Hunt Down The Freeman - Just Bad Games

[Music] Hunt Down the Freeman is a first-person shooter developed by independent game studio Royal Rudeous Entertainment for personal computers in 2018. Who is the Freeman and why are we hunting them down? Well, that is an interesting story because this game is a sequel—only not really.

First, some context: Half-Life was a groundbreaking first-person shooter released by Valve for the PC in 1998. It followed scientists and crowbar-wielding everyman Gordon Freeman, who, through his work at the Black Mesa Laboratory, accidentally opened a portal to the alien world Zen. This event led to a giant intergalactic kerfuffle. Classic Half-Life titles not only made industry-shifting advancements in terms of graphics and gameplay but also in narrative delivery as well.

Now, if you follow standard insertion procedures, everything will be fine. These games pulled players into their stories and worlds in amazing ways, using a wide range of techniques, most of which we've boiled down to what we call the three golden rules.

Rule number one: The protagonist must be silent. I can see you already know a great deal more than any one man is supposed to. Hearing an internal or external voice breaks the illusion of control in your character's choices and actions.

Rule number two: Every cutscene must be in first person. Keeping this viewpoint ties regular gameplay with exposition, making storytelling as immersive as regular action.

Rule number three: Levels and maps must be directly connected. A seamless world flow allows the player to feel as versed in a protagonist's story and surroundings as they are in their own personal lives.

These elements make for games that effectively keep players invested, and while classic Half-Life did not originate these techniques, their combined use, along with great writing, exceptional visuals, and mind-blowing mechanics, was a hit with players, inciting a hunger for more and more.

We got Gearbox Software, which released two official expansions of the game: Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Valve themselves followed up the original Half-Life with its sequel, Half-Life 2, in 2004, which was followed by two episodic releases in 2006 and 2007. Title after title, you can identify the three golden rules in each entry. There also should have been a third episodic adventure, but it seems Valve had a little trouble at the time counting to the number three. Sadly, after Episode Two, word of new official Half-Life content went about as silent as, well, Mr. Freeman. Man of few words, aren't you?

This continued for a long while—so long, in fact, that fans believed it was up to them to take up the Half-Life mantle and appease gamers screaming for more. Good luck out there, buddy! Projects like Black Mesa were announced, a full remake of the original game created by the fan community and given Valve's blessing to become a real commercial product. It took almost 15 years to complete, but the talented creators behind Black Mesa managed to deliver an excellent third-party remake—a competent retooled retelling Half-Life veterans could experience again in a brand new way.

But what if someone tried to make something more original? Enter Hunt Down the Freeman, touted as a wholly original Half-Life game taking place in the same universe but with new characters in a story that worked alongside the existing narrative. This was all to be built on the same engine that Valve used to create Half-Life 2. I mean, check out these advertisements! [Music] Looks like it might be a pretty good time.

So how well did this game present its vision? Would it satiate Half-Life fans starved for new content? Could it live up to the legendary pedigree of an official Half-Life release? Rise and shine, up your favorite crowbar; it's time to get our head in the game as we hunt down the Freeman.

First up, we got a tutorial level, which worries me, but I'm gonna bite my tongue for now. Let's see what they did here.

"Rise and shine, ladies! My name is Senior Drill Instructor George L. Garrison. The first and last word I want to hear from your filthy mouths is 'sir.' Do you maggots understand? Yes! Do you maggots understand? Yes!"

Well, uh, this looks a lot like the boot camp tutorial from Half-Life: Opposing Force.

"Rise and shine, ladies! My name is Senior Drill Instructor Dwight T. Barnes. The first and last words I want to hear out of your stinking holes is 'sir.' Do I make myself clear? Sir! Yes, sir!"

Yeah, look at this! We get yelled at by a drill instructor who, for some reason, won't even look us in the eye. Who's intimidating here? I will call you dirtbag!

We're told to head off to real training at the hazard course, which starts with an underwater section. Next, we've got movement practice. We can jump, crawl, go prone, and parkour. This seems way more complicated than movement in any other Half-Life game. Does it work? What do you think? Half the time, we don't grab ledges properly, assuming we even know which ledges are grabbable. Even then, once we do, we just sorta shuffle along them.

