Raising the Bar Redux is a Half-Life 2 Beta fan's dream come true. Not only does it revive the classic and gritty art style we never got to experience, but it melds into the story and progression of retail HL2. Honestly, if you are a Half-Life 2 fan, I cannot recommend this enough.

I see many people saying that the game struggles with guiding the player, but I honestly never had any issues with the level design and I think it actually improves on some chapters like Water Hazard.

The combat loop is exceptional as all HL2 experiences are however with new weapons that are exclusive to certain areas, it gives it much more dynamic combat scenarios than any HL2 mod ever.

It is not perfect, it is an incomplete game and essentially a beta, so the performance is pretty bad. The opening has some bad performance when exploring City 17 but it mostly goes away... then you get to the 2nd half of Ravenholm and the framerate tanks even worse. While there are only 2 of the 7 Divs released, it's a chunky 4-5 hour campaign that leaves you begging for more. This is going to be something truly special if it gets completed.

It's obviously not perfect, it struggles with guiding the player, some map layouts are confusing, and the performance could be better, but as a look into the, "What if?" of what HL2 could have been, this is an excellent mod.

It still has a long way to go, and every chapter has been better than the last, with Necropolis March being the clear standout, and star of the show. A truly inventive and fun take on the Ravenholm chapter from the original.

I hope they can go back and touch up some of the earlier levels in future releases, and I cannot wait to see the rest of the game. This is the best Half Life 2 mod since Black Mesa

The Half-Life 2 Beta is one of the most interesting things to come out of a development cycle in this industry, shedding a lot of light on how much stuff can change especially for a game that was known to be as troubled as HL2 before it released. The thing with learning about the Beta is that it's far more interesting to read about it and ponder what could have been rather than actually seeing it made into a final product, as both the leaks as well as a lot of fan-made mods over the years have continued to show. There's a reason why the final product we got for Half-Life 2 was the way it was, and it wasn't out of Valve trying to make a "lesser product;" as interesting as many of those ideas and concepts were, in practice a lot of them were very much cut for a reason.

Real quick on gameplay, it's Half-Life 2. I've never cared for the modding community's obsession with hyper-active smooth weapon animations and reloads because Gordon shouldn't be this gung-ho professional hitman with knowledge on every weapon he picks up, and I still don't care for its representation here even if every gun is modeled quite nicely. Combine soldiers still hitscan just as much as ever if not maybe more because of the seemingly faster firerate on the MP7, but the level design is usually very generous about health items. Level design becomes more cluttered and messy however, with issues leading the player in the right direction, something a Half-Life game absolutely needs to nail and something that leads to my bigger issues in general with the mod.

Raising the Bar: Redux has great art direction and a keen eye for visual detail within the limits of the Source engine, but it just lacks this flow to it that any Half-Life game really needs to have. Getting lost in where the hell Gordon is even supposed to be at any given point is extremely common, and while Half-Life games have always toed a line on believable locations with the ways you navigate through them if you think about them for more than a minute, Raising the Bar: Redux's version of City 17 is just a cluttered mess with weird back alleys and buildings that don't make sense in how they're interconnected. Progression through the environment feels jumbled and messy, stakes raising and lowering seemingly at random and far too suddenly, and RtB:R also has trouble with trying to fill in the blanks and making changes to the unfinished beta storyline. Some of the most interesting parts of the beta storyline such as the dangerous polluted air are mysteriously absent, and while there's attempts here and there of trying to create an oppressive atmosphere, it never quite coalesces into bringing it to a reality here. Some of my favorite pieces of concept art like the mysterious vortigaunt energy tank, this far more deeply menacing dark tram area with the Citadel highlighted within fog in the distance, the deep blue smoky views of City 17 itself, or even this more radioactive toxic take on the canals for the airboat chapter; they're gorgeous pieces of art that also help to really create this image of what makes the HL2 Beta so interesting and I just don't think Raising the Bar: Redux really captures that. The efforts made by this small team are impressive on a technical level and I'm still interested enough to see where they take the mod in the future with wherever their own version of the story goes, but there's too much of this that feels raw and missing that spice that would make this something truly great, at the end of the day just being merely fine.