Get a Life (Mod Review)

Overview: An obscure mod for Half-Life 2 was recently released. Sporting an intensely-convoluted plot, HL1-ish weapon skins, and the most hilarious voiceovers you will ever find in a game, Get a Life reminds everyone who plays that you should never release a game 50% complete.

Plot: You are Alexander Somebodysomething, a pale-faced leukemia victim with expert knowledge of weapons handling, medical aid, and absolutely no fear. A billion zombies, gigantic poisonous hairy tarantulas, and watching your fellow man die horrifying and nightmarish deaths does not sway you the least. You live in a swanky apartment with your cheeky scientist sister and her pet spiders. You wear a baseball cap for fun, listen to the radio, and work at a job that could use a regulation protocol or two. Apparently leukemia victims can handle complex machinery that regularly explodes into fiery bursts every few minutes, but somebody’s got to do it, I guess.

Gameplay: The game runs on a painfully linear path, with 9 out of every 10 doors being locked. The puzzles are childishly simple, with cut-scenes directly showing you where to get the next puzzle piece; the difficulty is reduced to being led by the hand. Firefights are uninteresting. Zombie levels always became a game of Whack-a-Mole. Healing never took a break. I found myself popping medkits every chance I got. It was a pain.

However, the bullet-time ability (though it wasn’t explained at all) was interesting and new, but nonetheless completely devoid of usefulness.

Graphics: The flashlight is replaced by a flare gun, the flares being unable to bounce off grates or zombies without dying into a few pitiful sparks. The crowbar has evolved into a rusty pipe. Zombies now wear name-tags. Headcrabs became spiders. Fast zombies are now Nemesis look-alikes, the Antlion guard fell into some red paint, and somewhere along the way G-Man joined the Combine army.

Most of the guns have the Half-Life 1 feel to them, especially the grenades. Get a Life doesn’t try hard enough to cover up the Half-Life defaults that came with Hammer SDK, almost everything either being directly stolen or ridiculously disguised. The only original graphic would be the skin of the protagonist.

The level design was beautiful for the most part. Fluidity was lacking, though, as backtracking was inevitable. After the boss battle with the red-painted Antlion guard, the game took a dead halt in level progression. There were two not-so-obvious puzzles that I believed were just the level designer being superb at subtleness, but I was wrong. Let me explain:

I was in a large warehouse with nowhere to go. After defeating the antlion boss, I tried every button and door. Nothing. I saw these barrels stacked up next to this cleverly constructed mountain of boxes. Using the barrels as stairs, I carefully climbed the mountain of boxes only to find myself trapped in a glitched void. So I tried another path, and after a long loading screen, found myself in a red-lit underground ventilation nexus. There was an unbreakable wall of barricaded planks that my pipe couldn’t bust, and about a dozen scattered explosive barrels. Naturally, I gave the level designer credit for such a crafty puzzle. I stacked the explosive barrels against the wooden barricade, and blew them up. It did nothing. I then got a little upset and went back outside, and after a long loading screen, was in the warehouse once again. I saw the debris piled up from when the antlion guard fell through the ceiling. I thought, perhaps, this is the puzzle the level designer has been drawing me towards. I tried climbing the debris and got pinned between two broken walls, stuck and motionless. I gave up and quit.

Sound: Music was swell, but didn’t have enough.

Voiceovers, horrible. The British cottonmouths who did most of the voices had no feeling, and no intelligence. The sentences written in the subtitles had more emotion than the dead-faced voice saying them. Every character rushed through his lines without pause or break between periods. It must’ve been a poor department during development, or its quality was completely ignored and the sound files thrown in with a cringe from the team.

Reviewer’s Final Opinion: You can download it, if you want, but you aren’t missing anything. There’s no inspirational storyline, no new and exciting graphics, and definitely no satisfaction in playing.