This mod suffers from a lot of the same things Hunt Down the Freeman did, just in lesser amounts. The maps are too open with no clear sense of direction or focus, the storyline gives me absolutely no reason to believe or care about the two NPCs in Sector X (who manage to take down the Advisor with a single shotgun shell?? When they've been shown to be immune to far worse, even while badly wounded??) and there is absolutely no attempt at believable continuity from Half-Life Alyx (literally nobody questions what Alyx found in the Vault, Russell immediately sends her on her way and Eli never even shows up despite Alyx being his beloved DAUGHTER).

Half of the 'boss' scenes are blatantly reused from HL:A itself, with minor changes to make them 'better' such as infinitely spawning Manhacks. Because that's... fun...? Health is too scarce, leaving players to fight through corridors and corridors of heavy troopers and machine gunners who have a bead on them from four different angles (crouching doesn't help if you have to pop your head up to, you know, aim). I had to savescum at multiple points, making every perfect hit a new file, because this mod has absolutely no sense of design. Swarms of Manhacks worked in Half-Life because you had the HEV suit and a targeting reticle. They don't work here. Ever wanted to go through whole chapters with no health resupply and nothing but the lightning gloves, with seemingly infinite swarms of enemies and no clear direction on what to do? I'm sure you'll have no problem with the inherent inaccuracy of the bolt of lightning when you've got a split second to not die, right?

Jeff shows up for absolutely no reason other than that 'everybody remembers Jeff! He's the scary part of the original game!' Why is there a second Jeff? If there's more than one, why not introduce two at once or even a whole colony to add to the fear factor? Not to mention the utter lack of throwables to distract Jeff from your location. If you're going to reuse a boss fight, making it arbitrarily harder doesn't make it derivative. It just makes it an annoying callback.

Even when you make it to Sector X, I'm still completely baffled by the need to teleport into the place with a custom teleporter, as if you look outside you can clearly see the rest of City 17. It's not like Eli was about to be taken to Nova Prospect again, so why didn't Alyx just... walk? Not to mention the two NPCs could have just as easily walked out of the building, if they had no problem taking down an Advisor.

The environmental intuition this mod seems to require is practically nonexistent. A certain puzzle is perhaps the best example of this - a bunch of colorful wires mark switches around a sphere of light. What order do you press the switches in? It ends up being the order of the colors of the rainbow, but there is no environmental hint towards doing that and no clear indicator of success or failure until you have actually found the correct order of switches.

None of this is even mentioning the many, many glitches and bugs along the way, but I was willing to ignore those for a community-developed mod series, as the mod was still playable (well, mostly, considering you need to have all five mods enabled from the start to ensure item carryover, something they could have mentioned in a bit bolder text). But given the sheer amount of hype this mod received - articles, mentions, trailers, and all - I would have expected the story to have been somewhat more than half-baked. This game considers 'more enemies' to be 'challenging gameplay' and 'going somewhere' to be 'storytelling'.

And does anybody else question why those mines on top of the train don't go off from the moving ceiling above them?