I just finished this game last night and…WOW, what an amazing feat! And it was free!
Its been over 5 years since I played the first Half-Life so I had the pleasure of experiencing much of this with fresh eyes (though I did just replay Half-Life 2 about a year ago so the controls were still familiar). I still remembered bits and pieces from the original, like that cliff helicopter battle, or that stupid bomb room, but playing this was pretty much a brand new experience. Even though its technically a remake, it really reinforces the strength of the original’s storytelling.
I liked pretty much all of the changes they made to the game. Don’t get me wrong, I had little problems with the original, but a fresh coat of paint wasn’t what I was expecting or hoping for. I’m glad some things got changed, some tweaked, and some stayed the same. Most of all, exploring familiar corridors updated to modern graphics was nostalgically fun, and then having that branch off to brand new layouts (or maybe I just forgot the old layouts) was great too. Basically, everything was great, I am very very happy with the results and commend those who put their time and effort into doing this for free. If they aren’t in the industry right now, Valve or somebody better hire them soon!
I echo MostlyClueless about the subtle static change when you’re near radioactivity. It was small, but it really gets the idea across. I also loved how I don’t have to turn off the flashlight all the time now because the batteries are unlimited. That bugged the hell out of me in the original and I’m glad that the annoying limitation isn’t there anymore. I do have to disagree with Jragon, I think you can shoot while sprinting, I know because I always set my FPS games to “Always Sprint” if the option is there. I think its probably a keylocking thing where if you’re pressing too many buttons at once, the last one pressed won’t go off. For example, I’ve tried to crouch, move, and shoot but can’t, but if I’m naturally crouching as in a small space, I can move and shoot just fine because I’m not holding down the crouch button.
I missed that Xen wasn’t in it, I was all set to do some long jumping and wondered how the alien world would look like. I’m disappointed of course, but glad that it’ll be out sometime this year. While I didn’t especially like the original Xen, I didn’t hate it. It was alien, it was supposed to feel weird and hard to get used to. But I have high expectations of the new Xen, especially near the end, when you get to the Lambda Labs, you see a bit of artificial environment set up and Xen flora glowing like Pandora in Avatar. That would be spectacular, I hope they make everything glowy.
I didn’t have any issues with slowdown at all until the last scene of the game. Only when the lasers were shooting at the teleportation beam, did my framerate drop. Luckily that only lasted a couple of minutes. I found the enemies to be probably a little bit harder than they were in the original. I don’t remember the instant return fires from soldiers, but that may be just my memory. Luckily most of them were armed with the stupid machine gun, which does crap damage at long distance. Many times I found myself using the pistol or the magnum if I wanted to hit something from long distance. To be honest, that kind of machine gun inaccuracy may be real, but I’ve always disliked it. I prefer the Quake version where it does tiny damage but is accurate from across the map. Then again, I also don’t like instant bullets very much in FPS games. I prefer weapons that fire off a projectile that you can see coming and dodge. Too many times, in close corridors in FPS games, especially the more realistic ones, if you run into a soldier in close combat its simply a matter of holding down the fire button and hoping you have more life than he does. I miss the days in Quake 3 when I would be strafe fighting someone in close combat with a projectile weapon and both of us would be jumping and dodging each other’s shots. The instant hit bullets make a few sequences in the game difficult, but there was only one instance where I had to reload from an earlier point in order to move past it (it was the one where soldiers were constantly going to be dropped from a helicopter if you don’t take it out. I just sat there trying to pick off soldiers in the tunnel and hoped they would stop coming).
I hope the next game will come soon. I hated the Nihilanth, but with the improvements in this game, I am expecting that the final battle won’t be such a bitch as before. Maybe less stupid platform jumping and more shooting.