Half-Life: Opposing Force

  

Going into Half Life: Opposing Force I figured it would just be a nifty little spinoff 'expansion' of half life 1 and wouldnt give me much trouble or pain. Something strange to note is that this isn't developed by Valve, but rather Gearbox

In Opposing Force you play the role as the military being sent into Black Mesa after Gordan, this is a cool and clever premise and a good excuse to re-use original locations and levels but in a new way. Much of the game you will revisit familliar, but tweaked or expanded areas of Half Life , this is both a pro and a con, on one hand it is cool to revisit familliar areas through a different point of view, it also does feel a bit too samey, like "i've already beaten this game" .

Opposing Force largely feels the same as HL1, you have some new weapons like the Desert eagle, Sniper rifle, Some weird alien weapons etc. But youll mostly stick to the standard weapons from first game.

Opposing Force has more of an emphesis on AI team mates, frequently youll come across sections where there are other military guys you can ask to follow you around / require their help to open doors and such. These guys become almost required to keep alive because unfortunately this game has a massive flaw:

The difficulty spikes are totally insane, and this is honestly one of the hardest FPS games ive ever played. There is only 3 difficulties, Easy, medium, hard. I chose medium.

The difficulty curve is just nuts. The game is piss easy for awhile, as you fight the standard enemies like zombies, alien dogs, mutated alien monsters etc.. but about halfway through the game it introduces these 'Black ops' enemies, which also include these female assassins, and holy fuck these guys are INSANE. I dont know if my game was glitching out or what, but they were huge bullet sponges that needed an entire mag dumped into them, while they had pinpoint perfect accuracy and would annihilate my health in seconds. For basically the entire game, I was always under 50 health. You come across health maybe once every 15 minutes, and you lose all of it the moment you come across one of these fucking enemies. Its so frustrating. I would crawl around frequently with under 20 health just trying to exploit the AI, keep my team mates alive, get lucky headshots, etc. Extremely hard.

These black ops soldiers are so tough that almost all of your weapns are worthless. They require 2 rockets to kill, and since they shoot you so fast, you need to guide your rockets so it takes too long and not viable. Machine gun doesnt do enough damage since theyre bullet sponges they take you out faster than you can take them out. They have perfect accuracy so you NEED to use a weapn that kills them in as little time as possible. This basically forces you to use either Desert Eagle, Sniper Rifle, Spam grenades like crazy, or M60, although its too inaccurate to really work.

I dont know, these guys ruined the game basically. A large chunk of the game is spent encountering these guys and it got so bad that I basically was forced to manually save every single time I killed one just to progress. Its not even so much challenging or difficult, its just unfair. It feels broken, theyre bullet sponges, and your weapons are fucking worthless, coupled with never finding health for 10+ minutes at a time its just a total chore to try to progress through this game.

So after these guys, you frequently have all sorts of jumping puzzles , and since you always have low health, falling from just a tiny height can take off as much as 20+ health. Frequently I would fall a couple feet and die instantly while trying to complete jumping puzzles. Ontop of this, theres often horrible physics where you gotta climb ropes and swing around, with low health, its just awful. Also theres a bunch of puzzles that involve pushing boxes around using a really shit physics system that is just totally clumsy and tedious which is annoying as well.

So many times I would have to drop down to progress, but actually not have enough health to take the fall damage, so id die over and over trying to figure out how to go where im suppoe to go without taking fall damage, its just a poorly designed game.

When you do find health stations, they dont even heal you fully, so even when  I finally found health it only put me up to maybe 70 if i was lucky. Then every box I came across you gotta bust to hope for health, after doing this for minutes on end, you come across one enemy who instantly puts you back to down to 20, or even 10 health, where you remain for another 10 mins. Then it puts you into this loop of dying over and over and over, quickload, quicksave, kill 1 enemy, quick save. Etc. So fucking tedious and frustrating.

The funny part is as soon as youre not fighting these Black ops guys the game is pretty easy again, all the other monsters are farily easy or properly designed. Hard to understand how they fucked this up.

Sometimes you come across these 'boss' puzzles where you gotta wander around this arena pushing switches while avoiding boss attacks, this became really nothing other than trial/error die/reload spam over and over until I found the proper route. Not that thrilling, but atleast a change of pace.


So the bulk of the game is: Go underground through famillir HL1 levels, sometimes find some new locations which are cool and interesting to discover, go around this underground facility doing annoying puzzles with rediculous fall damage, killing some cool monsters, eventually coming across sections with Black ops enemies which are near imposible to get through, eventually find these Above ground sections which are a good change of pace, fight through more insanely hard enemies, go back underground etc.

I am really confused, if I watch gameplay of this game on youtube, the player takes WAY less damage than I do. I dont really understand, was my game broken the whole time or what? People on youtube barely take any damage, whereas me I would go from 100 health to 20 health in seconds. What the fuck? This game is just broken or some shit.

Oh yeah, a HORRIBLE flaw with this game is that its frequently dark as fuck, and theres no flashlight - but Nightvision, and when you turn on nightvision, YOUR CROSSHAIR DISAPPERS, so ontop of everything I said previously, you also cant see SHIT and if you want to turn on nightvision, your god damn crosshair disappears and you cant even aim properly. What the fuck? That alone made this game so frustrating god damn.  Theres these sections where its pitch black and youre crawling through a tunnel full of these gigantic alien monsters that shoot instant death lasers at you, holy shit that was so annoying.

Eventually you get to an end boss which is some giant stationary monster which is little more than a two way turret. The boss shoots some beams at you, you hop on some turrets and hit the glowing spots, repeat a few times, game over. Gman shows up says some of his usual stuff about employment, you get stuck in purgatory forever etc etc.

Despite how cool it was to revisit some of the HL1 levels from a different POV, unfortunately the difficulty spike/curve and some really bad design choices made this one of the most frustrating and tedious 3 hour campaigns ive ever had to sit through. There were moments where I was dying literally every 10-15 seconds for a dozen minutes on end. So, so annoying.

4/10