I love Half Life 2.
So when asked if I’d judge a competition to recreate the Half Life 2 experience, I
said YES.
It’s all contained in one download and I suggest you check it out for a couple of hours
of single-player fun.
The Nostalgiaville Competition had 8 entries, and one bonus, which I’ll start with.
Freeman and Bob could pass as a Half Life 2 level.
It looks, plays and smells just like one, but on top of that throws some original ideas
into the mix, which is most welcome.
The first half is puzzle-based.
You’re without a weapon, but luckily for you you have BOB, who will shoot enemies and
generally be quite helpful, if incredibly stupid.
Something that Half Life 2 had, but never really used, was the squad function.
You could point to somewhere and anybody following you would run to that spot.
In Half Life 2 this was only really good for setting off tripmines, but Freeman and Bob
uses this mechanic to help complete puzzles!
You must guide him to control panels in order to progress through the level further.
Clearly, Bob can’t think for himself.
But then again, maybe you can’t either.
Something I was impressed with from this entry was the level design, which would do a good
job of hinting at where you needed to go, without ever having to scream it in your face.
The overhead cable in the starting zone tells you all you need to know and these sorts of
subtle hints are applied throughout, making you feel smarter than you actually are for
solving stuff.
Midway through there’s an escape sequence full of baddies, manhacks and helicopters
dropping bombs, as well as the risk of drowning.
This was my least favourite bit- I felt rushed and thought a lot of the damage dealt was
a little unfair.
But the end of the level picks up again as you and Bob fight off an army of enemies and
a helicopter, which satisfyingly concludes this entry in the finest boss sequence of
the competition.
This was a professional, consistent and enjoyable map, maintaining or surpassing Half Life 2’s
quality and keeping what was special about the game.
It also did a good job with the jokes and references.
Poor Lazlo.
Who needs Alyx?
Give me Bob any day of the week.
I give it 8/10 for being at, or above, the standard set by Half Life 2.
The first of the proper entries is METRO, which takes the nostalgic theme seriously.
This entry recreates the first third of Half Life 2, but within a single, sprawling level.
You have the train intro.
The City 17 streets.
The escape from the cops- at this point I could tell exactly where it was headed.
You escape from the city, which seems to have grown a few skyscrapers since 2004- and plummet
into the water far below to commence the sewers sequence, before ending on the canals.
Like I said, it tries to be nostalgic… but a little too seriously, perhaps.
In recreating Half Life 2, but to a lower standard, its limitations are obvious and
it doesn’t introduce enough new elements to stand on its own two legs.
All in all, I would say that this is a solid, but average entry that doesn’t have quite
enough shooting for my liking.
In fact, I don’t think you shoot any enemies at all- it’s all crowbar action up until
a vehicle sequence, which ends with mounted gun scene for end boss fight, which I guess
is always a good way to go.
But Metro tries to cover too many things too quickly, and it all feels a bit shallow as
a result.
I give it 5/10 for being kind of like Half Life 2, but to a lower standard and with no
original features.
As a judge, HERE AGAIN worries me.
I’m concerned that I didn’t ‘get’ this level.
Maybe I missed out on something obvious that would have made it all make sense.
But for now, this feels like a very flawed map.
Let’s begin.
You start in City 17, people and combine walking about everywhere.
What do you do?
Where do you go?
I don’t know.
I slipped through one of the laser gates at one point, but don’t think I was supposed
to.
The scanners seemed obsessed by the vortigaunt sweeping the streets, all like OH COOL LOOK
AT THAT!
Which I had a good laugh from.
But SUDDENLY a huge fight breaks out and you die.
Oh.
Not gonna lie- I gave up and had to noclip out of this level to see where I had to go.
Apparently, you have to head through this doorway, but there’s nothing that hints
that this is what you have to do.
After this you go through a clone of that bit in Half Life 2 and have to break out of
this window.
Once again, not obvious.
And then you plummet off the top and lose some health.
And then get attacked by headcrabs.
Okay.
Then I tried to go through here, but you can’t.
And you can’t break it.
So instead you go through a maze of rooms and sewers- this bit here also being remarkably
difficult to find.
The bits that look like you can pass through, you can’t, and the bits that look like you
can’t, you can, but probably aren’t supposed to.
Special mention to this bit- I was desperate.
I had run to every corner of the map, found several passages which turned out to be dead
ends, and I was trying anything to make progress.
Since there was an enemy up here, as well as some miniature scenery, I thought that
perhaps this was where I had to go.
Sure enough, I could get through!
-But no, wrong way.
Again.
So I returned to this and found an outpost.
But this proved to be a dead end.
Eventually I resorted to noclip again and found this train bit, which is only accessible
through the bit you can’t pass through.
At this point I had no idea what I was supposed to do and gave up, making this the only entry
I wasn’t able to complete from this competition.
I don’t get it- this map does so many things, some of which are complicated to make.
It has the potential to be pretty decent, but it’s so poorly planned and playtested
that I’m simply left confused and disappointed.
And worried that I missed something obvious.
I’m sorry to say that Here Again only gets 2/10.
BADWATER is a gorgeous map, looking like Half Life 2 but on a larger, more spectacular scale.
