Half-Life: Blue Shift

 


Blue Shift is the final official expansion pack for Half-Life, developed by the now famous Gearbox Software.
Unlike Opposing Force, the difficulty isn't broken. Or maybe I broke my copy of opposing force, but that's another story.

In Blue Shift, you play through the events of half life, instead through the perspective of a security guard working there. It's a great premise and it works quite well going through Black Mesa through another viewpoint, seeing familiar yet distinctly different areas , and sometimes you even see Gordan Freeman through some windows or cameras, its a nice touch and theres a lot of "Oh wow, its that part!" moments.

The level design is for the most part pretty straight forward, starting off slowly and atmospherically by making you showup for a regular day on the job, grabbing your security outfit and sidearm, but then being tasked with going deeper down into the facility to fix various problems and help out the scientists.
Soon, though, you find yourself fighting waves of aliens and eventually the military.

The game is really short, 3 or 4 hours, but unfortunately the level design is hit and miss.
Some levels are pretty great, almost Counter-Strike 1.6 type levels of outside office buildings, trainyards fighting military doing tactical style shooting, underground bases with horror vibes being surprised by headcrabs and aliens, but then there are some times where the objectives are needlessly obtuse and cryptic, sometimes involving obscure amounts of backtracking to find a switch that now works.
Parts like early in the game you have to operate a crane, but tapping the button does nothing. Only after running around in circles for 20 minutes I realized you have to HOLD the button to operate the crane, not tap it.
Another part towards the end of the game has a dynamite rigged up, with a broken line. It turns out you have to push a generic looking barrel and put it in the broken line part of the dynamite, then it 'connects' and actually explodes. Thats so cryptic I'm surprised I even figured it out without looking it up, because it kind of breaks the game rules where random barrels apparently now are mandatory to progress.
Also, that same level, you have to do all sorts of random things involving bad physics like using barrels to create a bridge, and then turning on some switches and having to backtrack 10 minutes through the level to find a switch that suddenly moves a bridge allowing you to progress. This level was terrible and I spent 30 mins just running around in circles trying to figure out what I missed.
Oh yeah and theres also a part ripped straight out of Duke Nukem 3d, with the spinning turbines that kill you in the water, but you have to push some explosive box into it to destroy it.

But then other levels are just nonstop action and progression makes sense, so its really hit and miss at times.

As the game progresses you find out the military are basically rounding up all the scientists and killing them to get rid of any witnesses of Black Mesa, so you're tasked with helping save the scientists, and yourself escaping. You do this by fixing some teleporters which end up teleporting you around to different weird alien planets similar to the ending locations of HL1, its pretty cool to return to these areas and they aren't as bad as the HL1 levels. Exploring this alien planet was pretty interesting and a welcome change of pace.

This is also the Half Life expansion that introduces 'HD Models' and changes the weapon models and sound effects and character models, they look pretty good and help to differentiate this expansion from the base game as well. So a welcome addition.

Overall I definitely enjoyed Blue Shift more than opposing force, mostly because the difficulty was a lot more fair, it wasn't too easy but not too hard, it was just right. The health packs are strategically and resourcefully placed around, with just the right ratio of scarcity to abundance.
But maybe there was some technical glitch in opposing force  that completely broke the AI damage and difficulty, i dont know, it was really bad though.

Blue Shifts occasional pacing issues, with the bullshit cryptic puzzles and backtracking and running around in circles, takes it from potentially being a great game, to just a pretty decent one. If you're just wanting some more HL1 action, you cant really go wrong by playing this expansion.

7/10