Blue Shift is yet another expansion of Half-Life. This time around, instead of playing as a HECU soldier you play as the common security seen in the Black Mesa facility, more specifically Barney Calhoun, a character we see around the 10 second mark trying to enter his designed sector in the original Half-Life and then never again. A funnily yet odd choice for a protagonist this time around, seen as how security guards in the game are pretty boring, only really standing in places and being lookouts then always being victim of the Marine invasion onto the facility and dying, and well, it's not like this game makes them any less boring.

This game truly feels like a Half-Life expansion in the way that it is simply more Half-Life. Opposing Force had a lot of things different than the original, new arsenal of weapons, some new mechanics and enemies to take on (and mind you this was two years before Blue Shift released, and one if you take into account this was supposed to be a Dreamcast expansion), yet Blue Shift features little to no different content than the original, making it kind of disappointing to play with the same weapons in a bite-sized version of Half-Life.

But, for what they didn't get to do when it came to new features they doubled in for level design. After three years of GoldSrc being out, I'm guessing the peeps over at Gearbox had a very clear idea of how to use the engine fairly efficiently, and in return we got a very polished and more updated look of the industrial insides of Black Mesa, there's clever puzzling here and there and they accommodate fairly well to the game having you moving NPCs from place to place.

So the game is just like Half-Life but updated and shorter and a bit more boring, what's not to like.