Minerva

Minerva is a Half-Life 2 single-player mod, which immediately makes it notable simply because there aren't many of those. And its being good as well puts it practically in a category unto itself.

After at least a year (I don't remember when the last chapter was released exactly) the final two chapters (for a total of four) were released about a week ago. Having loved the first two -- I thought they were in many ways an experience superior to that of the actual Half-Life 2 -- I eagerly anticipated more great level design, pretentiously enigmatic Marathon-esque narration, haunting music, and so on.

I was disappointed. (Spoilers in this review . . . as always.)

That's not to say that Minerva's resolution is bad -- far from it. It's good. But it's not great. The first chapter, Carcinogenesis, is still one of my favorite experiences in Source to date. It was clever and intuitive and complex in all the good ways. The second, Downhill Struggle, is not quite as good but still fascinating in its own way. It ends with the mod's first sighting of a (dead) fast headcrab zombie and the promise of more horrors lurking . . .

. . . and we resume in Depth Charge with a note that you've passed into an area without biological activity, i.e. no headcrabs. Glad all that suspense was built up. This is just a quibble, of course (though it's perplexing that Foster left the dead zombie in in the new release even though it appears its original purpose of foreshadowing has been outdated).

Depth Charge plays with an interesting idea for the first half of it or so: as in HL2's Our Benefactors, the player's weapons are removed by a Combine security device. Minerva's player character doesn't have a gravity gun, though, and so you simply run through much of the level, solving puzzles and getting chased by Combine, until you finally get a gun and then proceed to fight your way back up.

It's an interesting gambit that I don't think quite works -- take away guns and you've got to provide something else interesting, like the scenery employed by HL2's first two weaponless chapters. Here, however, while Foster is a great level designer, it's only stuff we've seen before, at least until the portal sequence, which is suitably awe-inspiring and well-deserving of praise.

But the greater problem here is the puzzles Foster inserts, and that continue even after you've gotten your guns back. In Downhill Struggle there were a few places where I was left wandering around, unsure what to do (this partially due to Foster's annoying tendency to place significant time delays between an action and its consequences, e.g. the opening of a door). In Depth Charge this gets even worse, until at one point I eventually just gave up and looked on the Minerva forum for an answer.

Maybe I'm just stupid, or maybe I'm just not used to thinking along those lines in a shooter. (Give me an adventure game and I'll be . . . well, I'll be using eavesdropping parrots.) But it's also a failure of the game, I think, in that it isn't set up properly; one of the things Valve is brilliant at is making sure every action has a reasonable precedent, that everything follows from what came before (while still being surprising and interesting -- the challenge of fiction everywhere, applied to gameplay). Here there was no real suggestion that what needed to be done even could be done, and indeed based on previous experience there was good reason to think it couldn't.

Following the turning point (the near-destruction of the Combine outpost), however, the game leaves the puzzles mostly behind (and also finally embraces the zombies promised so long ago). But the climb through the damaged outpost, while well-done, smacks of the Citadel sequences in Episode One and, more importantly, is heavily linear, which isn't a problem in itself (Half-Life is of course heavily linear) but is very odd when considering that one of the hallmarks of the first two chapters was their relative non-linearity and interconnected map spaces. Supposedly Foster had some help from Valve with these last two chapters, and I wonder if that influence had something to do with this, for they feel much more like Half-Life and much less like the Halo/Marathon-esque gameplay present in the first two chapters.

Except, of course, for the respawning enemies, which are very Marathon. I have to admit that I despise respawning enemies, and many otherwise great games -- System Shock 2, I'm looking at you -- have caused me great distress due to them. (I still have to admire SS2's genius, but I can't replay it with great joy as so many do because I can't stand to return to a fucking area and find it refilled with enemies. I killed them! Area clear! It should stay that way! Ahem.) And then there's another fucking stupid puzzle you have to solve while infinite zombies come at you. Grr. (Indeed, at times it's almost more Doom-like than Marathon, when the respawning enemies come from behind you in areas you've already been -- even if it's justifiable plot-wise, it's really annoying and not fun.)

If Minerva did it at SS2's rate perhaps it wouldn't be so bad -- but by the end of the game, when you've returned to the beach that you started on (in a wonderful display that I just wanted to admire for a while but couldn't do to being fucking attacked by fucking fast zombies every twenty seconds) and they come in a steady stream, depleting your ammo and your health with few replenishments available. After some time trying to kill a squad of Combine soldiers, hold off the zombies that kept coming, and advance, I just decided to say "fuck it" and sprinted past everyone, and kept sprinting basically to the end (with a short pause to hole up by a rocket box and shoot down a gunship, the mod's rather unimpressive final encounter -- even with a constant stream of fast zombies at the same time).

Now, I'm sure some will say that I just can't hack it or whatever. Bullshit. I made it through it, that's not why I'm complaining. I'm complaining because it wasn't fun, and that's all I played this particular game for. It's of course a well-known symptom of game developers today that, being hardcore gamers themselves and communicating mainly with the hardcore portion of their audience, they tend to design games for the hardcore, games that are eschew fun in favor of challenge. Valve is one of the few companies that has avoided this (apparently through near-constant play-testing and iterating throughout the development process) and it's rather disappointing to see the one high-profile single-player mod for Half-Life 2 fall into that trap. (In retrospect, the difficulty can be seen in the second chapter, so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.)

There's some great stuff in Minerva. Unfortunately most of the time I was too busy getting killed to really get a nice look at it.