You play as Gordon Freeman, who returns to an unknown base.
As usual, you must contend with everybody and everything trying to kill you.
Only the strongest can survive this onslaught – are you one of them?
- Title: Freeman’s Return 1
- File Name: hl1-sp-freemans-return-1.7z
- Size : 1.52MB
- Author: Jiøí Polcar
- Date Released: 22 April 2004
Download directly into MapTap [1.52MB]
You MUST have MapTap installed before using this link.
You can still use it with MapTap once you have downloaded it.
- Copy the fr folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Freeman’s Return should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the Technical Help page.
The playthrough/walkthrough below is provided by PlanetPhillip. See more of my playthroughs on this site: VP: PlanetPhillip.
Click on the tabs below to select the size of screenshot you would like.
All sizes are the same screenshots, just in different resolutions.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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118365 days
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 3 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 39 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 30 Mins by DeadCamper
Longest: 0 Hours, 50 Mins by PlanetPhillip
Total Time Played: 3 Hours, 55 Mins
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Okay, the first thing you should know is that this was made over ten years ago and as such, the standards used to judge maps and have changed.
I had a game-stopping issue at the beginning and my video explains how I solved it.
The general design was pretty well thought out but it looks very plain and unpolished.
There seems to be an issue with the health of the soldiers because 1 head shot and they are down and other times it takes 6 shots to the body – very strange.
If this were taken and made to look pretty, some small changes to enemy placement and had one WOW area it could be so much better.
You probably should play it, but be ware it’s not the prettiest HL1 you will play this year.
Using Gauge
Easy
50 Minutes
I think you give yourself too little credit, Phillip. I saw your stream of this mod and many of the things you blamed on your poor skills really seemed like the mapper recklessly tweaking damage and radius settings to try to create a more “realistic” damage model. I mean, you were playing this on Easy, and yet every soldier’s shot did a minimum of 20 damage and every grenade was instant death in a 500 unit radius. Those aren’t the standard rules.
That said, I also disagree with the idea that standards have changed. If your date released is accurate, then by the time this mod was made, Half-Life 1 was already 5 years old and Half-Life 2 was just months away. HL1 modders would have been pretty comfortable with the engine by that point and making things that were beyond Valve’s conservative standards for visual detail, much like how Research & Development and Mission: Improbable gave Episode Two a run for its money. So, I disagree that we should put this mod in the context of its contemporaries – I don’t think it ever would have looked or played well, even back then.
What I meant was more about comparing it with what people do with HL1 now, rather than back then. But you are right, HL1 was 5 years old by then and a lot of incredible mods had already been made.
So you know, Phillip, there is no main directory folder in the 7z file. You have to manually create the referenced “fr” folder to put all the files into, in your half life directory.
It’s the same with fr2, no main folder in the zip file.
Ugh, this mod should’ve been called “Freeman’s Torture”.
The atmosphere is really lacking and it looks very unprofessional. I don’t know if this is the first map of this author, but as I said in a previous review, that is not an excuse to not make a great map.
Now, about the main thing about this map… the combat. The combat is just… URGHH! It will make you feel very angry, and maybe break 4-5 keyboards. It’s VERY difficult. Like, INCREDIBLY difficult.
There is also a modified .txt file that supposedly “makes the game more realistic”, which I like, but I also hate. I hate it , because you can die with 2 shots or so, but then again I like it, because it feels very satisfying and fun. It’s one of those things that you want to do to others, but you don’t want it to be done to you.
Overall, this map could have been way, WAY better than it is. The thing is, there is more to Half-Life than the pew pew people.
I played this mod sometime back, but looking at this video i dont remember anything about it. One thing this mod changed was in skill.cfg where it made torso shots do 2x damage (default is 1x) so that’s why soldiers do alot more damage in this mod. Pretty run-of the mill type of mod
This installment of the pair of mods was actually playable for me, though at times I felt alternately like I was a hitman killing people in a firing squad, and a terrified rabbit running away with my tail on fire.
