Blue Shift doesn't have enough meat for a Half-life lover.
Written: Jul 29 '01
Product Rating:
Pros: Great Graphics...Good Sound.
Cons: Gameplay sucks...Not enough thrill for a Half-Life fanatic...Bad value....Controls suck.
The Bottom Line: If you can get the game for a lot less than $30.00, then it's worth checking it out. However, don't expect much in terms of game play or value.
zlatan2k's Full Review: Half-Life: Blue Shift (Add on)
Half-Life: Blue Shift is a disappointing addition to the Half Life series. The lack of new features and the shortness of the game make Blue Shift seem more like an add-on level than a legitimate sequel. The graphics upgrade package and the inclusion of Half-Life: Opposing Force may make the purchase of Blue Shift worth while for some gamers. However, Blue Shift only offers one day of game play and very little original content such as weapons, characters, or puzzles.
Blue Shift casts you as Barney Calhoun, a security guard at the Black Mesa facility. As usual, you must solve puzzles, kill aliens, and team up with scientists in order to escape Black Mesa and the soldiers following you. There is a crossover to the alien world and many other similar elements as found in the rest of the Half-Life series.
The best part of Blue Shift are the high definition graphics. The resolution of weapons and characters have been doubled to 512k, which can be handled by all graphic accelerated video cards. The HD Pack makes the awesome graphics of Half-Life even better. Details are crisper and cleaner than ever. The HD Pack modifies all Half-Life games except for Counter-Strike.
While the graphics are a higher resolution, the scenery is pretty much the same as the rest of the Half-Life series. There are no new alien monsters and the new areas of Black Mesa don't add much to the Half-Life series. One good thing is that the scientists are a little bit more interactive. Also, many of the weapons and characters have been redesigned to give them a more realistic look. The faces of the characters look different, not necessarily better. Although, they are better than leather faces of Gunman Chronicles.
The major downfall of Blue Shift is the uninteresting plot, lack of challenging puzzles and easily defeated enemies. Add on to that the shortness of Blue Shift and it is clear that game play is severely lacking and too short, making it a overall bad value.
The enemies include the usual assortment of Half-Life aliens with some occasional soldiers. There are no impossible to beat bosses ( i.e. gigantic hardcore super-aliens). Most of the fighting is easy compared to the other Half-Life games. In Half-Life some of the most difficult fighting is against really hard to kill enemies, including giant monster. By contrast, in Blue Shift the hardest battle I fought was against face huggers in an air duct. I couldn't fight them off without losing some life points and there were about eight face huggers in a row, each one taking 10 health points. I kept dying, so I had to go back to a previous save and pick up some weaponry I had overlooked. The overall lack of difficult enemies is especially disappointing when compared to the improved enemies in Half-Life: Opposing Force. Opposing Force improved over the original Half-Life by introducing the Black Ops (not included in Blue Shift) and several impossibly difficult battle sequences. Sadly, Blue Shift never had me thinking, "How am I gonna get past these guys?"
I'm not a big fan of puzzle games and I'm not patient enough to consider puzzles fun. However, I can appreciate the limited puzzle solving that makes first person shooters more than just a bullets and blood orgy of violence. The predecessor to Blue Shift had a good mix of easy to difficult puzzles, some of which could be solved in multiple ways. Blue Shift has some predictable and unoriginal puzzles which may hold appeal for those new to Half-Life. At times I was stumped for short periods of time. Once I was totally stumped and had to consult a walk-through to figure out that in one Blue Shift area a barrel needs to be pushed over two disconnected wires to serve as an eclectic conductor in order to complete the connection and blow some dynamite. Why I couldn't shoot the dynamite to start an explosion I'll never know. It was frustrating, but it was the only really frustrating moment. By comparison it took me one to two weeks to complete Half-Life and at least a week to finish Opposing Force. With both games I got stumped many many times and had to consult a walk through to expedite the fun.
In conclusion, Blue Shift is worth buying if you have never played Half-Life or Opposing Force. For everyone else, the HD Pack is not that big a deal and will probably be including in the upcoming new Half-Life series. If you can borrow the game or get it for way less than the asking price of $30.00, then it's worth checking out Blue Shift. However, don't expect much in terms of game play or value.
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