From the Read Me:
This level is very loosely based on HardBoiled, by Hong Kong action director John Woo. The brief story line goes as so… Big crime boss type bloke is using a hospital as a front for criminal operations. You are the number one type super cop fella, and thus your job is to find said nasty man, and spread a little 9mm joy his way.
Basic Details
- Title: Soft Boiled
- File Name: hl1-sp-soft-boiled.7z
- Original File Name: sb.zip
- Size : 789Kb
- Author: M.Gumdrop & M.Sparky
- Date Released: 09 January 1999
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Ahh, Soft Boiled.
Loosly based on the movie “Hard Boiled”, or so I hear. Never seen it.
single map. not good. poor gameplay. poor attention to important details.
This one goes back a long way, I got it on a give away disc from the magazine “Complete Game’.
Rated it then 4/10 but only commented then that it was ‘short with grunts only’. See piledriver comments above.
Seeing as this map is inspired by John Woo’s Hard Boiled, it’s a shame that Half-Life doesn’t include akimbo pistols. Perhaps in a future mod this level can be more authentic.
What’s also a pity is that this level is rather lacklustre. It is one of the best single-player add-ons for Half-Life so far but, at the current time, that really isn’t saying much.
While the gameplay is reasonable and the visuals could be a lot worse, it’s never that much fun and there are many things that seem to have been put there purely to annoy you. The lack of a HEV suit, for example, is extremely irking and is something that, in my opinion, map authors really must include in their maps. To be one bullet away from death and not know about it is ridiculous, as is the added difficulty in selecting weapons, and it really detracts from anything else the level might have to offer.
It starts off reasonably well with a decent prefabbed helicopter and a nice foyer to the building – although the helicopter seems to be employing some top secret military technology seeing as its engines are clearly running without making a sound. From there it’s a rather pedestrian level, with too few enemies and too much tedious wandering to find your next destination.
Enemy placement is fairly dire; in some places it’s far too sparse while in others the grunts are in groups of five. This would be acceptable if the intensity of the battles increased as you progressed but when the distribution is as random as this, it makes for a very inconsistent, unenjoyable challenge. When you finally do find your way around the maze-like complex and defeat all the grunts and automated enemies, the ending is a bit of a let-down and technically flawed too, which makes the amount of exploration you’ve just endured seem even more pointless in hindsight.
At such an early stage in Half-Life’s …er… life, this level isn’t too bad and there’s plenty of evidence that the co-authors could go on to produce some excellent levels. With the scant availability of new levels right now, it’s certainly worth picking up provided you don’t expect too much from it.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Wednesday, 3rd February, 1999 by Morgan.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.