Recent reviews by Wolfcl0ck

So I was quite a fan of the base game. I know, sue me, but in the very least, unloading the pizzaplex and falling through the world is at least *funny* and messing with the broken AI is fun on its own. If not for performance issues, I'd take 1.0 Security Breach over pretty much any of the first 4 games any day.

But that's the base game. This is Fnaf RUIN. I think the devs, no longer constrained thinly by the requirement for a holiday release and with a much stronger focus from the very beginning in terms of artistic vision, were able to reach a much greater and fuller potential than that of Security Breach. The DLC is actually reasonably scary at times, the gameplay is SIGNIFICANTLY more refined than that of the base game, and, although I have some qualms with the overarching story, I think the story in the DLC on its own is handled quite well.

For me, the DLC was about 5 hours of casual play to complete on the first try but Speedruns within the first few weeks are already below 40 minutes so there's a lot of wiggle room in terms of completion time. I look forward to HW2 and project Carnival.

Easily Game of the Year. Like fast Ed Edd n Eddy with pizza.

Petition for Valve to update the source sdk so we can have the sticky bomb launcher again.

Absolutely excellent. This mod exceeded ALL of my expectations, which were already a lot considering the first game. 100% check out the Entropy Zero games if you haven't already.

Exactly what we were told it would be, PLUS some new beta assets and cut content restoration! Good times, enjoyed using gyro for one of the sections.

So, after about two years of teasing, Security Breach is finally here. How is it?
Let's start with the visual fidelity. The game looks wonderful, even if you're playing it at low quality and without ray tracing. The world is vibrant and colorful and the fidelity of just about everything in the game is great.
Voice acting is excellent. Freddy's commentary is delightful, Vanny is an excellently spooky character, and a particular enemy, the Daycare attendant has a short cutscene that was absolutely fantastic.
Gameplay is exhilarating, but is somewhat bottlenecked by bugs. There were some moments where the bugginess of the game hindered my ability to play. I hid in a corner once, only to find that the wall's collisions didn't extend all the way into said corner, allowing me to go through a wall, then get stuck in an out of bounds area, forcing me to restart from my last save. a particular enemy teleported around his stage frequently, which I assume was intentionally, but it would happen when I could see him, meaning that the teleporting would happen too frequently and would make him impossible to predict. He eventually teleported directly in front of me and killed me. I would frequently lose my flash light by entering and exiting hiding places or a particular "mech" that you can enter.
Therein lies the issue of the game currently: Likely as a mixture of fans asking for a release date over and over again and Sony's deal with Steel Wool for an exclusive PS5 launch, the game is very clearly not finished yet. The Game Over screen is obviously temp art, the optimization pass was not completed, the game opens up past the half-way point in an unexpected way, some levels only work half of the time, animations get stuck and play at the wrong times, and it's over all clear that this game is still a beta release.
Here is the question you have to ask yourself before buying: Do I want to support the developers by buying an unfinished game and help them finish it, or do I want to wait until the game has had enough patches that it's actually complete? I went ahead and bought it and I'm still recommending it in spite of the fact that it's incomplete. The gameplay is still fun and I enjoyed playing it.

