Note: I'm playing post-patch. Afaik, some game-breaking bugs and level design issues have been fixed, or at least an attempt was made. I might also change some parts of the review later to elaborate on some issues.

Is HTDF good? Nah, not really. It doesn't even reach mediocre to be honest.

But is it an abysmal insult to FPS genre as a whole and one of the worst games ever made? No, it's not.

The bad:

-Bugs. While I haven't encountered anything game breaking that prevented me from progressing, they do exist and are very prevalent. Enemy AI glitching out is a standard occurence.

-Laziness and / or incompetence. From what I've seen online, majority of people who worked on HDTF did try to do their jobs, and most of the blame seems to lie on the project leader, Berkan "Frank" Denizyaran. He had grand plans, constantly changed things up, would be gone for days at a time, and overall kept the team in the dark. Among the things he did was buying a weapon model of some mutated Saiga 12K and sending it to an animator. The catch? The model had two billion polygons in it and almost broke the animator's machine. It's sad how the core team that worked on the game itself screwed it up, since stuff like weapon animations, cutscenes and music are well made. Among the "lazy" parts, Humvee and Bike you can use are just reskins of the buggy and control exactly the same. Driving a bike that feels so heavy is quite bizzare.

-The price. Game was incredibly overpriced on release, and even now I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price. The reason I bought it is that it's much cheaper in my currency.

-Act 2. While some think that it was made so huge just to make sure that people who went through it without cheating would be past the refund window, I don't think so. For one, considering the issues people seem to have with level design, they would pass the 2 hour mark long before reaching it. It is, however, an awful level overall. The sniper section is stupid, but not very difficult. The second moment when combine drop some pod that has like 3 sniper rifles sticking out of it is abysmal, and I have no idea how anyone is supposed to pass it without cheating, and the spotlight section wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be, they are pretty easy to avoid and it's obvious where you are supposed to go there. Blizzards are a ♥♥♥♥♥ though. Overall, a long and boring wasteland of nothing that just wastes the player's time.

-The performance. While it is stable for the most part, there are sections where it falls to 20fps or even lower. Ones that come off the top of my head are:

The ship defense section

The docks

The city sections in Act 1, but rarely;

-Canon got ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in every pose imaginable.

-Final section of the game where you have to defend against combine for 15 minutes. The game gives you 4 turrets, which is overkill and makes the section incredibly easy, and you just have to sit there and wait for 15 minutes until help arrives. There was also an annoying part in City 17 where an NPC tells you in cutscene to wait for a bit, and game literally makes you sit there for like a minute or 2 doing nothing.

Depending on how you look at things, screenshots and trailers that have shown Freeman appearing in the game are false advertising. The man himself never appears in the game except for a hidden cutscene at the end if you die during the 15-minute segment

Neutral:

-Voice acting. I'm putting it under neutral because, while the voice work for majority of characters ranges from bad to mediocre (talking about quality, not the material they had to work with), Mitchell and G-Man are voiced incredibly well. While a lot of people make fun of G-Man actor for how he pronounces Black Mesa, he overall does a good impression of the original VA, and Mitchell's actor goes all out on the "Badass action hero / edgelord" type.

-Level design. While there are some parts where I agree it's awful and hard to understand where to go, such as Chandelier in the mansion, and there are levels that are just huge areas of nothing, such as the combine installation in Act 3 and the infamous Alaska part, I disagree that the majority of the game is a confusing mess. The hospital part was easy, the city part afterwards was simple to navigate too with exception of that moment with strider at the end of the city level, before Mitchell reaches the parking lot. It should be mentioned though, that from what I've seen, devs changed the city part. When the game came out, you just had to rush past the soldiers and combine fighting, while now there's a fence in the way, and you have to help the soldiers out for a little bit before a combine Heli crashes and opens the path for you. The forest in Act 3 was also pretty simple to navigate. The docks, which also got a lot of bad rep for being huge and hard to navigate, gives you a humvee near the start. Again, this might be because of the patch and wasn't available on release. Finally, the factory level, which also got a lot of flak for being a huge map with nothing to do, gives you a humvee too, so while I agree that it's pretty hard to understand what the hell you are supposed to do after you get out, at least you can drive around and shoot aliens with the MG instead of just running around.