After a bare-bones shooting range and a second boring obstacle course, we get dumped back to the main menu. It just ends. No congrats, you pass. No sense that we actually completed anything. Okay, why is there even a tutorial? Isn't this supposed to be inspired by Half-Life 2, a game that integrated its tutorial into the opening so well most players didn't even know they were doing one? Maybe it was integrated a little too well because the team behind this game clearly didn't notice it, or maybe they wanted to emulate the older Half-Life tutorials. Either way, we're done; the real game can begin.

We get an introductory cutscene that we cannot skip or even exit to go back to the main menu. Whatever is happening must be incredibly important. Let's see—there are two kids looking at a dead body. One of the kids gets carried away. Drunk alleyway hijinks. Sergeant tutorial. Random warbeat. Sparkly room time. Oh, and finally, what looks like a helicopter ride where we put on a mask and fight that ends with "Get this guy a band-aid!"

Where is this? Is that the Black Mesa logo? Does this take place during the first Half-Life? What's happening? Why did we stab? Stab! Two-minute expository cutscene, and I feel real lost. Preceding Half-Life games introduced main characters with a little text on the screen—simple, direct. At least the cutscene and tutorial featured zero protagonist chatter. I think we can count on at least one hallmark of the Half-Life series staying true: we've got ourselves a silent main character.

"Bravo team, Bravo! Do you copy?"

Oh, come on! And that's not the only problem. Right away, the level design in Hunt Down the Freeman is worrying us. We enter this generator-looking room through a set of doors. There are no enemies and nothing to interact with, but we do see an identical set of doors across the way. Usually, areas are built for flow to help guide the player to different sections or points of interest. The design here seems to be directing us towards doors that go, uh, nowhere. Lost? So were we.

So what's the solution to this problem? How do you explore a game where doors act like walls? Why, you check the walls to see if they act like doors. Okay, through the wall we go. Try and guess where we're supposed to walk next—uh, down the ramp towards the monitors? Wrong! Because despite the fact that we've only moved like five feet, we're already in another room where they don't properly telegraph where the player should go next.

There's probably some sort of gaming terminology for this. Let's see—it's simple hidden actions that are relayed terribly to the player. We could probably make an acronym for that. Oh yeah, all right, that's good. What you're supposed to do with this spot is head to a door on the far right side of the room. This activates a pre-rendered cutscene.

Well, I guess we just need to sit here and watch as we get pummeled by some random person. They drag us around the room before beating our face in with a crowbar. A crowbar! I think that's good old Gordon Freeman! As we fall unconscious, our character, Private Dirtbag, swears vengeance against the man who has cleverly bested him in combat.

"Whatever it takes, whoever it takes, however long it takes, before I die, I will kill you!"

Sometime later, we're rescued from Black Mesa by none other than the G-Man. In the Half-Life series, the G-Man is famous for being a character who seems to be pulling the strings behind major events. He appears mysteriously in sections of each game and watches from afar, only stepping in at key moments. Here, in exchange for our character's life, the G-Man asks that we hunt down the Freeman and uphold our promise to kill him.

"Keep your promise, Mr. Mitchell."

But wait, that doesn't make sense! At this point, if the events of Half-Life 1 have already completed—um, spoilers—the G-Man himself is working with Gordon.

"I have recommended your services to my employers."

Why would he want him killed? G-Man, I don't know! The G-Man has historically been a bit vague and mysterious in his intentions. Hopefully, as confusing as this is, it's just G-Man being G-Man.

"Mitchell, wasn't it? Crazy when that man hit you with the crowbar. How about you go hunt him down and hit him with your crowbar?"

The character's name is Mitchell, by the way. Private Dirtbag, you don't know that yet because we didn't write it on the screen like we've done in every other game, but now you know that your name is Mitchell.

We're in a hospital now. We get up and have a look around since we're still not doing so great after our recent date with an orange crowbar. Movement is very, very slow. Oh hey, a health pack! That ought to make us feel better. But wait—oh boy, health pack! Somebody grabs it and takes off. We give chase.

