This game is so badass.

The aesthetic of the game is one of my favorite parts of it. I love the bleak blue hues and cold look to get the feeling for the Alaskan environment in various parts of the game that almost make you feel like you're in a different planet. The music is crazy too, even if there isn't much of it, the encounter music is iconic as shit and I love the droning midi choirs that play throughout the game.

The narrative and cinematic aspects of the game are incredible and still hold up well now as well as the voice acting. I really grew attached to a lot of people on the codec as well as several of the main characters that appear throughout the game.

The only issues I could say I had with the game was probably just some of the backtracking near the first half of the game was a bit tedious at points.

However, the gameplay was really enjoyable and creative with really out of the box ways to handle different fights and situations that make you think, I really enjoyed the boss fights and how you'd have to figure out how to utilize how to use your sandbox effectively. This also applies to smaller parts of the game like using your lit cigarettes' smoke to be able to detect lasers near the beginning of the game, it's a lot of creative stuff you usually do not see in newer games.

Pretty lackluster content wise for a PS2 game because of the fact there's not really a story in the game, you just do time trials on levels that have shared areas that are also used as levels in multiplayer.

However I will say that the game still is a lot of fun and I love how fast paced it is, however I can definitely see that the difficulty settings are complete bullshit lol.

Save for a few levels, on easy difficulty the game is super brain dead where everything dies in one shot, but as soon as you switch to "normal" the game is brutal difficulty wise, especially after the first two levels.

This was totally done to artificially stretch out the average player's time they spend on the "story" from dying over and over again and having to completely master the level and have perfect reaction times on regular and hard. This alone is kind of fun and reward in itself to master the levels back to back but it is way too hard at points like on the 1980s chemical plant map, some enemies will hide in complete darkness and you'll have no idea they exist until after you're shot by them.

However the multiplayer is really fun with the novelty of all these different weapons and characters from totally different eras being thrown together in a big goldeneye styled single player deathmatch. However, gameplay wise its just fun...It doesn't really do anything else super interesting.

I got super interested in this game two years ago because of its art style and the fact that its like a mix between Blood and RE4, both games that I absolutely love.

The weapons, enemies and sandbox of the game are incredible, straight up. All the weapons are crunchy are extremely satisfying to use, all holding a very important purpose within the sandbox of the game. The physics with throwable objects also are so fun and satisfyingly.

The best way to describe this game in general is that its just meaty. There's so many little mechanics within major mechanics such as the dynamite in the game seemingly working like Blood's dynamite but you're also able to throw an unlit TNT and shoot it like a remote explosion or unwrap a bundle, separating each TNT into separate explosives.

The level design overall is very well thought out and solid but there are some parts in levels, specifically in the first half of the game where I feel some parts could be condensed or the game doesn't do a great job directly the average player into the next area they need to go in order to progress the game. Every level after The Crypts (E1M5) is incredible though. Thee second half of the game is pure insanity and its fun as hell.

I love almost everything about this game but like I've said, the level design could use a bit of work with enemies getting stuck pathing on the environment sometimes and some areas having weird pacing.

The other thing is I feel like the music for some levels really doesn't match the vibes of the atmosphere at all. Like on The Mines, you have this only 80's-esque synth track that sounds almost upbeat in this super gritty and spooky section of the game.

This game is still great though and I wish it got more attention, looking forward to the second chapter. The second half of the game for me especially started to hook me and I had so much fun with it.

Such a great game, throughout all three chapters.

Chapter 1 was a bit more simplistic but I think it worked in the games sake because I imagine it was intended to give the player a bit of breathing room to learn the basic mechanics of the game before the game gets crazy.

Chapter 2 was probably my favorite out of the three because of how variety there was in the different levels and the level design and flow of those levels were excellent, The Grainery, Infernal Machine and Escher Labs are examples of being genuinely perfect.

Chapter 3 upped the ante with how crazy and Lovecraftian the game gets and while I don't think the levels were as good as the second episode, its very close and all the levels in chapter 3 are all mostly very memorable and do a perfect build up from the last two chapters.

The game's sandbox and enemies are all very fun to use/fight, the only two enemies I think are kind of lame are the Grand Wizards (the red mages that shoot projectiles that track you) and the bone ball. An enemy that I loved fighting was the Wendigo though, I loved the mechanic with having to look down to find its footsteps and also hear its breathing while it gets close and if you shoot it, it reveals itself from being invisible, such good shit.

