Let's Cut You Down To Size, Mr. Freeman: A Review Of Half-Life: Abridged

(Above image is taken from RunThinkShootLive.com)

Half-Life: Abridged is a compilation of Half-Life 2 user maps as part of a competition to see who can excel at the criteria, with that criteria being "collapsing a section or sections of the game into a single map". As a whole, the collection was pretty decent if a bit of a mixed bag. There were some entries which I thought were great for different reasons. 'Day of Red Letter' was an incredibly short and silly version of the 'Red Letter Day' chapter (and I daren't spoil it here). The 'Half-Life 2 Exhibit' map was great as you strolled through different areas of the game like it were a museum with compressed sound effects over the "museum"'s loudspeaker and visible wooden structures holding up the faux buildings. 'HWY 17' was an abstract take on the brief and I enjoyed it immensely as did everyone else it seemed because, as of writing and publishing this, it has the most votes of the competition on RunThinkShootLive. In short, the least I could say is that most maps were at the very least enjoyable and all tried something different: some were straightforward recreations of famous sections, others had a more comedic take and some excelled in terms of their design and abstraction of the concept. There were maps which had a higher attention to detail and design than others, but those that weren't were still nonetheless fun to play through. 

However, I thought a number of maps suffered from some major flaws. I found two of the three bonus entries to be particularly annoying to play. 'On The Debris' had what I considered to be strange design choices and the other, 'Blast Pit', was outright broken. And though the creator admits that the map was broken and that they had to rush it due to the lack of time, it was still broken regardless with the creatures recreated from 'Blast Pit' following you around into rooms they're not supposed to be in or getting stuck on objects constantly. When it comes to 'On The Debris'' design failings, it has a cart section which is obtuse to control where, if you aren't familiar with the way it worked in the first Half-Life, then you might not understand how to make it go faster making the boring dark tunnels you travel even more of a chore to sit through. Furthermore, there's a section where you have to shoot a button in a room protected by a slightly broken glass pane. Most players I would wager would try to break the glass and, seeing that they couldn't, would walk around trying to find a way to press the button with their Use key. On top of that, there was a lot of backtracking which I thought wasn't telegraphed well by the map at all. In terms of aesthetic complaints, 'On The Debris' also had severe lighting issues with many of the props and weapons being overly bright and shiny. 'Blast Pit' had other serious design problems as well. The opening car section is poorly lit and you can easily fall into a toxic pit you can't see which you don't get damaged by it either so you have to restart the map or load a previous save. I understand that this map had to be rushed for whatever reason so I will stop hammering on about it now at the risk of sounding overly harsh.

Besides, I experienced issues in other maps anyway. Nothing that couldn't be easily dealt with, but were still kinda annoying. For example, the second map in the collection, 'Black Mesa Inbound,' broke the entire mod for me every time I loaded it up. For some inexplicable reason, whenever I started this map, it automatically set 'mat_fullbright 1' for it and every other map I loaded after, causing the map to be fully illuminated in a visually displeasing way. Typing 'mat_fullbright 0' into the console didn't help either. I ended up fixing it by adding '+mat_fullbright 0' into the mod's launch options on Steam. And weirdly enough, based on the comments on the mod page that I read, I'm the only one that's experienced this bug. So take my criticism on that with a grain of salt. Another map was broken in a way were I had to use 'noclip' to continue. On 'Kravenholm', there's a section where you have to do a floaty, low gravity jump through a hole in a roof to get to the next part. But for whatever reason, that failed to trigger for me and I spent several minutes jumping fruitlessly at the ceiling. Again, no-one else seems to have experienced this issue; ergo, another grain of salt.

Overall: I know that's a lot of relatively negative criticism to take in, but I do need to express that I still had fun with this collection of maps. It had sparkles of brilliance, but was unpolished in a number of maps and suffered from weird broken glitches in addition to a swathe of bizarre design decisions on behalf of some of the maps' creators.