Recent reviews by The Gaming Archaeologist

Now you are playing as the Black Mesa soldiers who are invading and killing everything they see, however you too get sucked into the strangeness of Half-life. Action packed and filled with fun. If you enjoyed Half-life you'll enjoy this addition too.

I love this edition as it adds more to the Half-life story on the other-side as a security guard. You might not think much, but this addition has had the same TLC as the main game itself.

Edit: You play as the security guard who greets Mr Freeman at the beginning, Benny the Security Guard, who also makes an appearance in the second game as an ally who also managed to escape from Black Mesa like others.

Great new episode with another bunch of new alien creatures to kill. These episodes were meant to release the rest quicker rather than simply making a Half-Life 3, but this has taken sometime and there is still no sign of Episode Three.

Nice extension and continues right off the bat from the end of Half-life 2. Not much more to say from memory besides that if you played HL2 then you should certainly get this. I suggested getting the Orange Box.

Far, FAR better than the original. The beefed up the graphics, and yet my laptop could still play it very well. New aliens appear and old ones get a nice new polish added to them. Having breakable environments and the new grav gun and ability to pick up items makes the world far more interactive and easy to immerse yourself in this game.

If you have played the first one and not this one then what the hell are you doing?

Can't have enough fun with this game. As long as you have a good internet connection you'll have fun and the achievements are hilarious too :)

Edit: I have had endless fun with this game and even been playing it not too long ago either. It's fun way to blow off steam and even when dying, you can get back into the action fairly quickly! I'm generally just okay with the game and it doesn't bother me at all. Despite the age there's a lot of fun to be had and now being free you can join in the fun, assuming you've not played it already.

Had incredible fun when I finally got to place this game. First I played the PS2 version but this is FAR better. Intense story line, great controls and bosses that don't die from simply shooting them. This is a FPS where you use your brain.

Edit: A classic FPS that by this point, everyone has played or at least heard of and even in this day and age, it's still a very fun FPS that works well and has a good story.

You play as Gordon Freeman. A scientist who works at the Black Mesa research site and the opening you get to travel through the place and soon arrive at your destination, get your suit on and then begin the experiment where something goes VERY wrong. Lightning and energy is shot out everywhere and you are transported to an alien world a few times before coming back to this one and finding the lab filled with monsters. Some of which mutate and zombify scientists and others that shoot lighting, create shockwaves and the most disturbing ones (at least to me) being the limpets who hang from the ceiling and drop a long tongue down to stick to and pull helpless victims up into their waiting maws.

As Gordon, you have to somehow get out of this place alive, but with everything locking down these dangerous aliens getting in the way it's going to be much harder than you'd assume.

Not to mention, some of these aliens are so powerful and dangerous that conventional weapons cause no damage and in the case of one creature, it's sat in the rocket testing area and you need to activate it by fixing the different inputs before pressing the switch and destroying it!

At times I feel the platforming is a little off, like I often find it in most FPSs, but love how, much like Thief 1 and 2, you can save at anytime so you protect yourself from having to redo a whole chapter simply because of a flubbed step at the end.

Very fun little game with a lot of construction and open world things to do. I highly recommend looking on the wiki so you don't collect stuff that you might never use and find out what to do once you've gotten as far as you can go (getting gold armour and equipment)

Edit: Since this initial review all those years ago, the game has evolved to a point of being quite unrecognisable, but in a good way!

There are new world bosses that all have their own weaknesses and when you defeat the one at the bottom that was a final boss, the world mutates and now you have new and more deadly bosses that have arrived along with new rare materials and environments to deal with that all have their own little threats too.

I love the idea of summoner build being viable and had a lot of fun playing with a friend online and we unlocked a lot of stuff together!

Didn't finish the real final boss to this, but I did a lot and made a huge number of fun little aquariums and such with animals in them for display and stored huge amount of stuff in our many, MANY chests. These days there are so many hours you can lose in this game that it's well worth the money and I love the spin on it not being another Minecraft clone by going 2D and doing it's own thing.

Never played the first one, but this game is pretty fun if you're looking for a RTS that's futuristic and definitely a lot of fun. This is definitely a game that interests me and to me is a nice replacement to forget about the disgrace that is C&C 4.

Edit: This was a real fun time I was having with a friend playing this, but I was never as good as him sadly. It's the kind of RTS that I love being very much like C&C with all the different units and the related buildings and research for upgrades! The campaign was also fun, though as I ended up playing this one first, I feel like I missed a bit out of the main storyline so I was a little lost, but I still enjoyed every moment of it and how your main unit can harvest resources from destroyed buildings and machines to get more resources.

Very fun, though takes a while to complete, at least for me. I love this game so far, it's really awesome :)

Edit: Since the initial review I had works really hard to finishing the game, which was made difficult with an old bug that was shipped with the game where it interpreted more moderate difficulties to wanting the highest and hardest of all! So to actually complete it, I had to play at a lower difficulty, but I feel no shame in that as I still had a lot of fun and I feel some of the mechanics of this game hadn't aged too well as I covered when revising my review of the sequel.

At times I feel like when it says a soldier or alien can see someone, the person it still hidden in darkness and I often can't see them, having to rely on the cursor changing colour when targeting a square the enemy is in and sometimes it's not the main one I wish to aim at, but to take out the far more dangerous one equipped with a psionic amp.

The story, as I hope everyone should know, is that the Earth is being invaded by aliens and a taskforce is formed with funding from all the different nations around the world. However, if they do not see a change or you lack behind in saving people and taking down UFOs, they may choose to reduce or even end their funding entirely and that'll be the end of them and you will never be able to regain any funding again from them in the future, limiting the amount of funding you can have and causing a handicap.

One of the things this game did above the newer, successful, version by 2K is that you get the full gore with the autopsy which seems to be easier to get away with because it's pixelated, where as the others are essentially the same animation, but with a different alien.

I loved learning and reading up the alien's biology and getting a good idea as to why they would benefit from taking over this world and some of the disturbing parts of the aliens themselves, like how the "Snakemen" are filled with eggs that are reproduced asexually and if left to their own devises, could easily out-populate the planet in a short time-span. Or how the Etherials' bodies are severally underdeveloped in every part of their body, apart from their brain having great psionic abilities and is essentially the only real functioning organ in their bodies.

The lore for this game is really something and you may even miss some bits of it, depending on how good you actually are at catching the aliens and in vanilla form, the game itself doesn't require you to catch every single alien or all of the aliens of multiple different ranks to unlock everything necessary to strike back at the aliens and end the game in the one final attack.

I was also excited to learn years later of a opensource modding program, allowing you to modify this and the following game into a whole new experience! For those interested in wanting to play more classic X-COM without having to replay the same game over and over again, I highly recommend you check out this forum and website for all the mods and how to install them!

My favourite of the Megamods is X-Piratez, but I'm sure all of your could have fun looking up these mods for yourself and having your own fun. Maybe even getting involved in the modding community too!

Openxcom Forums: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/board,16.0.html

Mod.io: https://mod.io/g/openxcom