the best.

I've bought the game, I've opened steam in offline mode, I've clearly selected single player in the game, and it refuses to start with a bad excuse for an error message about some arbitrary steam verification. Oh thank you, just throwing me back to the main menu without a decent explanation certainly helps solve the problem! 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️

Well, I'm tired of being treated like ♥♥♥♥ by certain game developers, so f the game and the developers I guess, since they insist on showing their middle fingers to me whenever I want to actually play any of their games without an internet connection. It's more enjoyable to clean my home than to deal with this sad excuse of an offline mode. ...Assuming that's the problem, which they of course can't be bothered to say.

It would be a great game if it weren't inextricably linked to the garbage that is the steam client, which does everything in its power to prevent you from playing your purchased games. Since they cannot be separated, they are one and the same. The client will constantly fail to go to offline mode, refusing you to play without internet as well. What a great experience. The client is so bad that when you ask valve for support you get deferred to github, where they can't even be bothered to put up proper system requirements for, oh, several years until they're nagged about it. It would be hilarious, if I hadn't paid anything.

It also doesn't sync games between machines properly making it about as convenient as mozillas implementation of tab syncing in firefox. You can play for hours and not a single savegame is there waiting for you on any of your other machines. That's great until you want features you can actually rely upon.

The original is better. There's no real benefit from using the source engine here. Sure, a few higher poly models for NPCs and weapons, but the environments are the same.

The downsides to this version of the game are many:

Game breaking bugs:
- You can't even start playing the game before you get stuck. The second security guard that's supposed to let you though an airlock just stares straight into space and does nothing. It's not until you start debuggig the game in your mind that you might realize that perhaps the default running speed is too high and that a scripted event fails to trigger because of sloppy tolerances in the code. But I don't want to play a game developer simulator, I want to play Half-Life...
Annoying bugs:
- If you bump into a security guard he starts moaning and never stops.
- The shotgun basically makes no sound at all. Bubble wrap makes more noise. It feels as though you're shooting water balloons through the barrel.
- You know the deafening clang the crowbar makes when hitting metal? It now does that sound for practically every material, including wooden boxes. I think glass and enemies are the only exceptions. Super annoying.
- The movement seems to have more inertia than the original game. It's Half-Life on ice. You'll needlessly fall to your death numerous times because of it.
- The hand grenades look miniscule and out of place on your screen when you're wielding them.

I stopped playing, because the shotgun is supposed to be loud. I think I'll just start over with the original instead which is much more enjoyable.