"Come back here!"

A painful, slow, hobbling chase.

"Bring that back! Bring that back!"

Eventually, we catch up to him, and he's dead. We grab the health kit and take the elevator, but we still have no weapons. Boy, really hope we don't get to a floor invested with zombies. Crap!

So instead of bashing zombie heads in, we're jumping around and dodging them in a darkened hospital like a mouse stuck in a maze. Looks like we're face to face with another spot—a bunch of furniture blocks our path with zombies closing in. Now look at this door with a table in front of it. What do you think we have to do to get out?

Can we climb on top of it and crouch through the open space there? That is incorrect! Well, maybe use this door on the other side? Wrong again! Okay, uh, maybe push this stuff aside and create a path utilizing Half-Life 2's famous physics engine? [Music] Nope!

Well, where the heck are we supposed to go? Survey says go prone and belly crawl under the table through the doorway! Sweet merciful crap! Prone! We get to use a movement method unseen in any other Half-Life game to worm-slither our way under a table. Couldn't they have designed the table to be a tad higher so that we could just crouch through?

Once we slide under the table, another cutscene, but this time it's not in first person. Oh dang it! We get saved by members of the U.S. National Guard. An HECU? What are special forces doing here? They're from out of town. There is no easy way to put it, but as far as we know, we're under an alien invasion. Those things are targeting mainly military bases.

"It's been just two hours."

Wait, are they talking about the Seven Hour War? Oh boy, quick! We need to get everyone up to speed! War time!

So according to the original games, sometime after the events of Half-Life 1, an alien race known as the Combine invaded Earth through portals created by the Black Mesa incident—that one time Gordon Freeman moved a thing into a thing. They attacked so suddenly and so forcefully that Earth surrendered in only seven hours, hence the name Seven Hour War. This is one of the most pivotal moments in Half-Life canon. It basically leads to an altered dystopian planet, setting the look and tone for the rest of the franchise.

It's never been shown in a game before, and that would be really exciting, except here it's not. We see deployed troops on heavily damaged streets that likely wouldn't actually be there because of how sudden the attack was. It's unlikely any of these troops would have been ready to deploy in time. Said streets are also blocked in by invisible walls. This really doesn't feel like an epic battle; it looks far more cheap.

Oh sure, there are enemies to fight if you want, but everyone is doing their own thing. You don't matter! Sprint past all the enemies to find the next loading zone, and blammo! After it loads up, they're all gone.

"Hey, if the game be broke, we use the broke to our advantage!"

We've been led to this building for some reason, and in the lobby, it has a dozen open doors. Which one are we supposed to go to? Where do you think we're—oh yep, ignore all those doors! Sure, they open, but there are invisible walls blocking each of them. Instead, you gotta hit a button and wait for a slow-moving elevator while hordes of zombies try to kill you.

Of all the mechanics they stole from Half-Life, why did you have to take that one? So you have some in the left. When the elevator arrives, we take it and find ourselves in a dark hallway. But hey, no big deal! We just need to activate night vision with a button press.

"Hmm, what button activates night vision?"

There isn't one! Even though there is a dedicated button in the options menu, night vision goggles actually need to be switched in like they're a weapon. If you didn't figure it out, have fun running around in the dark!

How did they go about toggling on the flashlight in the original Half-Life? Oh right, the F key! Too easy! I hate it!

Further along, we meet up with a Black Mesa survivor named Adam. No relation—unrelated! Adam is part of the Black Ops team sent in after the army. He's apparently been providing sniper support so we could rescue him and escape the city. Didn't really see him do any of that, but maybe his bullets make cars fly.

With Adam's knowledge of the area, we traverse a number of levels that seem to be kind of pasted together with no real flow to them. First, we're in some sewers, then some side streets, a parking garage, and even an inconspicuous minefield in the middle of a subway station that will explode if you make even the slightest wrong step.

Eventually, we meet up with a commander who has his team held up in the nearby subway station. He needs someone to scout ahead and open a path for them, but none of his men want to do it.

"That's real brave of you, Larry! Your country's proud of you!"