-The plot. It's laughable and makes no sense, but since it made me laugh I'll put it in the neutral category.

-Character models. Mitchell looks pretty good and Adam is alright, but many models that aren't taken from other source games are awful, like Sasha.

The good:

-Weapon animation and variety. There are a lot of guns in the game, and animations are amazing and really well made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R08tL992W-A

-The cutscenes. Once again, they are well made, tho color correction in them does stand out when they happen mid-gameplay, but overall the guy who worked on them did a good job, especially considering what he had to work with.

-The soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zutc9YwJI8A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh_QNV_u300

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1_CgGC2q7A

Attack on Black Mesa East is amazing

Unlike Doom 3 Protagonist, Mitchell actually CAN tape a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ flashlight to a gun https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1498751001

Overall, Hunt Down The Freeman is a great example of what Valve has become. They don't care about Half-Life, they don't care about Steam, they don't care about quality control. The game itself fills me with sadness, since a lot of people who worked on it clearly cared about the game, or at least the idea behind it, but all of it was ultimately ruined by incompetence, lack of skill and questionable design decisions. Still, I hope that those who worked on it will be able to continue working in the industry, and, if Royal Rudius does somehow get out of all of this without shutting down, that they will take their future projects more seriously in the future.

After all of this, you might be asking: Why the ♥♥♥♥ am I recommending it?

I dunno, I enjoyed it. After hearing about how awful it was I expected something on the level of really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ g-mod maps made by kids or something like that, but all I got is a game that is not very good. Sure it has issues and is overpriced, but it's not the end of the world. The worst thing about it is that it carries the Half-Life name, but considering how even Valve clearly doesn't care about the series at this point, we might as well have the modding community try and finish the job, one way or the other.

Concerning the "stolen assets" controversy: from what I've been able to gather, the majority of assets weren't stolen, but rather reused from other Valve's source games. A lazy move, but not criminal.

Also, I never had the "node out of graph" error.

As mentioned at the beginning, review content might change in the future, but the recommendation itself still stands.

