Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/10/10/mod-corner-paranoia-half-life-2007-review/
When you have a dedicated fan base that are willing to spend a lot of time making and playing mods for your game, eventually a lot of these mods will eventually push the limits of your game and it’s engine. One of the mods that pushed what the Half-Life modding tools were capable of was Paranoia.
You play the role of a Russian officer of the Secret Service. You are called out on a mission, and your first impressions are that it will just be like any other. But you find yourself facing the dark secret side of military experiments that want to bring the dead back to life. It’s pretty much a horror B-movie, and it does a pretty decent job at being one.
Like a lot of Half-Life mods, Paranoia takes a note from it, and the first ~20-30 minutes of Paranoia is going around a Russian military base, teaching you how the game works and showing people going about their lives before shit hits the fan.
It’s here where you can see how Paranoia really pushes the GoldSRC engine for the time it was released, with all of it’s locations looking incredibly accurate to it’s real world counterpart. The team behind this mod took a ton of references from real world Russian architecture and environments, and it really shows how much work the mod team put into the small details. Every location feels run down, grimy, and gloomy.
The game even adds in a few new shiny visual effects that the GoldSRC engine didn’t have, such as bump mapping and gloss on top if it’s detailed textures as well as better lighting effects, which makes the flashlight more useful than Half-Life’s, really highlighting the incredibly run down and sometimes claustrophibic levels. The team behind this mod, appropriately named Paranoia Team, spent 3 years developing this mod, and it clearly shows.
It does show it’s age a little bit in that a few things have a lower polygon count than more recent games. Especially with other characters faces, which use real peoples faces as the in game faces.
Going into combat does have some strategic elements to it. Your character has a Ballistics Helmet that you can use to protect yourself from getting more easily killed. The down side is that it’s harder to see and you can’t view down the scope on certain weapons. There is also the Gas Mask, but is used twice in the entire mod, and one of those times is to teach you how to use it.
Maybe the developers intended to have it be used more, but didn’t have the time or man power to have more areas use it, so they left it in just to have another bullet point to show off. All of the weapons all look great and sound really satisfying to use. There is also the ability to use iron sights, which was getting popular in games at the time. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t exactly a viable option since enemies could easily kill you if you get too close to them. Although, when you kill your enemies, you can loot ammo and other stuff off of their bodies. This is how you’d get most of your ammo.
Aside from picking up medkits throughout the game that immediately give you health, you pick up Painkillers too, which are an item in your inventory you can activated at any time. On the easiest difficulty there are so many of them that I maxed out the amount i could carry and never ran out of them, but I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties they’re a lot rarer.
The AI enemies and companions are actually a lot better than the ones in Half-Life. Friendly companion AI can actually hold it’s own fairly well. You do get a game over when one of them dies, so you’ll have to take care of them to some extent, but it never feels like you’re babysitting them. The only problem I have with them is waiting for them to get in position, and I was never quite sure if I was the one who was supposed to open a door or they were until one of them moved their way in front of a door. On harder difficulties, the enemy AI is a bit hard for my liking, but I never had any problems with it.
Surprisingly, this mod’s soundtrack was done by a Russian metal band called “Slot” along with their own original music. I’ve never heard of them before, probably because they’re a Russian band, but from what I’ve heard looking them up, they seem to be pretty good. The games mix of dark ambient music for slower atmospheric moments and higher energy tracks when the action gets started really add to the tone that the mod was going for.
Paranoia eventually got a version called “Paranoia: The Game Version”, which runs on something called Xash3D, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine. This was done so that the people behind this mod didn’t have to continually have to update the mod every time Valve updated Half-Life. Plus it gives the added bonus of not needing Half-Life installed.
Probably the most interesting thing about this mod is that it got a port to the Dreamcast using the leaked unreleased port of Half-Life. I didn’t have the chance to test this myself since I don’t have a Dreamcast, but from the videos I’ve seen, it seems to work pretty well.
Should you play Paranoia? Hell yes. It’s one of the best mods for Half-Life out there, and it even has some of that loveable jank that Russia games tend to have.
