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Half-Life: Opposing Force (Expansion Pack)
Review

Much more than an add-on disk, Half-Life:Opposing Force is all sorts of goodness.
So much for air superiority. RPG: 1, Chopper: 0
A year after its initial release, Half-Life is still one of the most played, most talked about games for the PC. Like all ubersuccessful PC titles, Half-Life has naturally spawned an add-on pack to continue the money train, but, unlike most add-ons, Half-Life: Opposing Force is good enough to stand on its own legs as a full game. A correct balance of the familiar and the new has been struck, virtually guaranteeing that Half-Life fans will be more than pleased with this addition to the world of Black Mesa. Even the training level, with all of its Full Metal Jacket glory, is amusing enough to warrant a quick play-through for Half-Life veterans.





Half-Life: Opposing Force (Expansion Pack)

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Don't expect to don Gordon Freeman's dorky glasses and powersuit in OpFor. This time, players are handed a set of dogtags and an armored vest belonging to Corporal Adrian Shepard. In a spin on the Half-Life view of things, Shepard is actually a member of the government goon squad being sent in to Black Mesa to clean out the base. Before Shepard and his compatriots receive their final orders, their tilt-rotor aircraft is zapped out of the air by flying aliens, so Shepard doesn't realize that he's supposed to be wiping out the scientists, not helping them. Shepard is the only member of his team who survives the crash, coming back to consciousness inside the Black Mesa facility. From there, the player sets out to re-join his comrades and get the hell out of the infested base, kicking alien ass and taking names on the way. The introduction to the game is great, by the way, much shorter and much more active than Half-Life's Disneyland monorail ride of boredom (one of the few negative things we will ever say about the original). There is in fact a tram ride in OpFor, but it's mercifully compacted.

Gearbox has taken the already impressive amount of weaponry from Half-Life and rounded it out further. They've removed some of the weapons from the original line-up (mostly the Xen weapons and experimental toys that Gordon found on his journey through Black Mesa) and added a series of new hardware. The original simple crowbar, for instance, has been replaced by a chunky pipe wrench. Shepard can also grab an M-249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), a big machine gun that actually pushes the player back as it fires, a heavy Desert Eagle automatic pistol with a laser sight, a space age displacer rifle that teleports targets to Xen and a long range sniper rifle. On the alien side, there's the spore launcher, a strange living creature that attaches itself to the player's arm and belches deadly balls of explosive poisonous gas at enemies. There's also an energy-based shock rifle that recharges itself (much like the deadly hornet-firing weapon from the original) and a barnacle, which has been re-appropriated from its normal resting place on the ceiling and is used like a grappling hook.

The new weapons are a lot of fun and will undoubtedly add all sorts of new twists to the multiplayer side of Half-Life, but they do seem to be much, much more powerful than the original arsenal. The wrench will take out head crabs with a single well-placed blow, the SAW is incredibly powerful, ripping up even the toughest of alien beasties with a 30 or 40 round burst and the displacer weapon simply removes enemies altogether. To counter this, Gearbox has made ammo for these weapons harder to come by, so they don't completely overwhelm the structure of the gameplay.

Many of the original enemies make appearances here, including many more conflicts with the black ops invisible ninja bitches. Bull squids, head crabs, hound eyes and the rest of Half-Life's menagerie are all scampering about, but there are also plenty of new enemies, with just as many smarts as the denizens of Xen. While the head crabs seemed to have almost exclusively gone after scientists in Half-Life, Gearbox has tossed in a number of head crab soldiers, who can take even more punishment, most likely because of their bulletproof vests. The black ops ninja bitches have also brought along their boyfriends, who (thankfully) don't move as fast as the women but are more heavily armored. The toughest of the new bunch are the Shock Troopers, who replace the similarly large alien grunts from Half-Life, but these bastards have four arms, allowing them to fire sizzling bolts of death and chuck grenades at the same time.

Since Shepard is a Corporal, he finds himself ranking officer in most situations, which means that players can have soldiers back them up like the Barneys did in the original. There are grunts, heavy machine gunners, engineers that will cut through sealed doors and grates, and medics who can be used like the game's first aid boxes. These guys are smart enough to provide cover and take out enemies but tend to run enthusiastically into crossfire without much concern. Don't spend too long worrying about the various team members; they'll usually get whacked right quick, but replacements are often right around the corner in the next level. Supposedly, the game provides for command of up to eight grunts at once, but practical experience has shown that it's hard enough to keep three alive for any length of time. This is a cool feature, but the grunts are still little more than Barneys with new weapons.

Gearbox shows that they do know how to build great levels. Each "chapter" within the game is focused on solving specific goals or puzzles to push the player along to the next section. The explosive warehouse level, a walled-off area that contains a maze of freight cars filled with plastic explosives and trip mines, was particularly delightful. Get a little too frisky while firing at the black ops dudes, and the entire place goes up in a gigantic explosion. Slow and steady is the key, or Shepard will be reduced to a pile of ash. The "Lair of the Pit Worm" section is another fun example of gaming design. Like the classic three-armed monster that needed to be destroyed midway through Half-Life, the Pit Worm is a cyclopean monster with a laser eyeball and huge, crushing claws that must be destroyed. The player needs to negotiate several smaller sections of the level in order to flood the room with nuclear waste and keep going. This is classic video game design, very reminiscent of Zelda-type puzzles where there are often several smaller tasks that need to be completed before finishing off the big one.

Calling OpFor an expansion disk or add-on pack does a grave disservice to the game that Gearbox has created. Even without the rich world that Valve has created, OpFor is competent enough to play as a stand-alone product. Of course, being able to reuse Valve's tremendous materials while building upon the mythology makes it that much better. Those that had a rollicking good time playing Half-Life are going to eat Opposing Force with a spoon. There's enough of the first channeled into OpFor to continue the development of the Black Mesa story, but there's also lots of new things to be discovered, shot and blown up. After spending time with this first project, we're looking forward to the next game from Gearbox, as Opposing Force is one helluva way to make a good first impression.

- Chris Kramer

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Screens
Ready to rock 'n roll
Ahh, that's much better
Hey, ugly
Stick 'em up


"The female black ops ninja bitches have also brought along their boyfriends"

Screens

An engineer goes to work. After cutting all the way around, the engineer will draw his pistol, kick in the door and go in, guns blazing.

A close encounter with Mr. Freeman tears a rift in the much-abused space/time continuum.

The dreaded Pit Worm. Beware the Eyeball of Death!

Stats
Developer GearBox Software
Publisher Sierra
Genre Action
Supports 3D Acceleration
Sponsor
Faster.
Smoother.
Harder.
Faster..
Faster.

Make Your PC Climax.
Requirements
Pentium 166, 32MB of RAM, DirectSound compatible sound card
Recommended
Pentium II 300, 64MB of RAM, 3D audio card, 3D accelerator
What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?
A quick run through Opposing Force's training session will expose players to the game's Drill Instructor, who will be immediately familiar to fans of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. R. Lee Ermey played Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Full Metal Jacket's rabid, screaming, hilarious DI. Ermey, an actual former Marine DI, locked up his role in the movie by standing in front of a video camera and screaming at it for fifteen straight minutes without ever once repeating himself, stopping or reading from a cuecard. The transcript of the audition came to 250 pages!


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