From Gearbox Software comes the first official
expansion pack for the undisputed Game of the Year '98 --
Half-Life: Opposing Force. For those of you that haven't heard of,
seen, or even played Valve's original smash-hit-success, Half-Life, I
suggest you go to your local dealer and purchase it at once -- to
put it short and sweet, it's amazing. However, since this is a
review of Opposing Force and not Half-Life itself, focus will be
taken on the new story line, new weapons, new single and
multiplayer levels, and new race of monsters that exist within this
title.
Half-Life: Opposing Force pretty much follows the same
story line as the original, but this time around, instead of taking on
the role of Gordon Freeman, you become the opposing force: a
military corporal by the name of Adrian Sheppard. When you
begin your mission, not much is known about it. You are first
treated to a cinematic sequence in a chopper of your fellow
soldiers and yourself chatting about the purpose of heading to
Black Mesa. Things go wrong, and your aircraft goes down hard.
You find yourself in a building with a scientist and two dead
soldiers. From there, your journey begins. As with the original
Half-Life, I was sucked right in by Opposing Force. Only a few
minutes into the game you are treated to some pretty fantastic
looking scenes and sequences, and you are faced with terrible
danger. You'll have to play at least until you get to the scene
where the room decays and fills in with radioactive ooze to know
where I am coming from. Gearbox seems to have also improved
the AI portion just a little. When you meet up with fellow soldiers,
one will be as smart as to take out a torch and bust down a door
for you to go through. Soldiers also didn't seem to have too hard
of a time following me -- in the original Half-Life they would
always seem to get stuck behind doors and around corners. As
usual, you have the option of killing your allies. It's a pretty easy
thing to do being that it takes a lot more to get the soldier's to
shoot back at you. In my experiences, it seems you can shoot a
fellow soldier two or three times before he takes it personally.
And as you beat them across the back of the head with the wrench
or shoot them in the groin with your shotgun, you're treated to
certain militant commands such as "Friendly-fire sir!
Friendly-fire!", and "I'm hurt, but I think I can go on, sir!".
There are obviously no enhancements graphically,
being that it still the same engine, however Gearbox made an
excellent use of textures and lighting in the single and multiplayer
levels. A new feature that is definitely worth mentioning is night
vision. Gearbox has replaced the standard flash light with night
vision goggles. This is incredibly helpful in pitch black areas, as
well as some nice eye candy. Also the on-screen stats (health
level / amount of ammo) are a pretty nice lookin' green with scan
lines now!
The singleplayer and multiplayer level design is
extremely top notch. If I understand correctly the multiplayer
maps were made by the best in business. The game ships with 13
multiplayer maps (op4_ .. bootcamp, datacore, demise, disposal,
gasworks, kbase, kndyone, meanie, outpost, park, repent, rubble,
xendance). You may recognize some of these map names -- it
seems that they've barely touched up some of the most popular
multiplayer maps and simply renamed them with the "op4" prefix.
The only differences I noticed were that the new weapons were
added, and this new creature that sits on ceilings. I'm not quite
sure what exactly you call it, but it seems if you shoot it, a ball
comes out and bounces around the room until either it hits you
and hurts you, or blows up on the wall. Unfortunately I was only
able to try one multiplayer map, since out of 2000 WON servers,
only 1 was running an opposing force map (op4_rubble). I had to
fire up a LAN game to check some of the other maps. The level
design on op4_rubble was pretty good -- an indoor type of
environment with a place you could fall off the edge of the planet
-- definitely original. The single player environment is simply
amazing. For those that have played the original Half-Life, you'll
recognize a few places that you visited in Black Mesa previously
as Gordon, as well as a ton of new areas with new puzzles to
solve. So far in my journey, it's been a perfect mixture of old and
new scenery to let me know that while I'm still in the Black Mesa
facility, I am playing a totally new game. One quirk though in the
level designs I found were that some of the jumps were a bit
annoying. For example, in one area you have to jump up and
over some boxes to continue. The boxes are just so high that I
had to jump quite a few times to get up onto them. Also a new
method of I noticed of getting around is climbing ropes. This had
me puzzled as to what to do for quite some time being that I had
never seen it before. Be careful though, because the ropes look
an awful lot like the monsters with the tongue's dangling from the
ceiling.
As for the new monsters -- I've only gotten past a few
episodes, and have already noticed 2 or 3 new species. One
species that I came in contact with seemed to be the next stage
formation after the head crap takes over a body. It consists of legs,
arms, a body, and its head is just a huge mouth with a ton of sharp
teeth. Another species' hind legs represented those of a kangaroo.
However instead of hopping like a kangaroo, it runs like an
ostrich. This particular species had close range attacks as well as
a far range attack where it would shoot sharp objects out of its
mouth.
As well as the old weapons, there are a lot of new
weapons. A total of seven weapon slots are not accessible.
However, being that the "impulse 101" cheat is not functioning in
Opposing Force, I had to find a few of the weapons around the
multiplayer levels. There are now 4 close-range weapons (that I
found) in slot 1. Which is pretty nice being that the original
Half-Life had only 1 -- the crowbar. The best close-range weapon
would have to be 'sucker-guy' (for lack of a better name, or the
correct one even). The monsters who inhabit the ceilings of the
game now fit into your two hands. When you pull the trigger, the
tongue comes out and sucks opponents in.
My major problem with Opposing Force is the music.
The sound effects for the speech, weapons, monsters, and other
assorted events is perfect, but the music just isn't as good as the
original. Valve did such a superb job on the original Half-Life
soundtrack that it's worth listening to even when you're not playing
the game. Although the music isn't awful, it doesn't live up to the
original in anyway.
Over the years, we’ve beared witness to a number of FPS
expansion packs, many of which don’t even come close to
matching the atmosphere and gameplay of their predecessors.
Half-Life: Opposing Force does exactly that. It’ll reel you in the
moment you start playing it and will surely keep Half-Life fans busy
for weeks to come.