Re: Half-Life 3 Confirmed! For real!

On Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:20:07 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote at 18:57 this Tuesday (GMT):

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Project: Borealis - Prologue
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2215490/Project_Borealis_Prologue/
>
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And it's out. What the heck, I grabbed it (it's free!) and am
downloading it as I write. I'll at least give it a look and see if my
first impressions is more "Episode 2" or if I get a whiff of "Hunt
Down The Freeman".

>
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Aw man, it's Windows only? :(
At least its free, so I can test it on Proton.

It's an Unreal Engine 5 game, so if those run well for you with
Proton, this one will probably be fine too. It's not particularly
impressive with its visuals.

Anyway, I gave it a play. Since it's mostly a demo, it won't be
getting a full end-of-month write-up, so here are my thoughts now:


The Prologue is pretty short; I think I finished it in 30 minutes, ten
of which were spent stuck in a room because my "use" key had gotten
bound to something weird and I couldn't get the door to open.

I can't say I was that impressed. The game takes place in a snowed-in
Ravenholm, and you revisit a lot of the same locations from Half Life
2. There's very little actual content, so it's hard to make any sort
of judgment about the game. You only fight zombies and headcrabs (the
latter with a rather silly-looking frosted/icicle 'hair') and your
weapons are similarly limited (pistol, shotgun, gravity gun and
crowbar).

Movement feels weirdly smooth. There's no sense of actually walking;
it's like you're gliding across the ground. The devs say this has to
do with different 'friction' for different materials, but I've walked
on snow and ice and it doesn't feel like that.

The whole prologue has a very dreamlike feel; bits of the Borealis are
half-visible as intangible artifacts scattered across the map. Whether
this mood is just a teaser for the full game or will be building up to
something more concrete is uncertain so I'll let it pass for now.
Monsters seem to teleport in too, but -again- I can't tell if this is
part of the surreal atmosphere the game is trying for or just bad
gameplay design.

But, really, the biggest fault I had with the game was how /old/ it
felt. The rigid levels, the emphasis on the gravity gun... the whole
thing feels like a mod for the original "Half Life 2". There's no
originality, no innovation. The game seems to be going for the
silent-protagonist thing too, which I felt was played out already in
2004, and I've no interest in revisiting.

The TL;DR is that if you absolutely LOVE "Half Life 2" and can't
imagine FPS games ever getting better than that, you'll probably like
this teaser/demo. But as someone who has happily moved on from the
franchise, there was very little in "Borealis" to appeal to me.