Me? I did not volunteer, sir! Shockingly, no one respects a leader that squiggles a mustache under his nose with a sharpie. So much for military discipline! Feels like the human race called it quits.

Speaking of my fellow Americans, we have made a strategic decision to surrender to the alien invaders known as the Combine. Yep, it's official! Everyone just plain gave up! Humanity surrenders!

But we don't have much time to dwell on it. We need to get out of the city and continue our hunt for Crowbar McSmashy Smash. The game design only gets worse the longer you play. For example, here: welcome to a train station with tons of spawning enemies! We keep fighting and fighting and fighting. Eventually, we start getting really, really bored.

At some point, one of the train cars in the level had opened up. Entering it triggers the next load screen, but we had no idea! There was no NPC yelling at us saying, "Hey, dirtbag! You need to run into this train car here so that the plot can continue!"

"It's this one right over here! I'm pointing to it! I’m pointing to it! Can't miss it!"

Actually, it can! That's why I'm pointing to it! So instead, we just keep fighting near infinite enemies. Can we have any direction on what we're supposed to do? Verbal spatial cues? Anything? Great!

Okay, whatever! I say we go ahead and hop on the train, and wait—where are we? Did our character magically jump to the front of the train? Oh no! That means—hold on! Wait, what's that sound?

"Button down the hatches!"

All the golden rules have been shattered! [Music]

The next level has us riding on top of a train in a desert. We were just in a huge city! Where is everything? Why are we suddenly in the middle of a desert? As the level continues, we fight off infinitely spawning dropships, and the train loses cars while it continues to travel. So don't stand on top of the last car, otherwise—wait, is the train actually moving? The ground looks like it's moving, but I think we're staying perfectly still.

We completed the level not by killing a specified amount of dropships, but by waiting—waiting until a point the game unlocks the loading zone, which you can activate by going back inside the first train car. Brilliant! Go backwards without prompting? Smells like another to me! You could be sitting on the roof a good long while before you figured that out.

Luckily, we get another cutscene to break the monotony.

"Welcome to Nevada, boys!"

But the only thing I can pay attention to is the fact that his chin is moving while the strap wrapped around it decided to freeze in space and time. My jaw's hurting just looking at this!

Well, get ready for it to drop in amazement when you see the driving section. Look at how barren this is! There's no vegetation; everything is underbaked like a Google Maps prototype running on a Nintendo 64. Driving itself might not be busted, but since the controls don't match where your gun's moving, you'll absolutely fall off the road if you're not careful.

And you'll be wanting to stay on that road, folks, because while the road is fairly flat, the rest of the ground around it isn't drivable. You'll get stuck in the fractured level geometry and have to reload the game, assuming you've been saving. The main menu doesn't have a level select, so if you haven't been saving, well, you should probably uninstall the game.

Honestly, skipping ahead, we get even more levels designed in frustrating ways. First, a power plant where you run to the end of a series of corridors just to flip a few switches and rescue some scientists.

"All right, Joe! Let's save your friends from spiders with vaginas!"

What?

"Let's save your friends from spiders with vaginas!"

You broke the silent protagonist rule for this?

"Spiders with vaginas!"

Yeah, my pet! Hop up! And when we flip those switches, we have to run all the way back through the same corridors that are now empty with no prompting.

"Think I hear—"

Next is an area filled with enemies that we need to clear out. We assume the game expects you to do this on foot, but if you kept your truck from earlier, you can just mow down everything with the mounted turret.

"Hey, game allows it! Might as well do it!"

You have to finish this section by interacting with the switchbox to remove the invisible wall in this barricade here that's stopping our escort truck from moving forward. We've passed so many switchboxes in the game that all did nothing. This one, however, does something!

As you might expect, the game, as usual, doesn't tell you. In fact, it's so badly designed that you could skip this entire section by simply running to the switch, opening the invisible wall, and running into the loading zone. Almost the whole game plays like this. You walk through an unengaging area for a handful of minutes searching for a loading zone, find it, and do it again.

"Oh no! That's it! You didn't miss anything!"

The same can't be said about the folks that designed some of these sections—they missed plenty of things, like floors! Seriously, these booths are missing floors! This is right at the start of this loading sequence! How did someone miss this? They glow!

