Half-Life: Emergency

What we?ve got here is another fairly good attempt at a Half-Life mod that in places falls just short of perfection. Now, I?m not going to say that this could have been one of the best mods out there or anything, but it certainly could have been lot better than it was, had the mapper(s) put a bit more effort into conceiving a believable plot, and polishing off the maps. And while I?m not sure of all the fine nuances in the plot, since all the text is in Russian/Latvian, the author?s brief description of it gives me a fairly good idea what I?m doing.

Starting out in what is apparently your apartment, you seem to detect that something is amiss. After getting what is in all likelihood a sinister phone call, you grab an axe that is conveniently lying in the hallway next to some dead bodies, and break your window open to crawl down to ground level. Why there wasn?t an escape ladder, I don?t know, but there?s a bunch of zombies crawling around for no apparent reason, and basic instinct tells you that you should probably hit them with that axe you conveniently picked up.

When you get outside, you immediately notice a glaring flaw with the mapping. For no apparent reason, somebody decided it would be a good idea to set the draw distance obscenely low in this huge environment. This problem persists throughout EVERY SINGLE outdoor map. What were they thinking? Not only that, but there is a definitive edge to this city map, and you can look right over into the skybox.

After nabbing a truck and escaping your whacked out neighborhood, you come to what could have been a quite stunning outdoor map. The ambience here is exceptional, and you?re surrounded on all sides by fairly well made cliffs and boulders, but yet again, the draw distance is set so you can?t see 100 feet in front of you. Damn.

Anyway, after bashing some more zombie heads in, you eventually come to the entrance of a facility built into the rocks. I?m not sure how your player knew it was there, but once inside, you?re basically going around pressing buttons and running through hallways, killing the occasional zombie or Vortigaunt. There?s almost no increase in difficulty throughout the entire mod. Almost.

This is where things get a little strange. You enter a teleporter in the facility, and appear to have been sent to Xen, but according to the author you are actually an entirely different person now. You do the standard annoying Xen jumping puzzles, and end up getting hit on the head with a stray rock (lolwut?) and captured by aliens. This is where things get REALLY strange. Apparently, you?re now inside an alien coliseum, and you?ve just finished praying in front of an alter (LOLWUT?!?) when you?re sent out to battle a bunch of aliens in an extremely difficult match. You?d better be playing on easy, or you?ll have no chance at this. After a wave of Vortigaunts attack you from all directions, a Gargantua is thrown in the ring. I never got passed this part, but your tolerance will be tested here. Not only is it seemingly impossible to kill this thing with the weapons you?re given, but the arena has a bunch of rubble that?s been poorly clipped, and you end up getting stuck on invisible walls and little brushes while trying desperately to escape.

What?s so sad is that the mapping here is actually quite good in places, but then they had to go and botch up the gameplay. My recommendation would be to avoid this, as I had little to no fun playing it.

Oh... hey, was there supposed to be fog like in the screenshot? Because that didn't work for me, but I'm sure it would have fixed the draw distance problem.

^ lol! ^

Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to nitpick without being quite specific. :S

I don't know what it was about this mod, but I enjoyed it, good work.

If you doesn`t understand plese use Russian-English Dictoniary. Or tell me i translate you =)

=P the fact that makes me shocked, is that there is someone from my country mapping

Latvian? My Country Got to download

in the arena those rocks sucked because i couldnt hide behind them cuz they were models...and srry you can kill the garg but only w explosives...and the mod was ok, actualy im working on one right now and coincidently you start out in a room and its raining outside and you have to break a window w a crow bar to get out. Thow the mod was ok it realy made like no sense and on my comp. it was very laggy but hey it killed some time so ill give you that:)

I know you could kill the Garg, I just found it needlessly frustrating, and I didn't find it worth my time after already playing the rest of the fairly lackluster mod.

well hmm ima smellim some motivation to get mine done:)

Tried to D/L, but the hosting page is down ATM, says they're having some technical difficulties..

http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/half-life-emergency-half-life/

Here is Links to Download.