A lot of this game is what I wanted Quake to be when I played it more than a year ago, this game all across the board is near perfect and was so fucking fun to play.

An awesome community made expansion for half life 2. The level design throughout the whole thing was consistently great, bad cop I thought was going to be goofy at first but he was actually a pretty enjoyable protagonist and had some funny lines and I also loved the story and its integration with that “other valve game” that’s done it a tasteful way that doesn’t make it seem like a cringe fan fiction.

The biggest issue I thought of while playing this was the voice acting for the rebel radio guy sucks lol

I've always loved this game to death since I was a kid. I have almost 300 hours total combining endless beta and base game hours and the game's art style, music, character designs and mechanics were all incredible but I felt like over time, especially around the release of 2nd Encore, this game would face more and more changes that would really start to deteriorate the game in quality.

I always had gotten the impression that Mike Z was a giant piece of shit who was out of touch and unreasonably rude to his staff based off his dev logs on his YouTube channel (turns out I was right) and he was responsible for a lot of the ridiculous changes that game has gotten throughout time in terms of game balancing and just an overall trend of changing things that did NOT need to be changed.

But of course, an obvious factor for not being able to give this game a good review in good faith is the fact that they'd have so many updates where they would consistently keep removing things from the game, the "censorship" update that everyone talks about was just the boiling point and the changes they made with manipulating the story (The absurd changes with Big Band's story) changing character designs (Ex. Parasoul) and removing "lewd" art from a game that has always had sex appeal and its raunchiness as one of its main appeals shows how out of touch and bitter the current developers of this game are and how fucked this game has gotten over time.

I'm sure a lot of loser coomers started shitting on the game when they found out they changed the story shit with Filia and maybe they barely played at all when that update came out but I think its in extremely bad faith to defend an update that straight up removes content from a game that already has an extremely miniscule player base.

I mean it's alright...

In terms of positive stuff, nothing was offensively bad about Blue Shift and I think what this expansion does best is the puzzle sections are mostly pretty great and in some cases better than Opposing Force.

There are some pretty cool parts of levels but overall since it was originally supposed to be bonus content for the Dreamcast port of HL1 it has a reoccurring issue of being too similar to the content in base HL1.

Because of that, a lot of level design is very "safe" and pretty uninteresting, especially when it comes to enemy encounters, the entire expansion felt WAY too easy and boring.

To add on to that, Blue Shift LOVES putting headcrabs in crawl spaces that are artificially long and extended so they can spam you with them every time you get to a corner or they’ll put headcrabs in really obscure locations where it feels almost impossible to not lose health from them because of how hard they are to see. I’ve never died to a headcrab at all in Blue Shift, I think I might’ve died twice my entire time playing this, but it just feels really lazy and annoying more than anything.

Blue Shift will also constantly do this thing where it’ll have an empty room where it spawns exactly two vortigaunts but they’re so easy that you can spawn kill them before they even get a chance to shoot at you. This happens throughout the entire campaign.

The biggest thing about my experience playing this game has got to be escorting Rosenberg on the Captive Freight level.

People complained about the tracking of the marines in Opposing Force but during Captive Freight, having to escort Rosenberg has WAY worse tracking and sequence breaking. When I played, Rosenberg ran in front of me down all the flights of stairs, went to the basement area, said to stick together and then continued to suddenly book it all the way back where he started for no reason, so I had to run all the way back to where Rosenberg started and walk ahead of him so he’d follow me correctly.

Also this goes without saying but since this was meant to be bonus content, this expansion is so fucking short. I literally beat it in exactly two and a half hours in comparison to Opposing Force, which took me about six hours to beat.

Blue Shift isn't necessarily bad by any means but its a pretty overall forgettable experience. Especially when compared to the base game and Opposing Force.

Gearbox made like... two good games.
This is one of them.

Great expansion of HL1, building off the mechanics of that game and adding a lot of new interesting weapons and enemies. Very fun and well thought out level design throughout the entire thing too.

The only part where I felt the level design started to fall off was around the very end parts where it feels like the game can mindlessly spam you with shock troopers and voltigores with no breathing room.

Also as much as I a like a lot of the new sandbox, some of the new weapons seem kind of odd like the wrench being pretty useless as soon as you get the knife and also the sniper rifle being great but only being able to be used a little bit near the end of the game because of how late you get it and how rare ammo is for it.

Despite some minor flaws, it was still a really fun experience.