I’m not sure about the colour filter; replacing blacks with murky reds made me feel a bit
blind in the darker spots.
And the map has an identity problem: it’s unsure of what it wants to be.
You start by a hovercraft and it made me think it was going to be like the Canals segment.
But it ditches that idea without doing anything with it, becoming a warehouse shooter before
ending with a boss fight.
Along the way are optional places to explore, which reward you for doing so.
And while it’s light on puzzles, there are a fair few enemies to shoot.
WHICH I AM FINE WITH!
Sadly, this is where I felt it fell apart.
More so than with the other entries, I found the graphics hindered the gunplay, either
by hiding enemies in dark spots, or from plastering sections with unnecessary clutter that doesn’t
quite serve as cover.
There’s no room for flanking or alternative routes- every fight is you running at newly
spawned batches of enemies.
The warehouse theme had potential for so much more.
The best bit is the final boss-fight, which did bring back memories of the Lost Coast,
though it felt a bit cheap that I couldn’t go up this ladder here, and that when I beat
the first helicopter another spawned.
I’d rather have gone up against a single helicopter with double the health.
I know I’ve gone on about its flaws, but I still liked this map.
It just frustrates me that it wasn’t more.
A second combat section would have done the gameplay wonders- what about a gatehouse in
the canals section you have to clear out before advancing to the main one?
All in all, this was one of the most impressive looking entries.
The music was well chosen and I like this eerie sounding bit: …never figured out what
that was supposed to be, but it added to the atmosphere.
Rating this map 6/10 feels a little harsh, but I can’t shake the feeling that the graphics
came first and then gameplay was added around it.
LONE was another difficult one to judge.
It did its best to give a bad first impression.
It didn’t have lighting.
But to make matters worse, being a 3-map entry, the later 2 DID, but players won’t see that,
since the first level disables the lighting for the rest of it!
I had to rate this entry down for this.
Adding to the poor first impressions was the clutter.
Every area was spammed with seemingly random props and details.
It seems that Ravenholm had a serious hoarder problem.
Get past this, however, and this entry’s actually quite a bit of fun!
In an amateurish kind of way.
An early puzzle is to fill this generator with GAS.
A later one is to fill this precarious bucket with concrete blocks to open a gate.
And boy, is it precarious.
Incredibly, though, it worked!
The poorest bit by far was this bit.
You man the slowest-firing, most inaccurate piece of rubbish ever and must shoot wave
after wave of combine who enthusiastically run at you.
Why did the combine even come to Ravenholm?!
Honestly, you’re better off hiding further back because this gun turret’s a death trap.
And then I got insta-gibbed for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not good.
And here’s a lesson for all budding Half Life 2 mappers- if you use cables to point
people to where they have to go, don’t then turn it around and use one to confuse them.
I thought this door was a puzzle of some kind… then felt really stupid when all I had to
do was to press the button next to it.
LONE ends on a boss fight, which I felt was ruined by the presence of mines everywhere
for no good reason, which I found distracting.
All in all, LONE is an easy entry to dislike, but it also gets a lot right.
It gives you ample opportunity to shoot things, which is something that a surprising number
of submissions forgot about.
It doesn’t grasp the nostalgia of Half Life 2- but what it does do is to remind me of
the early custom maps you’d download online for it and I feel it’s been made by somebody
who might not have the best knowledge of mapping, but who has PASSION for the game.
And that’s something I respect.
And the award for the most abrupt ending goes to…
…yeah, that.
I give it 5/10 for being a flawed but gameplay-packed collection of maps.
And now for something completely different.
POWER UP is a point and click adventure game, disguised as a Half Life 2 map.
It’s absolutely nothing like the original game and should lose points for that, but
at the same time it grabbed my attention and I couldn’t help but want to play it to the
end, even if at points it tried to put me off.
Like, what’s this?
Who am I?
What’s that bus doing there?
Am I a combine soldier?
Am I a civilian?
Oh look, it’s an undercover cop, bit like Barney from Half Life 2!
He’s my friend and yet he shoves me off if I get too close.
The story is, you go undercover to get… batteries to… do something.
The voice acting is difficult to understand, and if you don’t hear it the first time,
TOUGH!
You’re left stranded in a large but empty City 17 map without a clue of what you’re
supposed to be doing.
You don’t get a weapon in this game, but it turns out you don’t need one because
cinder blocks are surprisingly effective.
One of the first unintuitive puzzles is how to get through this locked door.
I figured you had to stack a load of stuff up to climb over, but by accident I discovered
that cinderblock beats lock.
The cinderblock beats crab.
And finally, cinderblock beats window.
Like any point and click game, the tasks you’re given sound easy enough, but this being a
puzzle game there’s only one, very specific path that leads to success.
And to end it all off, some guards chased me, so I ran away, not realising that I had
to be killed to finish the mission.
Not intuitive at all.
I don’t think this entry was suited to this competition, but it could have been a bit
of fun had it guided the player better and felt like a mission of some sort, from start
to finish.
I give it 4/10, points for originality, but… not for much else.