TL;DR: Half-Life: Restored is a semi-ambitious project that absolutely makes strides in a good direction. However, with that being said, I cannot possibly recommend it for what it is in its current state.
Half-Life: Restored is to Half-Life what Half-Life 2: Update is to Half-Life 2. This is to say that both projects aim to minimally add new additions to their respective games in order to give them a newer, more modern take. Half-Life: Restored does a number of things right, but tragically contains a number of shortfalls upon which have deteriorated my gameplay of the game to the point that I cannot recommend it for what it is and does.
Pros:
- unused animations have been reimplemented in a number of areas, especially the viewmodels and a number of npcs (the guard blocking the way to the test chamber, the scientist later identified as Eli, etc.)
- Some short levels have been attached to one another in order to reduce loading screens
Neutral:
- some additional weapon changes have been made to reimplement cut weapon abilities (alt mode for the gluon gun has been added, for example)
- The Human Sergeant has been reimplemented
- The launch site rescue has been reimplemented
- the HEV weapon pickup announcements have been reimplemented
- The cut shadow system has been reimplemented, and can be toggled
- The Mr Valve scene has been implemented to appear at the start of new games
- Many textures have been AI upscaled
Cons:
- A doppler effect has been added in, which noticeably does not work as intended. All doors have been effected by this, randomly becoming different pitches, becoming muffled at times, etc.
- The vortigaunt revival system has been reimplemented without a thought about the reason why it was left out of the game, and works at all difficulties: vortigaunts can quickly outnumber the player and either kill them or force them to waste all of their ammo. I personally had emptied all of my 9mm ammo at the first vortigaunt room in office complex, which was well over 100 rounds, just because new vortigaunts kept appearing and reviving all of the others. There is also no option to disable this.
- Some animations have been reimplemented without a thought about why they were removed in the first place. The shotgun shell twirling animation looks incredibly janky.
- The mod page advertises grenade tossing, but at the time of writing, grenade tossing has been removed.
- The ai upscaled textures look particularly weird in many areas. The faces on many models are an excellent example of this. The Security Guards' tags are another excellent example.
- Mouse Acceleration has been forcefully enabled with no way of disabling it, even if it is disabled in the options. Personally, this issue is significant and is a major shutdown for me.
- The new opening level does not play the Valve theme, and it also, as a result of being added in, causes the Black Mesa Inbound theme to not play during the tram ride, either.

In essence, this mod feels right now like it was an attempt to fix everything that said "broken feature" or "cut feature" from Marphy Black's Half-Life Facts series without a thought about how any of these things could affect gameplay. I do not recommend it in its current state, and I highly recommend that the creator spends a significantly longer time working on it, both to give the users more options on what they want to have added into the game, as well as to fix the plethora of bugs that have been introduced.

But ♥♥♥♥, it was 99 cents.

Yeah... don't bother playing it right now. Perhaps when the mod gets an update with a new episode, it could be a little bit better, but it's no good currently. The gunplay is clunky and unexpectable and what's in the mod currently can lead to quick and easy softlocks due to the lack of balance.

Oh sweet Lord is it awful. Not a single good thing to say about it.
Pros: None come to mind.
Cons:
There's no discernible plot.
Half of the assets are stolen from gamebanana (I can even name some, the ff27 gas mask citizen is a prime example.) Sound effects are randomly mixmatched between each other, zombies play barnacle and antlion guard noises and the fast zombie scream is replaced with the stalker scream.
There's a giant floating terminator head boss battle in the middle of the game for no apparent reason.
Several maps are unbeatable without noclip, and at least one other spawns you in the void and hurdles you towards your death.
The entire mod is horribly unoptimized. I have an rtx 2070 and a ryzen 9 3900x and it still lags in several areas due to its atrociously unoptimized levels.
Each map in itself is ridiculously overly scaled for no apparent reason. The levels appear appealing for a few seconds until you realize that the design is fundamentally flawed by the scale and that the bloom is overbearingly hard to look it, it looks worse than a mid 2000s game in terms of how much bloom there is.
Some levels leave you without weapons at complete random. At least one level other than the one where I had to noclip simply to not die required noclip to finish.
The closed captions are in Russian with no option to change them.
Ending "Spoilers": For some reason, the game ends with you launching nuclear ICBMs at what I can only assume is Earth. I honestly cannot tell if you're on Earth or in space by at least half way into the game.
What doesn't help, either, is that the developer attempts to cover up the simple objective fact that this mod is bad by saying in the about section of the download that it is experimental and that players "usually rush along, forgetful of everything, caught in perilous skirmishes and long fights and sometimes not even noticing how deep the meaning of their surroundings is," to which I will respond to by saying that this mod is about as "deep" as a layer of fat and scum on top of a dirty pot of boiling beef stew and is an affront to game design as its own form of art.
All in all, I will give this mod a generous 1 out of 10 simply because the game can launch and has gameplay which, in its heart, is not fundamentally busted simply because it's just Half-Life 2's gameplay but done much worse. Do not download this mod. Save your hard drive the space and look up a playthrough if you want to see it.