Note: I'm playing post-patch. Afaik, some game-breaking bugs and level design issues have been fixed, or at least an attempt was made. I might also change some parts of the review later to elaborate on some issues. Is HTDF good? Nah, not really. It doesn't even reach mediocre to be honest. But is it an abysmal insult to FPS genre as a whole and one of the worst games ever made? No, it's not. The bad: -Bugs. While I haven't encountered anything game breaking that prevented me from progressing, they do exist and are very prevalent. Enemy AI glitching out is a standard occurence. -Laziness and / or incompetence. From what I've seen online, majority of people who worked on HDTF did try to do their jobs, and most of the blame seems to lie on the project leader, Berkan "Frank" Denizyaran. He had grand plans, constantly changed things up, would be gone for days at a time, and overall kept the team in the dark. Among the things he did was buying a weapon model of some mutated Saiga 12K and sending it to an animator. The catch? The model had two billion polygons in it and almost broke the animator's machine. It's sad how the core team that worked on the game itself screwed it up, since stuff like weapon animations, cutscenes and music are well made. Among the "lazy" parts, Humvee and Bike you can use are just reskins of the buggy and control exactly the same. Driving a bike that feels so heavy is quite bizzare. -The price. Game was incredibly overpriced on release, and even now I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price. The reason I bought it is that it's much cheaper in my currency. -Act 2. While some think that it was made so huge just to make sure that people who went through it without cheating would be past the refund window, I don't think so. For one, considering the issues people seem to have with level design, they would pass the 2 hour mark long before reaching it. It is, however, an awful level overall. The sniper section is stupid, but not very difficult. The second moment when combine drop some pod that has like 3 sniper rifles sticking out of it is abysmal, and I have no idea how anyone is supposed to pass it without cheating, and the spotlight section wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be, they are pretty easy to avoid and it's obvious where you are supposed to go there. Blizzards are a bitch though. Overall, a long and boring wasteland of nothing that just wastes the player's time. -The performance. While it is stable for the most part, there are sections where it falls to 20fps or even lower. Ones that come off the top of my head are: The ship defense section The docks The city sections in Act 1, but rarely; -Canon got fucked in every pose imaginable. -Final section of the game where you have to defend against combine for 15 minutes. The game gives you 4 turrets, which is overkill and makes the section incredibly easy, and you just have to sit there and wait for 15 minutes until help arrives. There was also an annoying part in City 17 where an NPC tells you in cutscene to wait for a bit, and game literally makes you sit there for like a minute or 2 doing nothing. [spoiler] Depending on how you look at things, screenshots and trailers that have shown Freeman appearing in the game are false advertising. The man himself never appears in the game except for a hidden cutscene at the end if you die during the 15-minute segment [/spoiler] Neutral: -Voice acting. I'm putting it under neutral because, while the voice work for majority of characters ranges from bad to mediocre (talking about quality, not the material they had to work with), Mitchell and G-Man are voiced incredibly well. While a lot of people make fun of G-Man actor for how he pronounces Black Mesa, he overall does a good impression of the original VA, and Mitchell's actor goes all out on the "Badass action hero / edgelord" type. -Level design. While there are some parts where I agree it's awful and hard to understand where to go, such as Chandelier in the mansion, and there are levels that are just huge areas of nothing, such as the combine installation in Act 3 and the infamous Alaska part, I disagree that the majority of the game is a confusing mess. The hospital part was easy, the city part afterwards was simple to navigate too with exception of that moment with strider at the end of the city level, before Mitchell reaches the parking lot. It should be mentioned though, that from what I've seen, devs changed the city part. When the game came out, you just had to rush past the soldiers and combine fighting, while now there's a fence in the way, and you have to help the soldiers out for a little bit before a combine Heli crashes and opens the path for you. The forest in Act 3 was also pretty simple to navigate. The docks, which also got a lot of bad rep for being huge and hard to navigate, gives you a humvee near the start. Again, this might be because of the patch and wasn't available on release. Finally, the factory level, which also got a lot of flak for being a huge map with nothing to do, gives you a humvee too, so while I agree that it's pretty hard to understand what the hell you are supposed to do after you get out, at least you can drive around and shoot aliens with the MG instead of just running around. -The plot. It's laughable and makes no sense, but since it made me laugh I'll put it in the neutral category. -Character models. Mitchell looks pretty good and Adam is alright, but many models that aren't taken from other source games are awful, like Sasha. The good: -Weapon animation and variety. There are a lot of guns in the game, and animations are amazing and really well made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R08tL992W-A -The cutscenes. Once again, they are well made, tho color correction in them does stand out when they happen mid-gameplay, but overall the guy who worked on them did a good job, especially considering what he had to work with. -The soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zutc9YwJI8A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh_QNV_u300 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1_CgGC2q7A [spoiler] Attack on Black Mesa East is amazing [/spoiler] [spoiler] Unlike Doom 3 Protagonist, Mitchell actually CAN tape a fucking flashlight to a gun https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1498751001 [/spoiler] Overall, Hunt Down The Freeman is a great example of what Valve has become. They don't care about Half-Life, they don't care about Steam, they don't care about quality control. The game itself fills me with sadness, since a lot of people who worked on it clearly cared about the game, or at least the idea behind it, but all of it was ultimately ruined by incompetence, lack of skill and questionable design decisions. Still, I hope that those who worked on it will be able to continue working in the industry, and, if Royal Rudius does somehow get out of all of this without shutting down, that they will take their future projects more seriously in the future. After all of this, you might be asking: Why the fuck am I recommending it? I dunno, I enjoyed it. After hearing about how awful it was I expected something on the level of really shitty g-mod maps made by kids or something like that, but all I got is a game that is not very good. Sure it has issues and is overpriced, but it's not the end of the world. The worst thing about it is that it carries the Half-Life name, but considering how even Valve clearly doesn't care about the series at this point, we might as well have the modding community try and finish the job, one way or the other. Concerning the "stolen assets" controversy: from what I've been able to gather, the majority of assets weren't stolen, but rather reused from other Valve's source games. A lazy move, but not criminal. Also, I never had the "node out of graph" error. As mentioned at the beginning, review content might change in the future, but the recommendation itself still stands.