Half Life. It’s been out eight, nearly nine, years now. Still one of the best games ever, but seemingly eclipsed by Half Life 2. Recently I played Someplace Else, a mod for HL that’s been around for a while, interest only kicked up because of the related mod series for Half Life 2, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sure, the graphics might be a bit dated, the sound effects a tad tedious, but at the end of the day the plot and gameplay were better than most recent games I’ve gone out and bought! I thought that all the good mods for Half Life 1 had already been released, long gone stagnant in favour of its new, flashier brother. But I was wrong. Poke646 recently released their new mod for HL and it is killer.
You see my PC was bought mainly for work, and as such lacks the graphical power required to play most modern games. This forced me to give up favourites like Far Cry and Halo and switch back to the classics I first started playing. Counter Strike 1.6 is my most played game currently, due more to the fact that CS: Source has been butchered so badly I couldn’t take playing it any longer. So, with a new PC, I went back to the old games. Half Life, Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, even Hitman and Aliens vs Predator. And after I’d finished with them I started hunting for mods. There are the main ones, Natural Selection, BrainBread, but I found them lacking after a while. I wanted single player action. So I eventually found Someplace Else, enjoyed that and then couldn’t really find anything else good for a while. Three days ago Poke 646 released a sequel to their first game, called Poke 646: Vendetta.
I’ve never played Poke 646, the first game, though I’m downloading it now, but if the sequel is anything to go by it has got to be good. Vendetta picks up where the first game left off (I assume). Trapped in a crappy Zen world you have to somehow make it back to Earth to stop an evil doctor who left you to die and is now planning to nuke an entire city to hide his mistakes. The story isn’t really all that important here, you’re mainly going to shoot anyone and anything in your path and hope to make it to the next area.
Battles are weighted perfectly, supplies right where you need them and the level design is some of the best I’ve seen in any game, commercial or free. For example; taking a train journey (not as long as the ones in HL for which I’m grateful) you eventually arrive out of the ground into a glass tunnel, the enemy HQ looming ahead. It’s brilliantly done, everything fits and makes the whole place feel real. And once you get inside the action never lets up with innovative problems I’ve never seen in any other HL mod. Laser grids tied to turrets, cameras, even portals (yes portals as in Portals, but only one). The whole thing feels like a frantic battle to survive, effortlessly transitioning between outpost worlds to cities, libraries to sewers, yet it never gets too much, never leaves you frustrated for long. If anything the game is too short and too easy, especially compared to Someplace Else which took me a good while to complete.
The custom weapons (of which there are five) all have their unique purposes. There aren’t the usual ten pistols, five rifles and multitudinous grenades, here you have a pipe to hit things, rifle to shoot things, shotgun to blast things, crossbow to snipe things and a stick of dynamite which comes in mighty handy with some of the bosses. And that’s something that I missed from previous HL mods, the obligatory boss battles. Although there were only two they each felt perfect in their composition, and the final fight did make my jaw drop, something I haven’t felt in a long time.
Considering the shortness and also limited variation in enemies, this game felt in no way stagnant or hastily put together. It brought back memories of Half Life I’d long forgotten, the head scratching puzzles, sudden surprises and also new elements alongside. Laptops providing information, cameras tied to turrets, and a lot of innovation on the developers part. This mod really does breath new life into something I thought was all but dead.
Overall Poke 646: Vendetta might have an unusual name, might look a bit dated and seem a bit abstract, but give it a chance. This is one of the better mods I’ve played and if people are still making new content for an eight year old game, I think it definitely has some life left in it yet.
My Rating: 89%
