Reviews - TheUnbeholden

If adventure games died, then this is really not helping things.. it reminds me why. The puzzles are unintuitive and only have 1 solution (of which are abstract naturally) so you spend a long time in one room trying to figure what order to ******** you have to do.
The game offers I think 2 hints throughout, but what it needs is better puzzles and more solutions (sensible ones).
Controls are ***, I would so love to swap the mouse buttons around and fix the damn super mouse sensitivity. The storyline is about as involving as staring at one room can give. You have some weird hallucinations and ghostly visions but seriously, to get to the good stuff you have to wade through the gameplay. Not worth it. And yes there are some nice visuals in the beginning but that doesn't last.

Mediocre, tediously difficult for working your way around, way to much darkness, some lame scares.

This game is evil (though addictive at first).
Don't let the soothing fun music trick you in to getting the game.
When you play the harder levels you begin to realize that you can't simply time your button pressing entirely to the music (which is what you'd expect) rather you almost always have to hit the button just BEFORE the beats, the "reward" sound plays correctly though. The end result is you end up relying more on visual cues rather than auditory.
I finally beat the later levels on hard difficulty by taking my headphones off.... thats how far it pushed me/forced me.

I think it was quite good there was good scares and a fair bit of detective work here. Although to short to really give me a good enough impression of what its all about.

I liked playing as a detective, its just the whole thing about there being 'a monster' again *sigh I know its Amnesia but there doesn't have to be a monster all the time. Searching ones own inner demons or prying into someones elses like a detective would, can be a adventure of its own. You can put in false scares like a ceiling collapsing, a rat biting you :D..

This had some potential. New weapon galore to replace the old ones. All the enemies are re-modeled and re-skinned. It all seems different enough to be quite enjoyable until you realize what the creator did with the levels :/
They are mostly dark, hallway after hallway. I am quite aware of corridor shooters and their plight on the mod community. There are a few tasty traps though, a Egyptian walls closing in one, spikes coming from the ceiling and floor and one where there are swinging pendulums.
But the rest is way to mediocre to justify the price of admission, ie 20 or so minutes. I was steer cleer of it. Even with the really impressive looking boss, you have to take out waves after waves of enemies in a arena like environment (another no-no modding mistakes) and once you finally fight him, he dies after 15 seconds of fire.
bah!

Story... no comment.

+A sword
+Enemies are nicely made
+a few nice traps
-Some uninspiring new weapons
-lame levels
-medium length
-weak boss
-....story

Buggy, had some of the dumbest AI and the same rinse and repeat gameplay over and over.
You have to pass through every checkpoint to your next destination, everytime it is filled with mercs. As soon as you leave and come back they are there again. And theres a quite a few checkpoints. Not to mention theres no way around them. You can't go over the hill/canyon for some reason. And you can't use stealth the majority of the time, they just see you.. if you get up behind a guy and kill him with a knife, instantly everyone knows where you are.

All of the weapons minus the sniper rifles are terribly weak requiring around 15 rounds to take someone down.

Its got nice graphics, Africa like I've never seen in a game before.. its got some nice diamond hunting, where you find briefcases in secret locations. But aside from that the rest of the side missions are very repetitive. Go get malaria pills, go take out a convoy, go kill baddies... rinse repeat.
if the gameplay could somehow be a tad more realistic, allow interaction with more people and have a environment that was truly open sand box and not have alot of invisible walls then the repetiveness of the side missions I think I could stomach.

As it stands its alot of broken promises.

This is the sort of map pack that leaves you disappointed and annoyed. Not in the sense that it was hard, apart from 3 parts I really didn’t have much trouble at all.
…and I’ve never really been good at these sort of things.
Its got nothing to do with Quake so you pretty much have to ignore what you think its referring to, a bit shameless to draw people in with its name… I’m tempted to downgrade it just for that but I won’t.
When you look at this mod objectively, you see
- some bland levels with some very simple combat (and not just because you only face 2 types of enemies),
- enemies that silently teleport into a room you just cleared
- bland voice acting, sounds like a few french mod developers who seem to be friends (probably because it is)… it put me off. What ever atmosphere it could have had is absent.
+ a single new texture (a weird symbol on everything)
+ a unique boss with a unique way to kill it, and liked the stuff it spouts to you while your running around :)
-+ Jumping puzzles, button hunts … I’m not into it, the blandness of the levels and mediocrity of doing these random things is hard to do without a atmosphere or music to keep you awake (apart from 1 or 2 ambiance tracks we get later on, which don’t last long)
and finally does not accomplish what the mod makers said it would. It wasn’t that hard.

It does however have color and enemies to gun down unlike the sequel Half-Quakes, but this isn’t going to win any brownie points for having that unless it can do it well.

PS- oh the grunts have a new texture, it does fit into the mod eventhough it looks plain.

Its one the most repetitive and boring maps I’ve played. There is not much in terms of exploration/secrets/length or even gameplay. Xen is done and very much out of the ordinary of what we’ve seen come before. You just have to make some tough jumps onto floating small metal parts… excuse me? There is no way something so light weight could float in Xen… Xen has reverse gravity, only a heavy object will float in the air… so why am I jumping on small floating pieces of human machinery that was taken to Xen by accident? and the part before it was even more ordinary.
The gameplay is boring, there isn’t much enemies and the mod ends before we really got to see anything interesting or fun.

4/10

Typical Disaster lost levels is the opposite, it takes solid level design and actually fun and quite challenging gameplay. Theres one little puzzle that just requires common sense and some exploration the level design is of a attention to detail in a 3 small storage areas that look grandeur than they are because of some blocked off areas. Theres even a secret here if you do some really tricky jumps onto those crates in the ceiling rail... if you give the player a sense of things happening before you got there or interrupting something big, you give the player the sense that things are grander then they are. Half-life can do that well to make you care, rather than investing in characters. You get only a tiny glimpse of aliens and the mod ends pretty quickly so its not Emo's big comeback. It is however a big step in the right direction.

lost levels 6/10

The mod started off in a hospital of all places which surprised me and when you enter the dream it really starts off surreal and creepy. The abstract part where you have to walk towards floating red lights was strange but even though the premise sounds boring, if you stray to far from the straight line you're suppose to walk on you, you hear creepy whispers and flashes of twitching zombies, to far and you get killed. Awesome. When you finally get back to the hospital it has a really good Silent Hill vibe, theres ample light but corridors seem strange because of the filth on alot of walls/floors like things aren't quite as you remember then in the real world. But after about 15 minutes... this is where the fun ends.

You are forced to flick a switch that turns the lights off and they stay that way until the end of the game... where 90% of levels are pitch black with only a few areas with light. To make matters worse the flashlight's batteries regenerate very slowly (if you run out of batteries you might as well load a old save game then stumble around blind and increasing the gamma doesn't solve the problem)

Don't get me wrong, I like darkness as it can enhance atmosphere.. but not through the whole game! This isn't the real reason why I gave it a 4 out of 10 though. This mod has a different design philosophy than Half-Life, it uses backtracking... alot of it. Half-life had almost no backtracking what so ever. Reason being is Valve knew that it only serves as padding and its not fun when you have to go to the same areas over and over again. This mod is a perfect example of how terrible backtracking can be, especially when you have to do it in the dark with many, many doors that don't open and buttons that open doors God knows where.
You run out of batteries.. you loose. You run out of ammo.. you loose (ammo is almost as rare as light areas) and forget about using the knife on enemies, it takes forever and you'll get injured in a mod where health is also scarce.