Half-Life: Prospekt - my review
So today, after 2 years in development, the most anticipated recently mod for Half-Life 2, that earned green light from Valve themselves, called "Prospekt" finally got released. Many people boarded the hype train after this game ended up on Steam Greenlight, but was it worth waiting for? I won't lie, it wasn't. It's just another mod, but with a price tag on it. But let's start from the begining.
Prospekt is unofficial sequel to highly rated expansion for original Half-Life, the Opposing Force. Once again the game puts us in boots (and vest) of young US marine, corporal Adrian Shephard. As the author himself described the plot on game's Steam page: "Prospekt begins in the Nova Prospekt prison in the Half-Life universe. Gordon Freeman is slowly being overrun by soldiers in the prison, however unknown to him, his Vortigaunt allies manage to find some help from a forgotten hero." And this is pretty much all information you will be given in terms of story. Not good.
[center]Rise from doom
[/center]At the very begining of the game our protagonist, Adrian Shephard, is released from stasis by Vortigaunts and send to Nova Prospekt. Narration in intro, describing us what happened after events of Black Mesa incident is cheesy and, as someone described it "cringe", the intro itself lasts way too long. It's just 3 minutes of continuous, poorly acted and unnecessary exposition.
[center]
First couple of minutes into the game feels like the begining of Amnesia: the Dark Descent - we walk around abandoned corridors of the Nova Prospekt prison and occasionally listen to Adrian's flashbacks from the time when he was a soldier assigned to Santego millitary base and even from Black Mesa facility, simply because the game has no plot on it's own. Everytime a flashback begins, our view gets distorted and we hear voices of our fellow marines talking to eachother, about Adrian, about their mission in Black Mesa, or even about the G-Man himself. Worth mentioning is the fact that except for those flashbacks we won't see any of our comrades, or even no friendly NPCs for that matter. Voices in retrospections are decent, but why are they taking 3-second pauses every few sentenses? And by the way, this is now the very first Half-Life game where we get to hear the "f" word uncensored. It's not a big deal tho.
[center]Plot? What plot?
[/center]Even tho Prospekt was said to take place in prison well known from Half-Life universe (which was indicated even by the title itself), only first few chapters take place in Nova Prospekt. Which brings us a question: if it is set by the time Gordon Freeman's assault on the prison, then how is it possible that no one in HL2 noticed Adrian's presence in there? I know that Prospekt is not canon, but the very premise of it contradicts with HL2 this way.
Early in the 'game' we get to see the portal chamber in Nova Prospekt getting destroyed after that Gordon and Alyx escaped the prison. Everything is crumbling so we have to quikly jump into portal to escape ourselves. It's obviously just the same scene as in Opposing Force, where we've seen Gordon teleporting to Xen, wow. After that, we get to some other area that looks like Nova Prospekt. Or is it still Nova Prospekt? I don't know, it blew up in a portal explosion, so we have to be somewhere else. But it's never told to us, so we don't know where we are. Overall, just like in Opposing Forse, Shephard is mostly teleporting and wandering around random areas for no reason and with no explaination of why he does that.
[center]Worlds Collide...
[/center]As I mentioned before, the very begining is set inside, and partialy outside, the prison Nova Prospekt. And it's pretty much Nova Prospekt as we know it from Half-Life 2. There are some standard puzzles here and there, like puting a box somewhere to be able to climb up and continue traversing throught corridors.
After we leave Nova Prospekt, we teleport to other places overtaken by the Universal Union. Some of these levels look kinda neat, areas like the swimming pool are looking good, and have a neat addition of combine hight-tech stuff here and there, but some are average and boring aswell.
Nearly halfway throught the game, however, setting is changed as we get deeper into Combine structures. These Combine areas are cool, the author really nailed it, imo. They feel alien, I have to admit this, some areas are even better than what we've get in HL2! At some point, seeing how we're actually on a Combine space station orbiting Earth bellow was unexpected and really refreshing! They look cool, but then again, the monotone metal corridors get boring quikly. Sadly, they last for too long... These areas, despite their great design, are mostly schematical; a bunch of hallways, a big chamber with some device in the middle, copy+paste, copy+paste.
At some point we even get to Xen, now under Combine control, but it doesn't look really cool and we don't do much in there, except for killing some soldiers and jumping on floating islands. Why don't show us some sort of Xenian rebelion against the Combine? Let us see Vortigaunts and maybe even alien grunts and controllers fighting with the invaders. But noo, we don't even get to see synths in Xen, or in the entire game for that matter (but I will talk on this later). And why is everything covered in green fog? The best part about Xen in Half-Life and its expansions was how beautiful it was, sadly here we can't behold any of the wonders of the Border World, because of the forementioned fog that covers everything in 20m radius from player.
We are not alone...
[/center]So much bitching already and I still didn't mentioned the most important thing in all of FPS genre: enemies and weapons. So Enemies: for most of the time we fight the same combine soldiers and antlions we've seen in HL2 before, sometimes (at the begining) we occasionaly encounter headcrabs and barnacles, but why, oh why there's literally no Combine Synth units? We can see a gunship TWICE and that's it! We almost don't fight any other combine units than just soldiers, the exception being several manhacks and two, I repeat TWO hunters, in the swimming pool area I mentioned before...
Continuation of Adrian Shephards adventures really begs for addition of new enemies, as well as old ones, like the mysterious race x. Weapons: again, nothing new. The weapons are the same as in HL2, and some of them were cut away, apparently Adrian even wears HEV gloves on his hands (repainted to have a millitary look, but still).
And this is my biggest issue with Prospekt - it wastes the potential that lays in Half-Life universe. It has no story, it reuses enemies, weapons and locations known from Valve's piece of art. Instead of setting it in a different time span, in a different place on Earth that would allow and justify addition of new characters, plot and creatures, creator decided to set his game in the exact same time and place as Half-Life 2. And this is why I was not expecting much from it. And it turns out I called it...
[center]"I didn't sign up for this shit!"
[/center]Seeing how after few hours possitive reviews of Prospekt on Steam are slowly but systematically overruned by negative ones I realise how many people got dissapointed by it. My guess is they were expecting too much, for me, it turned out to be exactly what I expected it to be. Sadly. It really doesn't deserve being called a half-life game, and it isn't worth paying 10$ for. The gameplay is average, it doesn't introduce nothing new or special and the campaing is hillariously short. It's just an average mod for Half-Life 2, but a mediocre game on it's own. I know it was made by only one person, and I apreciate that. But it it doesn't make Prospekt any better as a game.
Seeing Prospekt makes me sad that Opposing Force 2 got cancelled. The creator, Richard Seabrook, mentioned that he's going to spend money earned from Prospekt on making another game. I have to admit, he's a really good mapper, but only mapper. And that's obvious when you see Prospekt. Making a game requiers a crew of people, a development team, who know their job, and this game lacks a crew. Better play some free mods like Minerva: Metastasis, or wait for Operation: Black Mesa, a fan remake of Opposing Force or even go buy Black Mesa. Prospekt is a waste of time and money.
I will take the liberty and leave a link to full Prospekt walkthrough by Bolloxed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKtZH_Cieq8
All images taken from Prospekt page on Steam
Prospekt belongs to its rightful owner