Awakening - Single Player Mod Released

Hectic Glenn

Hectic Glenn

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Following up Bluestrike's media push earlier this year he has produced the goods and released his single player mod, promised to be set in a Black Mesa environment playing the role of the much loved Mr. Shepherd.

This campaign consists of a intro and 5 playable levels and it takes
a average player a hour to complete.
Click to expand...
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[br]As you can see, the developer is a very talented mapper. To download the mod visit the website and choose a mirror. Good single player mods are in short supply so fingers crossed for this development.
 
Amazing! I was looking into the release date a day ago, thanks.

EDIT: First impression - Gravity gun? 269 megabytes?
 
its a really good mod. its on par wiht coastline to atmosphere and minova.
its very challenging and hard even on easy mode.
the fun never stops, the most time your not fighting is like maybe 10 seconds.
 
The Gravity Gun? The ****? Otherwise, looking good. I'll download when I can.

Edit: Is that a Combine Dropship in the last pic?
 
You know folks, if you want to play a great mod, play Counterstrike.

This one is pretty good, although you will encounter endless amounts of opponents trying to bust your ass.

The voice acting (Hell yeah, there _is_ voice acting) is not good at all, a true Half-Life fan won't enjoy it.

About the opponents: Yeah they are way too many.

As for the leveldesign: The leveldesign is TOP and you will like the balancing at some points.

I don't really understand what the story is all about... It's Black Mesa and they have Combinetech already.

If you are bored and don't know what to do, you might enjoy this. If you are a busy businessman like me, you would rather prefer to waste your time with TV since they spawned too many opponents.

To the guys who made the mod: Please don't get me wrong. You did HIGH QUALITY OWNZ0r w0rK! This is amazing. I could never do this, ni**as. I know a lot of deep scene guys will enjoy it. :afro:
 
It has nothing to do with black mesa, I just said on my website that the player starts in a black mesa-ish envoirement but thats only the 1st level :)
 
Point by point impressions of chapters 1 to 4:

1) Large download size hmm? No matter. But why does Steam say I need the SDK as well when I install?

2) Eek! Third Person cutscenes in a HL Story! egads! They're not badly done, but could use some work. Many times, the camera points forward and the massacre happens behind... then other times, nothing happens at all whilst the camera doubles back on itself (a cut would have worked better). Of course, I would have simply preferred to be playing at this point (at the very least, running away from the approaching forces or something :p), but i'm not convinced the intro was needed at all.

3) Story and use of existing Half-Life characters. Pro Shepherd, Anti Shepherd... whatever your position, using Shepherd can hardly be an original story move. Using existing HL2 characters is also shakey ground, and the mod doesn't really justify them all given that it fails to locate the events geographically, takes major liberties with the story (G-Man seems to be collaborating with Eli etc. and storing people in cryo-sleep under the combine's noses?) and it uses the characters so sparingly that it would have probably been more advisable to use vanilla citizen characters instead, especially when you consider...

4) Voices. As voices added to a computer game by an amateur mod-maker, you can't really complain. They're not terrible. But as voices added to imitate existing characters, they're off the mark by quite some way. Would have been better all round to just invent new characters.

5) Music. 10 Points for simply having custom tunes :p It's functional and not out of place. It's not Mozart, but it'll do.

6) Early Weapons loadout. GRRRRRRR. In the first two maps, you're all but limited to using the MP7. Gravity Gun ammo is scarce, the Crowbar is the crowbar, the pistol gets about 50 bullets and you're left with MP7 which has shit loads of ammo. Hands up all of those of you who like using the MP7? Thought so. 90% of the battles seem to be Adrian Vs Combine throwing bullets at each other with the kind of accuracy that would embarrass as Stormtrooper. That is, unless you're stupid enough to jump into the fray, in which case, you'll likely lose all your health to the plentiful enemies, because even when the MP7 hits something, it takes a quarter of a clip to kill anything. Bizarrely, you come across Shotgun-equipped Combine Soldiers who will offload two shotgun barrels into you, but the shotgun never drops after they die, leaving you to receive the truly useful shotty later in the game (The same happens later with some elites who have phantom pulse-rifles).

7) Cover. Please give me some to duck behind, there isn't enough, and hiding behind a single structure for a firefight is boring, I want to be able to run about.

8) The Car. Why did we get this? The Gauss Removed, the Buggy turns into a mobile MP7 bullet chest. Hit and Run isn't a viable tactic because there are too many enemies and it offers no bullet protection. So everytime you come across enemies, you get out of the car. Then you get out of the car to open another gate. Or fight a gunship. Or get rid of mines. True, HL2 itself did exactly these things, but Highway 17 was FAR larger than Awakening, which can sanely be attempted on foot.

