Recent reviews by Dr. Fronkensteen

This is beautiful. Better than some actual full-length games I've played before.

Before focusing on adding interior, there's a lot of clipping and FOV issues that need to be addressed. The FOV seems to be too low, so much so that when I'm moving forward against walls, I can see through the other side with ease. This sort of thing actually isn't that uncommon, but it usually isn't as bad as it is in this game. I'll also find myself going through certain objects and very often my character would shoot upward like a rocket when I touched certain objects, and then fall back down. There's no fall damage so it's not like I'm dying constantly, but it's still a problem. There's also some minor details to nitpick about, like why is there only one set of stairs going from the forward well deck to the bow? Why isn't the water moving during the iceberg collision? Again, these are minor things that get a pass, but the clipping and FOV are the major things that need to be addressed. There's also not much going on during the sinking. I don't care about the ship not breaking in half, but how about the lifeboats being lowered? Add in some sound effects of the ship creaking or people screaming, something to make it more interesting. I couldn't tell whether or not the funnels fell, if not then that'd be cool to add. It really doesn't have to split in half, that would understandably be a massive pain to do. The ship model itself is fine. Nothing spectacular, but not nearly as bad as Fall of Titanic's.

In the first 2 minutes of this game, Alyx was more helpful than she was in all of HL2:EP1 by using the gravity gun to open the train door. And then not long after that, she's unconcious throughout a good half of the game. Already things are looking good! The first third of this game involves a lot of puzzle solving which I enjoyed because they were fairly clever and didn't feel like they were just placed in random spots, and I didn't have Alyx telling me things like "Hey, I think that wire goes somewhere" or "Hey, I think a crank needs to go here" etc. The only part I didn't care for was the last 10 minutes where I have to destroy like 10 Striders with those weird exploding spheres. That was just tedious. But that aside, this brought on some new characters/concepts/plotlines, most of which were handled pretty well.

If you want more Half-Life 2, that's exactly what this is. Alyx is with you pretty much throughout the entirety of the game. She helps by either telling the player how they're the most amazing person in the universe, or repeating the same puzzle instructions to you over and over again as you're solving said puzzles. It won't knock your socks off or anything, but it'll entertain you for a little while (it's fairly short).

From the word go, there were some red flags with this mod. It starts off with a cinematic cutscene featuring a blue laser shooting up into the sky like you see in a lot of movies. It's a little jarring seeing all this cinematic stuff in a mod for a game that's known for not being very cinematic. But that's small stuff. What really shows why this mod doesn't work is the gameplay in the first few minutes. The game is generous at first because it gives you a pistol and an SMG at the very start when the helicopter drops you off, but right as it drops you off (when the cutscene ends) you're placed in an area with tons of combine shooting at you from a distance in all different directions, and you have two weapons meant for close quarters combat. That's this game's problem. This doesn't just occur at the very start, it's like this throughout the whole first section. You don't have any armor either, so this game hates you in the first section. Then later you go underground into this Citadel looking area and I came across one of those generators you disable with the gravity gun, but I had no gravity gun and found myself going in circles trying to figure out what to do. I didn't have a problem finding weapons in HL2 or its episodes, so I guess it was maybe a bug or the developers decided to hide the gravity gun for some reason. It also said something about turning power on in order to enable a bridge in the same section as the one with the generator. I went around trying to flip every switch, but there was nothing I could do. Not very straightforward. This game LOVES to shake your screen around when you get shot too. Not as drastically as Doom 3, but it's annoying. Might just be because HL2: Ep 1 was like that (since this is a mod for that) but it's obnoxious either way and I got sick of this mod very fast.

This game has the 2nd best 90's video game graphics I've ever seen. As much as I love Half-Life, Unreal's graphics blow the Goldsrc engine away with ease. Reflective materials, solid lighting, decent looking water, MASSIVE environments, decent texturing, and good looking sprites. The gameplay is also pretty solid. Had a blast fighting enemies and exploring the environments. Some of the environments got pretty confusing though and I ended up doing a lot of backtracking. Then again, this is a 90's game, so that sort of thing is to be expected. Definitely worth a buy though.
Oh, and the music is great too.

The weapons in this game are awesome. Just awesome. Blowing enemies away with the super shotgun is so satisfying.
The enemies are also fine, but not nearly as memorable as the enemies from Quake or Doom, but they make it so you can put the weapons to good use, so I don't have much of a problem there. My only gripe is that the maps are kind of bland.
Unlike previous Id Software games, you're given objectives in this game, but they just amount to pushing a button to open a door or something of that nature; things you typically had to do to finish Doom/Quake levels as well, so it's not terribly different from your typical Id Software game, but I do think that the lack of John Romero is definitely apparent here.

Fast paced, intense, creative, and atmospheric. If you like FPS games from the 1990's, this is definitely for you. Some of the enemies can be annoying (*cough* Spawns) but the weapons, the enemies, and the maps go together really well and give the game a consistent flow.
I've also always been impressed by the grenade physics in this game too given that this was made in '96.

If this were a few years ago, I'd be a lot nicer to this game, but after the updates this game got in, I think 2013, they've really made it Not worth your money. The hitboxes on the choppers are now extremely small for some reason thus making them almost impossible to take down (good luck getting past the cliff section), the weapons have an ugly reflective effect that they didn't have before, there's certain areas where... I'm not sure how to explain it. It's like a flat surface consisting of a bunch of random colors will just sort of appear out of nowhere. Hell's version of a rainbow as I like to call it.
There's also a few other less severe bugs, but on the bright side it's fun to just sort of mess around with it using console commands and seeing as how this runs on the Source engine as opposed to the Goldsrc engine, but this shouldn't cost as much as the actual game does. This should only cost maybe 2 bucks. That's how much I bought it for. (it was on sale)

It's not quite as good as Opposing Force and it's pretty short, but it's still Half-Life.
This doesn't have any new weapons or enemies, but it does include a likable main character aside from Gordon which is something Half-Life and OF lacked, so that's new. I didn't really like the Xen part to be honest though. I'd already seen enough of Xen from Half-Life and Opposing Force, and it lost its luster by the time I reached it here.
Despite this, Blue Shift does have quite a few interesting/memorable areas/puzzles, many of which were different than what you'd seen in HL and OF. It had just enough to keep me engaged, so if you want more of the classic HL gameplay, this is for you.