This being hailed as one of the best Half-Life 1 mods I am thoroughly surprised and disappointed by how poor of an experience this is. I’ve decidedly abandoned it about an hour and a half in.
Despite being more than a whole hour in, I have not found a single piece of armor. What’s worse is that you find HEV charging stations and batteries lying around that you can’t pick up. (Blue Shift did a similar thing but it actually gave you replacement body armor and helmets as an alternative)
The game tends to use large empty arenas with usually 5-7 or even as high as 12 H.E.C.U. grunts despite not giving any precision weapons (other than the handgun. But you try using the fucking handgun while being surrounded by 12 machinegun toting H.E.C.U. grunts)
But the worst offender by far is the decreased weapon switch speed. In base Half-Life it is damn near instantaneous to switch from gun to gun. But here it takes nearly TWO FULL SECONDS.
As I said prior, the way the poorly game handles arenas and enemies as well as the lack of precision weapons makes you use the MP5 almost exclusively as it’s the only weapon in your arsenal with any remotely decent range, and the long weapon swapping makes you want to switch guns less which only worsens this issue.
A lot of the H.E.C.U. encounters just end in fleeing since combat feels sluggish and you have no armor.
Not the worst Half-Life mod I’ve played but its insanely overrated. It’s just bad Blue Shift.