Mod Corner - Half-Life: Echoes

it's been kinda rough going for half-life fans recently not only have we all had to come to grips with the fact that episode three is probably never gonna happen but we also had to endure the awful hunt Dion the Freeman again that tried to take the existing storyline into its own hands and try and salvage what it could telling a story running parallel to give hints of half-life one in two but I doubt I need to tell you have it all turned out spoiler it was a steaming polish [ __ ] you [ __ ] up my face we did get that kind of late script or whatever you want to call it that basically outline the plans that valve had with wrapping the whole thing up but I mean let's not mince words the cold hard truth and finding out that we probably are never gonna see half-life 3 is a bitter pill to swallow but all hope is not lost because recently there's been a fantastic single-player mod called half life echoes let's done one hunt down the frame and try to do but failed which was used the foundation upon what the half-life series is built on and tell an interesting story on top of that including clever level design and enjoyable gameplay this mod even uses plot elements from some of the information we got leaked about episode 3 and there's references to characters from half-life 2 II thrown into the mix now having said that this video might be considered a little bit spoiler heavy the mod isn't really all that long and I didn't have that much footage to work with but I've tried to get things to a minimum in terms of what gets shown but look if you're really that worried about it I'd suggest go playing the mod then come back and watch my video I'll still be here I promise now it's a little bit ambiguous as to who you're playing as I think you're just some random scientist working for Black Mesa who for some reason is really good at shooting things the game starts off with you moving around the Black Mesa facility on the same day that Gordon Freeman and the rest of the eggheads in the anomalous materials department caused the resonance cascade that turns the facility into a war zone and basically just [ __ ] up planet earth from that point on it's really cool walking around the facility interacting with random NPCs and seeing a side of the base we've not seen before a lot of which is entirely new and original throughout this prologue sequence there's this huge sense of foreboding I mean we all know what's coming and it's just a matter of when not if sure enough eventually the entire base is rattled as Gordon does his thing opening portals throughout the basis the Xen creatures swarm in and start ruining everyone's day I think every half-life game and the official mods have always handled their prologues pretty well in terms of setting everything up and making the tension so thick that you could cut it with a crowbar and anyone who's played the half-life games knows they're a bit of a slow burn and echoes doesn't do things any differently so don't expect to start off with a shotgun crossbow or RPG right from the beginning you can expect to spend a fair bit of time unarmed in fact you spend a considerable amount of time in this mod without any weapons I'd say maybe 25% of the until I think and then even when you do get the crowbar you're mostly just up against headcrabs and headcrab zombies both of which are often easier just avoiding them trying to tackle head-on especially the headcrabs which still retain their rank is one of the most annoying [ __ ] in the entire half-life series along with the houndeyes and snarks now Echo's does play along similar beats to you other games it's a mix of exploration combat and some like puzzle solving most of which involved just like activating a button or some kind of lever they're not terribly challenging if you're at all familiar with the series and they just require a bit of common sense the first VR is emotionally underground and against the Zen creatures like the vortigaunts the bull squids and headcrabs you don't have all that much ammo at this point and it almost feels like survival horror in some ways especially if you're playing on hard mode then the military is slowly introduced now you initially only see them from a distance during a scripted sequence before they start showing up during actual combat combat against the military is pretty good without being amazing and these guys show off half-decent artificial intelligence throwing grenades your way if you stand still for too long and being quite aggressive and rushing a position but a shotgun blast to the face or a head shot from the Colt pythons gonna take him out pretty quickly then finally the last few areas in the game kind of mirror surface tension from half-life 1 where you're on the surface engaging in almost constant gunfights with the military but now also trading shots with them and the Zen creatures as the entire place is engaged in all that warfare this is a kind of every-man-for-himself situation and you're always given the upper hand in these scenarios dropped into the middle of a fight between both groups and able to choose how you want to engage them it's a pacing tactic that worked in half-life 1 and it works here again and echoes I mean if you're gonna be thrust straight into the action from the get-go there'd be no time to get used to the weapons and the behavior of enemies but slowly progressing things along like this gives the play the time to accommodate themselves with the kind of enemies they're gonna come up against it's a constant crescendo that just keeps on rising throwing more and more challenges that the player but also making sure that challenge is implemented properly and this carries over to the weapons so you start off with the crowbar then you get a pistol the shotgun and eventually the machine gun and most of the other weapons now look I'd love to shoot a skybox for 12 minutes and show you all the new guns but sadly it's just the original lineup from before not that that's really a bad thing almost all of half-life's guns are rudimentary but they are workhorse and they all serve a purpose but like I said before the progression of acquiring these guns is handled pretty well and there