There are also a plethora of new aliens to learn and fight against while exploring some never before seen areas of the Black Mesa facility. Additionally, you will find some other troops a few times who can help you clear areas and are quite competent for 1999 AI teammates, while sometimes healing you if you find a medic. Your arsenal is mostly the same as Gordon Freeman’s, however, you do have some new things, such as a lizard-like alien that spews toxic sludge at foes and a gun that teleports you to Xen for health and ammo refills! Those slight charges made it quite interesting without overhauling the formula you grew to love over the first game. Your helicopter gets taken down as you’re entering the Black Mesa perimeter, and everything goes down hill from there. In this game you play as one of the military personnel you see throughout Half Life 1, Corporal Adrien Shepherd. The controls and design are the same as that now-classic game and while the story over all may not be as good as the first game, there is still a lot of fun times here. On the outset, if you enjoyed Half Life, you certainly will enjoy this game a whole lot. Opposing Force is very derivative of this experience but this is most definitely a positive, not a detractor. Half Life was a ground breaking FPS game with an amazing story and universe it created to boot. I guess it's tradition that this one isn't any different. I still have gripes with it's latter sections, but I have similar feelings about most Half-Life games, dipping quality here and there. Enough enemies and weapons are introduced to make it feel new, and the same sort of level and game design is present to keep it familiar. It's to the extent that I consider this game to be an almost direct accompanying piece to it. The same endearing style that HL1 has is carried over pretty faithfully here. If I have tons of weapons and ammo, I need more enemies to fight to make it challenging, but fighting tons of enemies in a row with Half-Life's mechanics gets a little stale for me. I don't dislike the gunplay or anything, but I'm not exactly sure I get *how* I'm supposed to enjoy the more straightforward fights in this game as divorced from environmental and resource limited circumstances.
By that time the weapon choices have expanded further and people who enjoy Half-Life solely for the shooting parts will probably have more fun with it than I did. The latter half of the game features a lot of firefights with big aliens and bullet spongy black ops guys. I wish some of the high stakes puzzle elements and shorter encounters could have stayed around longer. But there's something about a soldier being lost in the chaos of a collapsing research facility overrun by aliens and black ops that better captured that background storytelling thing the Half-Life games do than in the first. I'm "something of a scientist myself" and want as little to do with the military in real life as in fiction. It's funny that I identify more with this protagonist than in HL1. It wasn't until the more action heavy latter half that my praise wavers a bit. The initial few missions in particular are really well done. The crown jewel of the crossbow is in fact in its alternate fire - When switched into alternate fire mode, the crossbow becomes a sniper's dream.Half-Life 2 is my preferred version of the series, and yet parts of this one worked for me in ways Half-Life 1 failed to. It does a fair amount of damage, but the actual blast radius is far smaller than it appears. Used as primary fire, the crossbow has explosive tipped bolts (arrows) that explode on contact. Though it is not the most rapid firing weapon it is the most accurate. They're motion sensitive and will follow your movements around an area, spraying bullets at you with alarming accuracy. There are big gun turrets and little gun turrets, but both can kill you. The RPG's velocity is slowed down tremendously in water and acts like a torpedo. You can opt to enable the laser targeting system, thereby giving away your position, or turn it off to conceal your location. Wherever the laser is set, that is where the target falls. The rocket launcher is Laser-Guided which means wherever you point the guide the rocket follows.