After a slog of mindless running around and dying, we get another cutscene.

"Mitchell, are you a gift from God sent to save us, or perhaps you are God himself come to doom our worthless lives? Perhaps he's cursed! Whoever is at the top of his command dies!"

"It's just a coincidence! There's no such thing as a curse!"

"You and your men from now on are under my command!"

Just a coincidence! Next, we get an exposition dump from Mitchell about the epic war they didn't show.

"It's been three years since the Seven Hour War. There are no more countries!"

"Hey, what's going on? Where are the visuals?"

Uh, there don't seem to be any!

"What? Why? How long does this black screen voiceover thing go on?"

Oh, let's see—a minute and 20 seconds! A minute and 20 seconds of nothingness! You know what would have been better than nothing? Anything! Anything at all! Even hastily made paper scribbles I did on my lunch break would work!

"There are no more countries! All the governments having been replaced by one—the Combine! The alien Combine Empire had enslaved humanity, put in place a puppet leader, Dr. Brain, and started siphoning the Earth's resources!"

Wasn't that freaking better than nothing? This ultra-low effort lights-out plot plop is punctuated with this: [Music]

"Three years later!"

What? You don't do that in a Half-Life game! Not without having a character in some sort of suspended animation! You've lost whatever direct connection you shoddily built between the player and the protagonist! Three Gordon rules? Blasphemy! That's what this is!

We're in Alaska now, and no one cares! And in our inventory—nothing! In a rough three years, the vast majority of Alaska is an empty snow-filled wasteland. They call this part Act 2. Shockingly, this fresh new act offers the same stale old brokenness we've come to expect.

Take here, for example: we need to use the game's parkour system to scale this white pipe. Around halfway up, you need to jump over to another pipe before continuing to climb. But if you try—damn, some fine poor cars you got there!

To do this right, climb all the way to the top of the first pipe, then slide back down just slightly and start climbing again so you can climb further than you could before. I guess the game decides the height of the pipe depending on where you start climbing or something. I don't know; it's broken!

This is just how it worked for us! As bad as that was, though, beyond this section, we have quite literally the most rage-inducing section of the game, bar none: snipers hiding inside sniper towers. There are a few places where you can take cover, sure, but the vast majority of your path through the plains is wide open, so you'll get shot again and again and again.

The snipers always aim just ahead of you, so you can dodge the majority of bullets by just pausing for a second every time you hear a gunshot. Yeah, this method works until you meet up with a lone sniper on a hill. I hate them so much! They're completely bypassable, though. Most times when you go the wrong way in this level, an inexplicable storm kicks up and drains your health—a kill wall, basically!

But for some reason, there is almost always a roundabout path to the exit that skips the rest of the sniper nests, even the towers that fire undodgeable Zeus lightning at you. At the end of the Alaska segment, we make it to a fairly unremarkable compound full of Combine soldiers. We meet the administrator of the facility and his daughter.

"My name is Boris. I am the administrator of this fine factory."

Mitchell learns that this facility is using children to build bombs and materials for the Combine. The Combine raises them as slaves, forcing any child older than the age of five to start to work.

"Ah, so the administrator is evil! He should probably be punished for his misdeeds!"

"I'm gonna burn the whole factory to the ground!"

"Oh no, no, not quite!"

Mitchell sees an opportunity.

"I'm gonna burn the whole factory to the ground and take those kids with me!"

He needs an army, and there's a whole compound of desperate children here.

"You will do this for the children!"

"I will, but not for the children! I need an army!"

So wait, Mitchell doesn't kill the administrator? Look, I don't want to kill you! He allows him and his daughter to escape.

"Get out of here! Take your daughter and leave!"

And then becomes the leader of a group of child soldiers? I don't think that's disgusting at all! Excuse me, Gordon should have hit Mitchell way, way harder at the start of this game!

So we, as the definite villain of the story, continue to fight through more bland battles until we reach the end of Act 2.

"Hey, remember how last time between acts we got a minute-long explanation and that big title card saying 'three years later'?"