was only like a couple of times early on when I started to get a bit irritated about how slow things were feeling you'll interact with other NPCs along the way too and what I think was a good choice too was reusing existing dialogue and voice lines instead of hiring voice actors to do new stuff or heaven forbid the mod is doing the voice acting themselves one thing I always find laughable in half-life mods is when the modders try their hand at voice acting it's rarely a good idea and it never really works out go listen to some of the dialogue and underhill to see what I'm talking about just get rid of me man also too if you get multiple people doing this on different microphones you have that problem too where someone's dialogue sounds entirely different to someone else's because of the acoustics of the room they recorded it in or the microphone they used my point is what they've done here is a smarter idea there's a couple of instances where I'd say these moments with the other NPCs almost bordering to being in a scored quest the path finding of the half-life game has always been kind of dog [ __ ] and this mod just again kind of proves it but thankfully these segments are pretty sure didn't look they just require a bit of patience visually the level design in half-life hackers also shows a real sense of Polish there's some really good-looking environments in this mod especially early on during the moments when this [ __ ] has hit the fan and things are crumbling around you quite literally the higher polygon count with the level designers some of the lighting effects just looks great I think it's probably one of the best-looking mods to run on the gold source engine I mean I'm not any kind of authority on half-life mods but I struggle to think of something off the top of my head that looks better outside of how the environments look visually also the way they function during gameplay and combat is really good too now I'd say that roughly the last 25% of the mod is mostly combat against the Marines and anyone who's played the half-life games knows how crappy this shooting can sometimes be because combat is almost entirely based around line sight a lot of the areas you fight the hecu often have plenty of objects you're able to use as cover allowing for the play to make sure they're not always exposing themselves and have a means of breaking line-of-sight and not getting pelted by like half a dozen enemies at once aside from that though during the parts of the mod where you're just exploring or trying to navigate the environment the use of lighting is really deliberate in trying to be as helpful as possible by using certain colors or just making a light source more obvious to direct your eye to an item or an area of interest the highlight though I think is the scripted sequences some of which are just really impressive and entertaining like watching a bunch of Marines fighting with a gargantuan that's just busted down a giant metal shutter is pretty damn awesome one thing the original half-life did quite well was sort of introduced the whole scripted sequence thing into FPS games well if maybe it didn't introduce it but it sure did help kind of pioneering I mean it could have been simple things like in we've got hostiles how enemies would rappel out of a chopper well something else as simple as the headcrab zombie smashing a door down to give you a bit of a jump skip the scripted sequences and echoes are a lot more elaborate to the kind of level we saw in half-life 2 on a much larger scale involving a lot more NPCs and clearly taken a lot more effort and skill to construct one of the main recurring ones involves this gargantuan whether it's just chasing after the player for almost the entire campaign and some of the little instances when you encounter it are really well done it's also a neat way of shifting the paradigm on how the game plays like one minute you're feeling in control then like you've got a handle on things then suddenly this thing turns up and reminds you how insignificant you really are and you hightail it out of the area to avoid getting roasted or stomped on so what didn't I like about the mod well I mean I guess it's over too quickly though that's not really an outright fault and considering the fact that that's been worked on by mostly one person I think it's still damn impressive the whole thing's even been made in the first place obviously - if you don't like half-life you're probably not gonna like this I mean the mod is great but it's not gonna win you over whatever you didn't like about half-life is still gonna be prevalent here - overall though look I really like the modern I can't really find any kind of major fault with it anything I could think of would just be nitpicking I mean for a free mod the quality here is outstanding half-life fakirs has done a really good job at taking a spin on an existing universe and storyline and trying to do its own thing and you know what it does it pretty damn well if someone [ __ ] it to me and told me this was some kind of official valve mod I probably would have believed them because it has that same level of polish and quality from the original games and in some ways even more because it shows a concise and profound understanding of level design and pacing hump down the Fremen was an insult to the half-life modding scene it was a colossal piece of [ __ ] half-life ecers however is an absolute blessing and that's suggest anyone who's a fan of half-life check it out it's a great throwback that feels like something made back in 1998 but in the best way possible

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 373,050

Keywords: halflife echoes review, halflife echoes mod, halflife echoes trailer, halflife mods, halflife 2 review, halflife episode 3, source engine, gold source engine, goldsrc engine, counter strike, cs go, halflife engine, halflife 2 gameplay, source mods, moddb, first person shooter, fps games, black mesa, blue shift, opposing force, playstation 4, xbox one, microsoft windows, gggmanlives, best mod of 2018, best fps mods, best halflife mods, halflife 2 episode three

Id: nITrAwChI0E

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 28 2018