There is at least one screenshot up there, number 24 with the stacks of missiles, that I *did not see* ever, anywhere.
It seemed that a lot of the things I see in that video never happened for me, because they’d already triggered or finished by the time I got there.
The guard in there? He was dead and 4 guys were waiting for me on the other side of that first door. I had to pick at them one by one and hope for a headshot. (Which I will also say – why was it not consistent between this and the 2nd Freeman’s Return? Not one single headshot could be done on Easy in that 2nd one.)
Most of it was pretty straight forward: you go around corners and you get shot at, figure out how many enemies there are, and carefully plan how many times you’ll die before you make it past them. Climbing up rope ladders and such was a pain in the butt, particularly when there were guys waiting, but even that was glitchy at best: half the time you could tell that the AI hadn’t noticed you standing right next to an open door, and you could pick off 3, 4 guys in a row without any of them even noticing you.
The ‘death alley’ sequence made no sense at all. Why are all these guys literally lined up facing each other? Waiting for *one guy*? This isn’t plastic army men, but apparently the mod maker had no concept of how fighting in the real world might work.
All that said, at least I had some FUN with it, but it felt kind of like… well, kicking a rubber ball into the wall. Eventually you kick it hard enough and get smacked on the face when it bounces.
Not worth playing again, but at least it’s not as terrible as its successor.
Manually
Easy
40 Minutes
I understand the age, design, graphics and so on. Not much different from others of this vintage. However the gameplay difficulty is inexcusably high, its just dumb. So of course this gets a bad rating, as gameplay is more important than other things.
Don’t feel you missed anything by not downloading it. And it may be a “spoiler” but who cares, use the pistol as its way more powerful and effective at distance aiming.
Using Gauge
Medium
40 Minutes
This mod is just a bad to medium quality mod from 10 years ago. And that’s kind of normal if you consider that for 5 good HL1 mods in early 2000’nd era, there are maybe 6 or 7 into the low quality mod standards.
I mean, here we have ugly boxy map design, terrible distribution and placement of enemies mixed with a very poor gameplay in skills terms, sometimes way too easy and some times stupidly hard, and the list goes on and on.
Also the last enemy is a clear offense to the player as you can barely do her a little harm and die very fast as there are no where to cover, just run in circles on that weird arena waiting for your death.
Also there are no story at all, at least is not told into the gameplay and well this mod is maybe the classic shoot everything it moves.
So yeah Think twice, in my opinion this doesn’t deserve a: maybe?
Using Gauge
Medium
35 Minutes
Don’t play this mod! This is unbalanced, hard and brain-braking!
Manually
Medium
40 Minutes
There is really little I can say positively for this mod.
I don’t think the age of it and when it was made really factors in when the enemy placement is this hell-bent on killing the player. But I can’t even excuse it for its age when mods for Half-life 1 that came out before it were already better than this (assuming this was made around 2005. I don’t know, the readme doesn’t come with a date)
Ignoring an initial bug that breaks escaping the first area and forces you to noclip out of the map, this level is not playable without cheats. This mod was made without a good balance of enemies vs health available, and seemed not to try.
I could mildly exaggerate and say that there’s more enemies in this mod than there are bullets (which actually isn’t the problem here), but I could easily say there are more enemies in this mod than there are POINTS of health to heal with (and the player’s starting health of 100), and I might actually be accurate.
Playing it with the provided skills.cfg file (a file that modifies the hit points and damage multipliers to every enemy in the game) actually makes the mod worse, in my opinion, because despite making every headshot count, it feels like every bullet from the enemy is still 10x more effective than one from the player.
It’s not fun when I have to cheat, and turning on god mode is pretty much the equivalent of giving the death sentence to the part of the mod where I have to do it. This entire mod requires god mode.
Really, it’s not fun to play.
Manually
Medium
30 Minutes