Recent reviews by Stas

Gameplay is challenging but very enjoyable and rewarding. The atmosphere is incredible. Had a lot of fun exploring the levels and reaching seemingly impossible places. It gives the same kind of feeling you get when you manage to outsmart the mappers and get to an out-of-bounds area in an old shooter, except in this one you're never quite sure! Can't wait for the full release.

Absolute garbage. While the free version runs smoothly for me with most settings maxed out, this one suffers from FPS drops and momentary freezes even on the lowest settings, without offering significant graphical improvements. Performance is especially bad when playing online, often making the game unplayable. Even just connecting to a server can take minutes. There's little new SP content. Xen is still notably missing, years after the original release, with zero indication of any progress on it.

If you're a HL1 deathmatch veteran who's in it for the online play, you'll be quite disappointed to discover nothing more than a Half-Life-flavored turd. All movement and weapon mechanics have been altered beyond the point of recognizability. It seems as though much effort has been put into slowing and dumbing down every single aspect of the game. All trick movements are gone, including the basic strafe-jump. There's a forced delay between consecutive long jumps or gauss jumps, explicitly preventing fast and fluid movement.

Crosshairs are far larger than they should be, with no way to adjust them. Fire rates for most weapons are significantly lower. Annoying recoil effects have been added, forcing you to readjust your aim after each shot. Zooming in with the crossbow is excruciatingly slow, and now requires holding down the mouse button. Laser-guided rockets are almost entirely unresponsive, and feel like they come out from somewhere other than your RPG, sometimes resulting in accidental suicide. SMG grenade trajectories are unnaturally straight, while hand grenade ones are unnaturally curved, reducing the usefulness of both weapons.

Unlike either HL1 or HL2, thrown hand grenades are hard to spot once they land, due to their reduced size and increased map decoration. Multiplayer maps are very detailed, far beyond what is appropriate, hindering both navigation and the ability to spot enemies in the distance. Ladders are far more annoying than either HL1 or HL2 ones. Map layout is more confusing, with details like jump pads and ladders getting lost in a sea of visual noise.

In short, absolutely abysmal game design, wholly unworthy of the source material. I strongly regret wasting $20 on this turd, and can't recommend it to anyone. Do yourself a favor and play the free version, since this new and expensive one offers more grief than improvements.