I went in knowing nothing about it, and perhaps I expected too much, but this was not the smooth, high quality ride I expected. I understand this is a free mod, and complaining about it might be frowned upon, but I just want to point out what I think did not work here in my opinion, so maybe the authors can learn for it.

First of all, the dialogue is extreme cringe. The entire mod feels like it leans wayy too much into "humor" if you can call it that, and almost none of it lands. Especially with Russel's lines, and especially since they thought Alyx died which creates tonal dissonance. Also names such as "Sector X" and 'Pleasentville"? Seriously? But maybe one could say that the whole narrative is just an excuse to have the gameplay sections.

Secondly there's the apparent over reliance on reusing mechanics (and assets) both from HLA and other HL games. As someone who played them many times over, these things are painfully obvious, and when you have such "puzzles" as "find a keycard under the box right next to the keycard reader", it begs the question why was that included at all. It really feels like the developers had a checklist of every mechanic in HLA that they felt they must include, regardless if it makes sense to or not.

Then there's the combat. It's fine for the most part, but those last 2 sections feel very cancerous, especially with the vortal hands mechanic or whatever you call those having severe aiming problems, both here and in the base game. Not only that, the last section is so cramped its really frustrating, with manhacks bouncing off of walls hitting you multiple times. Other sections that feel underbaked are Jeff and Strider encounters, latter of which is really raw. In my playthrough it barely ever shot directly at me, and would just shoot at a random location near me even with direct line of sight to me. Not to mention the "death animation".