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Half-Life: Opposing Force

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I really enjoyed Half-Life and was hoping for more of the same.  I had heard good things about Opfor.  Though, Chad had a pretty blah reaction to it.

I enjoyed the early parts.  It was fairly reminiscent of Half-Life.   Sometimes, I like vegging through a simple first-person shooter, and this was filling the bill.  Some reasonably cool weapons.  They had one large machine gun that did a lot of damage.  Though, of course, there was never enough ammo :-)  They also had a couple of alien weapons that I didn't end up using very often.  One was self-recharging, which is obviously useful.  But it didn't store up enough rounds for a decent fire-fight.  So it was only useful against monsters that would let you shoot them around a corner over and over until they died.  The ball-spitting lizard was too slow-firing and I didn't have enough control over where the balls detonated.

But even early on it was clear that the path through was quite a bit more linear than the original.  Hidden openings, overwhelming odds, an occasional trick solution.   There were a few Mario Brothers sections.

One of the alien weapons was a tentacle creature that was used as a grappling hook.   Except it would only grapple onto a living thing.  So they scattered alien pods around where they wanted you to grapple.  That was both good and bad.   Grappling gives extra options, but it also points up the linear levels.

I started getting frustrated about 2/3 of the way through.  I missed a breakable grate that had me stuck while trying to find the trick to kill a big monster.  I had to read the walkthru to finally find it.  Not long after that they had a succession of tough monsters in darkened corridors.  It took me about 15 tries to get more than a couple hundred feet down the corridor.  And most of the last few levels seemed to be fighting ninja assasins.  Again, a bunch of them, arranged to come at you from multiple directions.  The only way by them was to die over and over until I learned where they'd be and I could get the timing down to blow through them.

On my brother's Game Total Value Scale, Threat?  What threat?  It has short bits that were photogenic and a few good puzzles.  But mostly it just threw lots of monsters at you.

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Last modified: January 25, 2003
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