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Investigation

Unusual Combine activity has been detected in the well-known "Fairview Junction". Alyx Vance has agreed to investigate.

There are three maps to play through, with over an hour of play time.

There is a review by Ben Plays VR
and a review and play through by Skummeh

You can start any of the three maps, but obviously I think you should play them in order!

Play outline:

Map 1: The Trap

In this map our intrepid hero narrowly avoids a Combine trap and stumbles upon an underground Combine base. Downloading secret information that will be useful to the resistance she tries to escape to bring the information home. Unfortunately the escape does not quite go to plan...

Map 2: Stealth Mode

Alyx is now deep in the bowels of the combine base. Alyx attempts to make her way out. Explosions and mayhem ensue.

Map 3: GTFO

Alyx finds her way back to Fairview Junction, while the combine and ant-lions battle it out. All she has to do now is get back to the train. Simple really!

*Note*: sometimes when a saved game is loaded the enemies are frozen. This appears to be intermittent and therefore difficult to debug. I'm working on it, but in the meantime if it happens to you - sorry! The workaround appears to be to restart the map, which I acknowledge is not very satisfactory.

Designer notes (may contain mild spoilers):

A big shout out to Valve for providing the tools to allow a hobbyist like me to make something which I hope people will find fun to play. The beginning is set in Fairview Junction and it is only thanks to Valve providing the maps for the campaign that this would be possible. It quickly moves to a previously undiscovered area, although again mainly Valve assets are used.

Other than the usual use of models, sounds, prefabs, skyboxes, mobs, and textures, eagle eyed users may spot the following:

Map 1:

- The building used in a Valve demonstration map of visibility forms the scaffolding of one of the buildings lining the street after the station.
- The animation scene stopping you leaving the station from the 'correct' exit is taken from the campaign map.
- Half the garden behind the locked fence (the nice half!) uses a garden from the campaign map as a base.
- The leggy milking room makes a guest appearance.
- The white picket fence on the street came from a folder on my computer. I must have downloaded sometime in the past 8 years, but I forgot from where. To the unknown author I salute you and if you let me know I will acknowledge you too.

Map 2:


- The train tunnels are taken from (and are altered versions of) some tunnels found in the campaign maps. This includes some of the minor rooms and corridors off them.
- The building pits and scenes are based on some found in the campaign map.
- The 'leggy milking room' makes another appearance, but from a different angle (Hint: heads up!)
- The ant tunnel is the one between the distillery and the zoo, but going up! (Valve have done an amazing job with that tunnel, I was just altering it to make upward traversal possible and it did my head in). It also serves as a medium for what is, in my opinion, easily the worst pun in the map.
- A very squeezed corridor is repurposed.
- Some nice skylights and lighting effects were used and repurposed.
- A workman's hut from a railyard map serves as a signal control hut.
- Ant plugs, ant prefabs and ant plugs!
- I shamelessly pay homage to "Mars Attacks"

Map 3:

- It's Fairview junction! (so rather heavily based on the campaign map). Playing the map it's amazing how well I remembered the campaign play through (It's where you meet your first combine after all). Although I have had to tweak it to fit the game play (and added a few passages) and you start at the end, I hope you enjoy cycling round to the beginning - but under VERY different circumstances.
- Strider: the strider fight sequence is very similar in actual strider movement to the game (it's a difficult model to play with). Killing it is slightly different though!


In short everything that looks great is Valve, everything that is bad is mine and everything that you enjoy is yours!