CANAL ESCAPE looks like a Half Life 2 level that didn’t receive the last layer of polish.
And yet I found it to be one of the most enjoyable entries of the competition!
You start with nothing and end with almost the full arsenal of weapons at your disposal.
It goes through several defined and unique segments, all of which were fun in their own
kind of way.
I really liked the early sequences where I had to fight with nothing more than a pistol
and a gravity gun.
And I thought it did a good job of pacing when to mix it up and to move onto the next
segment.
But there were problems.
It doesn’t always guide you too well.
I got lost a few times and there’s a really silly bit in the middle.
You’ve got to stack crates to get onto a ledge.
But you could easily destroy these and make it impossible for yourself.
And once you’re up, you open a gateway before going on a quest to retrieve a valve to raise
the water level to let yourself through.
But do you see the problem here?
Why would you bother doing this, if you could just stack the crates again, like you did
to get to the control room in the first place?
This was a very silly oversight.
At one point you fall and lose a load of health through no fault of your own, which is also
a big NO NO.
And the end fight was flawed, too.
With combine everywhere, I missed the rocket launcher and had to backtrack to find it when
faced with bringing down the helicopter later on.
And I’m all for the mapper using his favourite songs in his own maps, but he uses the SAME
SONG 3 times!
It’s not even the best one.
All in all, this was not the most glamorous or intuitive submission, but I found the gameplay
to be among the best in this competition.
And its pacing was spot on.
That counts for a lot, making me rate this one more highly than some other entries that
on paper looked better.
Maybe it just got lucky.
I give it 7/10 for being a self-contained, if short adventure.
It was a pleasant surprise: more fun than the sum of its parts suggests.
GRIGORI!
I had to replay this entry, because the first time it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
However, with hindsight I can now appreciate its fantastic storytelling.
You play as Father Grigori, the eccentric vicar from Ravenholm.
In Half Life 2, he’s a mystery.
An enigma.
And this is something this map builds upon.
I mean, who has a chess board on the same table as a CACTUS?
Who has a table solely for a hula girl?
You get the idea.
And on this table is ANNABELLE, his custom weapon that you don’t get to use in Half
Life 2.
It looks like a shotgun, yet contains less ammo, a longer delay and a different button
to equip it, all of which will serve to confuse Half Life 2 fans.
And although he respected the town’s residents in the original game, here he doesn’t give
a DAMN.
His radio’s in need of repair and he’ll rek anybody who gets in his way!
This level plays like an arena shooter.
Rooms filled with demons ready to get smoked.
It’s actually a bit of fun, but too short and the route you have to take can often be
misleading- perhaps this represents his own path to salvation.
Seriously, excellent storytelling here.
With all that being said, this entry’s too basic, too short and too empty to live up
to its potential, and isn’t too similar to Half Life 2 in any way.
I give it 4/10.
I couldn’t rate this one too highly.
But I kind of wanted to.
And lastly, Cosmonaut.
And what an entry this one is!
First impressions matter, and this one delivers.
It looks beautiful, offering a large open environment for you to explore as you leave
the rocket crash which seemingly nobody has noticed.
This slow start pays homage to Half Life 2.
I like the humour, too- like this bit.
Anybody who’s played the original will know why this happens- and likely has done themselves!
What follows are 25 minutes of great custom content.
Each bit will feel similar to places from the original, but it gets away with it by
often ramping up the scale or challenge to the next level.
I’ll say now that there wasn’t as much shooting as I’d have liked- I’m talking
close-quarters with shotguns and smgs, here.
Never been a fan of long-range with pistols much.
But what this submission contains is well designed puzzles, and rooms that I would look
at and think ‘Yes, yes I’d like to see what kind of challenge this will present to
me’.
And despite the large scale of the environments, I never felt lost or confused.
COSMONAUT contains some outstanding examples of player guidance- I don’t even know if
it was intentional, but at this point I had to find a broken pipe piece and a barnacle
helped point it out to me.
Thanks, barnacle!
I also noticed that interactive objects would highlight if I was close enough to them.
This isn’t something I’ve ever seen in Half Life 2 before but it’s a thoughtful
guidance tool.
As good as Cosmonaut was, though, there were a few niggles that I had.
Of the enemies, I find manhacks among the most annoying- and there were a few too many
for my liking in this entry.
And despite the scale and potential, the final boss fight was underwhelming and far too slow.
I was left wondering if I had broken it between waves.
It was a bit of an anti-climax, given what I had gone through to reach that point.
But despite that, this was the best entry and was faithful to the theme of the competition.
This one deserves a 9/10.
Free content doesn’t come much more professionally executed than this.
Being a judge of a mapping competition is intimidating to me.
Being a mapper myself, I understand the effort that every entry has had invested into it.
And I never like speaking badly about one.
I’ve enjoyed myself more than I expected though.
It’s been great to jump back into one of my favourite games and to play through these
entries with an open mind.
They’re all so different and unique and I hope I’ve been fair with what I’ve said
about them.
Thank you to the mappers for making me want to map again, and to Niker107 for hosting
this competition- check out his Youtube channel here, and go over to runthinkshootlive to
check out the entries for yourselves.
See if you agree with me.