Folks, I believe we’re going to need to let Half-Life go. It’s been over a decade since Valve did something with the license (past cross-promotion deals), and the seemingly posthumous leak of the sequel’s planned story beats cemented the sense that the sequence wouldn’t be returning any time quickly.
Seemingly disinterested in utilizing it themselves, Valve have been approving the usage of the Half-Life setting and belongings (if not the identify) to be used in business fan-works, Hunt Down The Freeman feels prefer it may simply be the final nail within the coffin for the sequence, if public response thusfar has been any indication.
Of course, this isn’t the primary case of Valve formally authorising Half-Life fan-works for business launch on Steam. On high of the wonderful (however nonetheless unfinished) Half-Life 1 remake Black Mesa, we’ve just lately seen the likes of mod-turned-commercial launch Prospekt. Hunt Down The Freeman from Royal Rudius Entertainment is among the extra formidable business fan-projects so far, promising a full size marketing campaign set in between Half-Life 1 & 2 propped up by a bevy of totally voiced pre-rendered cutscenes. Sadly, this appears a case of overreaching past the developer’s means in extra of even the deliriously wonky EYE: Divine Cybermancy.
While I don’t have a overview copy of it to dig deep myself, I’ve watched a good quantity of Hunt Down The Freeman being streamed, sufficient to get a tough measure of its qualities. Visually, it manages to look a number of years behind the unique launch of Half-Life 2. Despite making an attempt to leverage a number of the fancier visible results solely obtainable in later iterations of the Source engine, the world of Hunt Down The Freeman is stuffed with outsized, under-decorated corridors, industrial-scale buildings with nary an merchandise of litter to outline the area, and outside segments that includes terrain that manages to be blurrily textured and awkwardly angular in equal measure.
Mechanically, there are some concepts right here that appear good on paper, however are executed poorly. In making an attempt to painting the brief however doomed protection that Earth’s militaries put up towards the Combine, virtually each encounter seems scaled up haphazardly, with dozens of AI combatants on either side, firing wildly. When not accompanied by a gaggle of NPC minions, the participant has to deal with equally up-scaled hordes of zombies and headcrabs. On high of that, the sport makes an attempt to make gunplay extra lifelike by way of a minimalist HUD, an absent crosshair, and a requirement to purpose down every weapon’s sights for any sort of accuracy, a call seemingly at odds with the elevated enemy density.
All of this might be dangerous sufficient by itself, however among the many litany of complaints from those that have performed the sport is that it’s greater than a bit buggy, incessantly crash-prone and customarily unpolished. The developer has issued a confusing yet broadly apologetic statement, opening with a declare that they had been pressured to launch by unfavourable press coming from Half-Life followers dissatisfied by what they noticed of the sport throughout improvement. They go on to say that the sport that they (and we) at the moment are seeing by way of different participant’s streams and movies isn’t what they imagine they’ve on their improvement machines.
This weird declare is adopted up by a suggestion that some error in file group might have put an unfinished construct out into the general public’s arms, which might be a extra convincing argument in the event that they weren’t already incrementally patching the model that was simply launched, straight addressing a number of the extra obvious faults identified by gamers. Royal Rudius Entertainment go on to state that ‘We will release the actual version of the game we were supposed to release’. If they do, we’ll be the primary to let you understand, however by some means I discover myself skeptical.
Hunt Down The Freeman is available to buy on Steam for £19.49/$25, minus a launch low cost, however you in all probability shouldn’t.