9) The Gunship battle. This was fun, but I wanted more cover. Gunship battles are about dancing from cover to cover, curling rockets into the Gunship's hull. This battle was more about standing behind the three cars that provided sufficient cover, and catching the gunship off guard. The opening of this battle was also a little cruel. Fighting off Combine simultaneously to the Gunship worked in say, the Nova Prospekt assault, but here, you're forced by the placement of the RPG to jump right in front of four heavily armed Combine soldiers with either the useless MP7, or the coverless buggy. You can't even gravity gun the RPG towards you to make this fair. It's totally stuck :/

10) Puzzles. They're few and so far i've figured them out quite quickly, but I can't help but think I could have got stuck on them quite easily. Making a ramp over the forcefield in the barn particularly.

11) The Zombie sub-pen level was fun, but truth be told, a little easy. Tough I think I needed that after the difficulty of the first two maps :p

12) Creative use of effects at the end of that chapter! Love the portal, great idea :)

13) I've only got as far as 'Citadel Foundations'. Sadly, whereas I've been interested despite the fluctuating difficulty up to this point, I've had a massive turn-off moment already in this map. Those soldiers and that strider seem seem miles away, far above my head and I'm STILL forced to rely on the MP7 for long range combat. Not exactly exciting stuff :/

14) Visuals. Saving the best till last :p Visually, this mod is the best singleplayer mod i've yet played. You have some nice landscape ideas, and have pulled off most of the areas well so far. The Coastal road and Sub-pen levels are definitely compelling areas to play in. I'm not so sure about the Citadel Foundations, i've not played for long, but they don't seem to fit the Combine art-style well enough. Otherwise, the levels make the occasional step towards smaller details, but could perhaps move that extra mile that HL2 itself manages. Great architecture, less so on the attention to detail.

So there you are, 14 bitchy points over something I personally wouldn't have the creativity to achieve myself (heh, that comes of being a Literature student). Now, don't take this as a warning off of the mod, or a dig at the mod's author. Basically, if this was mod was complete crap, you'd expect a post consisting of 'this mod is complete crap', rather than a point by point assessment of the sequences in the game. I offer suggestions on how to improve, simply because I believe both the mod and the author are capable of that improvement, and because the mod has been interesting, if not 100% fun to play.
 
The last level was beautiful--it was all very well done in terms of map design (flow could've been a bit more pointed: like, go here go there--it got a bit confusing at times b/c I'd double back and not no where to go from there--or maybe I just suck, haha.)

Single player mods always suffer from the throw a million enemies at you and kill them all routine--with no puzzles or anything. This was about 80% of that and about 20% of puzzles.

I'd really like to see something with that ratio flipped over.

Good work though. :)
 
The first post implies pretty heavily that it's in Black Mesa, I was wtf'ing for a bit. Looks nice, will play tomorrow :) Er, today.
 
Pretty good mod so far, only just got up to the "antlion infestation" section. Voice work is a bit ordinary but the woman who did mossman's voice did an ok job clarity wise. It's got a bit of variety too and it's not stupidly hard.
 
Good mod. Lots of good work has gone into this ......


..... on the other hand it's kind of made me realise how bored I am getting with HL2 content. Even the best looking mods are looking dated now & the gameplay isn't to exciting either. The same thing happened with HL. The extra levels & mods started to feel really stagnated in the end. No fault of the mod makers. There's just only so many zombies & enemy soldiers you can kill & so many ventilation shafts you can be arsed crawling through!
 
The voice acting in this mod has the same fault as all the other mods that have tried voice acting: they speak so silently you can't hear a word, you have to crank up the volume to hear something. And there's no subtitles.
 
There are subtitles, its just now working for some reason, probebly a bug in the base-sdk engine, because the choreography tool is finding them ...
I tried my best getting the sounds louder, but I guess its how the voice actors recorded it, The only results we got was louder with alot more noise as well.

re Kupoartist,
You don't need the sdk, just the sourcesdk-base engine , it installs automaticly anyway.
(that all mods should use since last august since its the EP1 source engine)

In HL2 you didn't get all weapons right away either, hmm but maybe I should have added that 2nd pistol and located it somewhere early on :)

Maybe I should have removed the buggy, but then people would probebly have complained about long walks. The Tau gun is removed by the sdk-base engine in august and could not fix it. According to Valve, the verhicle code was for the Ep2 verhicle now, what makes no sence because we can't use that anyway for mods.

And thanks for playing :)
 
Oh yeah, vehicle_jeep_episodic. Came into the SDK with the Ep1 update.
 
the game keeps crashing in the point when I first see the antlions and I try jumping back to the other side of the broken bridge
 
Au-heppa said:
the game keeps crashing in the point when I first see the antlions and I try jumping back to the other side of the broken bridge
Click to expand...

Looks like more people suffer from it,
I had crashes myself but they apeared to be fixed when I moved the supergravgun to the end of the map.
You don't have to get on the other side again btw,
Just follow a pipe to the glass tunnel.

Its possible that selecting a new game and selecting the last chapter reduces the chance of crashing, especially if you try to get out that cave asap when the power is turned on.
 
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