Mitchell gets embroiled in the Seven-Hour War against the Combine, bridging the plot of Half-Life 1 and 2, just in case it didn't sound unmitigatedly galling enough yet, and what follows is a showcase of some of the worst level design ever commercially sold. Why else would he solemnly swear epic revenge upon someone who, to him, should just be one random pimply scientist committing the sin of not wanting to be killed? In truth, Gordon Freeman is rather conspicuously absent from a game with his name and, indeed, lovely marketable face all over its Steam store page there's an in-game screenshot on there showing his face that's a flat-out stinking lie. See, it's not just that the plot only makes sense if you know the plot of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 it's also that it only makes sense if you assume the main character also knows the plot of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. ![]() But instead, Gordon Freeman kills all our pals and duffs us up with a crowbar, whereupon we swear revenge on his orange ass. As for the actual story, you are a soldier bloke called Mitchell, who was one of the soldier blokes sent into Black Mesa in the original Half-Life to kill Gordon Freeman and all his scientist pals. ![]() Hunt Down The Freeman is also weirdly plot-heavy, interrupting its shitty levels regularly for elaborate Source Filmmaker cutscenes, starring multiple intense soldier dudes who all look like they were created at the Mass Effect character customization screen with about 90% of the options removed and sound like they had that usual mod problem where every character has different audio quality because the actors were recording with their personal headset mics they more commonly use to swear at twelve-year-olds in Counter-Strike. It's also fairly obviously nicked a lot of its new content, weapons, and level architecture from asset stores and other mods as, again, some of it looked competently made, but has all been dropped into the game with the care and precision with which turds are placed at the bottom of a budgie cage, the kind of thing where you walk into an overlarge room and there's just twelve zombies arranged in a neat row because I guess the people in this room were doing the fucking hokey cokey when the aliens invaded. ![]() The staggering thing is that this is a fan game embellishing Valve's story, using Valve's intellectual property, being sold for actual money on Valve's own distribution network, and therefore, carries an unspoken stamp of endorsement, despite being truly, madly, ovarian cyst-ingly bad on every imaginable level, in ways that only bad fan games can be: the unique juxtaposition of the professional art assets and mechanics of the original game, taken apart and reassembled in the clumsiest way possible, like an art gallery storage room after an earthquake. The staggering thing about Hunt Down The Freeman is not that it exists if we had to stop the presses every time someone made a shitty fan game, the presses wouldn't be running long enough to print a fucking Bazooka Joe comic. Some of them might even do something as drastic and self-destructive as pay actual money for Hunt Down The Freeman! But please, if you're even considering it, remember that there is always help out there and, failing that, morphine tablets. With the epic and scintillating story of Half-Life that we all spent fifteen years getting invested in now, it seems, resigned to end on an unresolved cliffhanger, fans of Half-Life may now turn to drastic means for the sake of some kind of closure: fan fiction, cosplay, allowing Valve to essentially monopolize digital distribution of PC games. ![]() Sorry to fumble open an old wound like a frustrated teenage cinemagoer on a fourth date, but what do we think actually happened to Half-Life 3? Was it just shunted down a priority list because Team Fortress 2 needed some more fucking hats? Or, knowing Valve, did they almost finish it two or three times, only to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch 'cos they weren't 100% satisfied with the color of the tomato sauce bottles in the 50's diner level? (That is to say, knowing Valve from back when they were game developers and didn't just spend all day sitting atop their dragon's hoard of plunder, gently rubbing their scaly bell-ends with an emery board.)
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