valve > maps folder

open the graphs folder in downloaded ‘maps’ folder and copy the .nrp and .nod files to your:

valve > maps > graphs folder

To run the game start Half Life, open the console and type:

map mark2 – (I used lower case and it worked)

We find ourselves in some snowy mines. Some time will be spent in perplexity, because the door to the right don’t want to open, and door to the left too, and it’s protected by turrets! But soon it will be over when our stare falls on… No, I won’t spoil the fun of solving it by yourself.

And then we are in the server rooms – big rows of servers stand right in the cave. It reminds of similar rooms in Chaos Theory offices: rows of computers, lights which hang in the air… These server rows are a fun battleground. We enter the elevator and “enjoy” z-fighting, and then… Then there will be the same mines, but with more complex layout, and tricky puzzles. The puzzles themselves are not bad, but not here, because they make our stay in this nightmarish place longer. The number of used textures is very low, and many things are textured with the same blue texture. Awful.

After that just walk through the door.

I also had to cheat past the door, it didn’t open for me after getting past scientist 3.

I wouldn’t really call this one full of puzzles, it’s more about finding where you should go next. I suppose those are puzzles too, but figuring where you should go is not a good feature in typical Half-Life mods. The only real puzzles are of the find-the-button variety.

I did like the reactions you get from the speaker system, it gave some life to what was otherwise a set of maps that lacked atmosphere. The architecture is passable but nonsensical, and the texturing is dark and drab and unfortunately probably a relic of the author’s Quake mapping experience.

Skip this unless you’re desperate.

Personally the place where this mod was really poor was the difficulty of action and puzzles. The action was incredibly easy, quite possibly the easiest from the 100SDoN so far, yet the puzzles were hard, for me anyway. Quite honestly there is no point in talking about the action as it was easy and boring. There were many puzzles in this, and three of them took me a good while to figure out. Luckily I didn’t actually need to cheat to get past the puzzle to the next level, but there were many times where I came close. For some reason you kill scientists, this probably should have been explained within the game although it didn’t affect me because I already knew what I was meant to be doing.

This isn’t too fun, but if you like tough puzzles then it’s worth a try.

It looked as though it had largely been made with Lego bricks. It was dark but not in a good way. The gameplay/combat was sporadic. The puzzles, such as they were, were far from taxing. By the way did I mention this was BORING?

OK to be fair, this is another one where the author had some good ideas but not the knowledge to put them to best use.

One last thing in the download there was no assassinsmark2 folder, I had to put the maps and graphs into the correct folders and start it by typing ‘map mark2’ to play it.

The textures and design were a little depressing and the whole thing never got me excited.

Perhaps it was the colours and feel.

Anyway, definitely not the worst release this week but neither is it one of the best.

Review:
This is one of the three releases that Stuart Maine did for Half-life (he has made several maps for Quake1 including Assassin 1 ) After improving himself through mapping for Quake, Stuart skipped (moved) to Half-Life… with success.
Stuart has really his own mapping style with a different approach (does something different than others). In Assassin mark 2 you play the role of an … guess what? and your mission is to eliminate 5 scientists who have the power to destroy the Earth. The whole mission happens in an atmospheric base (green-black wall texture, concrete structure and snow). This 4-map pack features a well balanced gameplay between fights and puzzles (sometimes tricky). Surrounding atmosphere enhanced this pack especially when the music from the original game starts, it’s never too hard and it’s gonna keep your interest for less than 1 hour.
Worth downloading especially if you got bored of the classic HL pack.

Note: The first Assassin release is worth to play so if you never try it on Quake 1, it’s never to late especially if you like Challenging gameplay.