When you have a dedicated fan base that are willing to spend a lot of time making and playing mods for your game, eventually a lot of these mods will eventually push the limits of your game and it’s engine. One of the mods that pushed what the Half-Life modding tools were capable of was Paranoia.
You play the role of a Russian officer of the Secret Service. You are called out on a mission, and your first impressions are that it will just be like any other. But you find yourself facing the dark secret side of military experiments that want to bring the dead back to life. It’s pretty much a horror B-movie, and it does a pretty decent job at being one.
Like a lot of Half-Life mods, Paranoia takes a note from it, and the first ~20-30 minutes of Paranoia is going around a Russian military base, teaching you how the game works and showing people going about their lives before shit hits the fan.
It’s here where you can see how Paranoia really pushes the GoldSRC engine for the time it was released, with all of it’s locations looking incredibly accurate to it’s real world counterpart. The team behind this mod took a ton of references from real world Russian architecture and environments, and it really shows how much work the mod team put into the small details. Every location feels run down, grimy, and gloomy.
The game even adds in a few new shiny visual effects that the GoldSRC engine didn’t have, such as bump mapping and gloss on top if it’s detailed textures as well as better lighting effects, which makes the flashlight more useful than Half-Life’s, really highlighting the incredibly run down and sometimes claustrophibic levels. The team behind this mod, appropriately named Paranoia Team, spent 3 years developing this mod, and it clearly shows.
It does show it’s age a little bit in that a few things have a lower polygon count than more recent games. Especially with other characters faces, which use real peoples faces as the in game faces.
Going into combat does have some strategic elements to it. Your character has a Ballistics Helmet that you can use to protect yourself from getting more easily killed. The down side is that it’s harder to see and you can’t view down the scope on certain weapons. There is also the Gas Mask, but is used twice in the entire mod, and one of those times is to teach you how to use it.
Maybe the developers intended to have it be used more, but didn’t have the time or man power to have more areas use it, so they left it in just to have another bullet point to show off. All of the weapons all look great and sound really satisfying to use. There is also the ability to use iron sights, which was getting popular in games at the time. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t exactly a viable option since enemies could easily kill you if you get too close to them. Although, when you kill your enemies, you can loot ammo and other stuff off of their bodies. This is how you’d get most of your ammo.
Aside from picking up medkits throughout the game that immediately give you health, you pick up Painkillers too, which are an item in your inventory you can activated at any time. On the easiest difficulty there are so many of them that I maxed out the amount i could carry and never ran out of them, but I’m pretty sure on higher difficulties they’re a lot rarer.
The AI enemies and companions are actually a lot better than the ones in Half-Life. Friendly companion AI can actually hold it’s own fairly well. You do get a game over when one of them dies, so you’ll have to take care of them to some extent, but it never feels like you’re babysitting them. The only problem I have with them is waiting for them to get in position, and I was never quite sure if I was the one who was supposed to open a door or they were until one of them moved their way in front of a door. On harder difficulties, the enemy AI is a bit hard for my liking, but I never had any problems with it.
Surprisingly, this mod’s soundtrack was done by a Russian metal band called “Slot” along with their own original music. I’ve never heard of them before, probably because they’re a Russian band, but from what I’ve heard looking them up, they seem to be pretty good. The games mix of dark ambient music for slower atmospheric moments and higher energy tracks when the action gets started really add to the tone that the mod was going for.
Paranoia eventually got a version called “Paranoia: The Game Version”, which runs on something called Xash3D, a reverse engineered version of the GoldSRC engine. This was done so that the people behind this mod didn’t have to continually have to update the mod every time Valve updated Half-Life. Plus it gives the added bonus of not needing Half-Life installed.
Probably the most interesting thing about this mod is that it got a port to the Dreamcast using the leaked unreleased port of Half-Life. I didn’t have the chance to test this myself since I don’t have a Dreamcast, but from the videos I’ve seen, it seems to work pretty well.
Should you play Paranoia? Hell yes. It’s one of the best mods for Half-Life out there, and it even has some of that loveable jank that Russia games tend to have.