Chris Spain has done quite
a few levels in the past. Starting with Doom2,
he graduated from Quake with two excellent levels
for their time - Badlands 1 and 2. He then created
a very nice pack (at least the second half of
it) for Quake2 titled Forces Of Evil, which
is also reviewed here and scored an 80.
Then came a couple overrated (but I guess that
happens when there are not many other good HLDM
levels) deathmatch levels for Half-Life, using
the tiring style of playing in a huge room as
a small mouse or something. And now finally
a new SP release from Chris, titled Edge Of
Darkness.
As usual with HL, it's an episode of 11 levels,
a few of which you return to later on to newer
sections. And as usual, it's a the typical base
and labs theme of Half-Life. The build quality
is consistently good, with several very spectacular
sections scattered about the episode.
The first few levels looked very good. Especially
at the start where the story as set. It reminded
me alot of the start of Daikatana. But then
as I played the levels weren't quite as good
as the start ones.
Gameplay was good, again the
typical Half-Life style with lots of Grunts.
The monsters were kept fairly simple though,
the toughest of them - Assassins and Alien Grunts,
only made a couple of appearances. Then at the
end a real surprise, rather than a big boss
to fight, you have a strange alien vessel with
lasers! A really good finish, though fairly
tough.
The only flaws this pack had
was that sometimes it would get real slow, especially
in the final battle. I had to put on god because
the screen was stuttering so much. Two lasers,
several Slaves and Grunts, a machine gun all
in quite a large level was not such a good setup.
And this on a PIII 450, 128mb, TNT2.
Otherwise, Edge Of Darkness
is up there with Gut Reaction as the best episodes
that stuck to the Half-Life theme of base and
Grunts.
