Hard 2 - Half-Life

I played it for a short while before quiting. Like the title suggests, its very hard That’s OK and I enjoyed it initially, however then a time limited objective which is unclear happens. And after being in a barrel processing room about 15 times when everything (including me) blows up, I made the wise decision to exit the game….

IMHO, its one of those “games” where the develop er missed the ‘point’ of making it in the first place, and instead said “look at me, I can make a super difficult game and get you mad!”

So if you share the developer’s view in terms of what a game should be, then maybe you want to try it! Otherwise, I suggest you take a pass on this one.

dougjp Said:

And after being in a barrel processing room about 15 times when everything (including me) blows up,

You got to read the textes: you need a code (two numbers in the office behind the picture, then read carefull the new text for the other two numbers: on the pipe…”

So you are in the barell-room en there you enter this code and the door opens again and you can hide between the two doors

Like how the mod starts, let’s begin with the annoyances/irritants at the beginning. This includes, but is not limited to: an absolutely horrendous start (complete with crappy keypad functionality!), early triggers that require you to be at a certain spot (and if not, it’s noclip time), invisible barriers, maps that create draw distance problems, and waiting for NPCs to walk very slowly through a preset path to activate switches, and the ending is pretty meh.

There’s also some bizarre game design, like calling in air support… to blow up a door, and the aircraft that comes isn’t even human (it’s those alien fliers that look like sting rays). Yeah, weird.

Fortunately, and oddly enough, most of it is crammed at the beginning. However, once you get into the bulk of the mod, that’s where the fun starts. But like the name says, this mod is a hard one. So get ready for some extremely conservative playing.

There’s also a really fun little side-area that really stood out from the bland switch-finding majority of the mod. Well, you still have to find buttons/switches, but it’s set in a three-storied building, packed with love rooms, a theatre, and a disco room playing electropop… Very cool.

Oh yeah, not that I play these mods for story or anything, but the storyline from the first Hard is pretty much moot here, and it just gets pretty random at the end.

8/10, would’ve gotten higher, but the design inconsistencies and terrible start bog it down.

Although, I *do* wonder why there’s urinals in the women’s washroom =P

It’s really not that hard. But it’s very long. I would rate this mod somewhere between mediocre and good.
There are some really annoying graphical errors, that you normally only see in beginners’ maps. They occur in the beginning, and somewhere just before the end. There’s an absolutely ridiculous overuse of ninja’s. Some parts are clearly recognizable copies of the original hl1, with a few modifications. e.g. the canyon climbing part. There’s no story at all. There’s no logical progress, you just go from one area, to the other, totally different and unconnected. Fighting and solving puzzles of the door-switch-scientist-keycard kind, mostly. None of them very hard, I didn’t get stuck once. You teleport, from outdoor area to labs to spaceship etc. Every few maps you get a big spider, gargantua or helicopter thrown your way. No challenge their, either. You usually have about 10 AR grenades and 5 rockets, and plenty of room to move around, or a safe position to attack from.
However, in between the boring parts, there are also some good parts. Nice architecture, interesting set-up. Or puzzles that have you looking for a while. This could have been a lot better, if the author had gone for quality instead of quantitiy. And if he’d tied it all together, to make some kind of logical story, or give it some kind of sense of progression. Maybe even at the expense of throwing large parts out. Even though it all works well, and is quite playable, you get the idea that the author just wanted to try out everything he could do with the editor, in totally random order.
You can definitely get bored at some times with this mod, despite a large number of areas that keep you entertained.

can someone put some scrennshots?