Yeah, for Act 3, we jump ahead 17 years! 17 years! 17 years! What even is the point of following a plot anymore when you jump time like a madman in a DeLorean?

Oh, the real joy of this is that they don't bother to tell the player that much time has passed until some character brings it up like five minutes into the level.

"God help us!"

No, God will stay away from this one! We roam around a ship aimlessly and without direction, trying to activate cutscenes between the crew and whatnot until the spooky G-Man shows up again.

"We require your services!"

He tells us that it's time to finish the job and fulfill our promise to hunt down the Freeman—finally! Because we remember what the game's called, and we haven't done it yet!

So what's next?

"Gentlemen, we are going to City 17!"

This is the wrong way! This is it! Yeah, we're supposed to instantly realize we have to jump aboard a moving train! Nothing in the cutscenes prior to this mentioned anything about a train! There is almost no way for someone to piece that together on their first go!

This is it! Land the train trip correctly; you're off to City 17! Straight from Half-Life 2! No, literally, it's the exact same level! Hope you played Half-Life 2 to understand half of these references, folks!

Up until this point, we've been playing a game that we could charitably call an underbaked homage to Half-Life, but its lack of care and polish becomes even more strikingly evident once we are forced to play through the opening levels of Half-Life 2, only to be gated by invisible walls, bad AI, and general confusion.

From this point on, new sections are shoehorned into maps from Half-Life 2. In City 17, things are mostly identical until you have to wander around aimlessly and find one specific window to progress. The level is large, and the guiding hints are non-existent.

Suddenly, after ignoring our character for several minutes, the Combine decide to chase us, only for us to reach a point where we're swarmed. But don't worry! You're supposed to fail! Mitchell's captured and dragged to the Combine base. He's questioned by the administrator.

"Wait, if I know my Half-Life lore, that should be Dr. Breen! How did you get in here?"

Funny you mentioned that! No, the administrator is not Dr. Breen; it's [Music] the administrator from Alaska!

"I don't think that's disgusting at all! Excuse me!"

Mitchell offers up a proposal: he and his crew will join forces with the Combine for the express purpose of hunting down Gordon Freeman, who at this point is gallivanting around with physics puzzles and crashing an airboat.

The administrator is intrigued by this offer. He leaves the room to talk to Dr. Breen, who is apparently just next door where we can't see or hear him. But what's worse is that the game leaves us waiting in an empty room for a literal minute until he comes back.

"Keep yourself occupied like a rube! Great design choice! Thank you for your patience, Mr. Mitchell!"

Eventually, Mitchell's proposal is accepted, and you find Gordon Freeman's whereabouts: Black Mesa East! Finally, we can hunt down the Freeman!

We storm the Black Mesa East lab. For those familiar, this appears to be the same raid from Half-Life 2 played from the opposite side. Dr. Freeman escapes to a place called Ravenholm. We continue to give chase.

Whoa! The game's plot finally feels like it's going somewhere! But any praise we could have given this title is dashed immediately. Why? We start in a room that we can't leave because Mitchell says out loud to himself, "I can't leave yet!"

"Why, Mitchell? Why can't we leave?"

Instead of just saying, "I can't leave yet," why not say why so that we can know, Mitchell? We're not mind readers, Mitchell! We certainly can't read the vapid puffs of air between your ears, Mitchell!

We discover that Mitchell needs a flashlight—one that we have to pick up from a nearby table and duct tape to a shotgun. Looks like Mitchell forgot his broken night vision goggle mechanic! I wonder why Mitchell, a trained soldier with the backing of a massive army, would have entered the Black Mesa raid without proper gear!

It's Alaska all over again! This guy is perpetually underprepared! This whole situation seems to be a way to force the player to use the shotgun and kill zombies, but you can avoid all that boring gameplay by just running through this whole section!

From here all the way to the end of the game, we get quick cut levels that give off the illusion of chasing Freeman through Half-Life 2 events. Any fragments remaining of the third Gordon rule? Burnt to ashes! None of these levels fit together in any meaningful way! If you never played Half-Life 2, this game would make very little sense to you because elements of that title are stuffed in here with all the care and quality of discount burrito filling!

We make our way to what we think might be Highway 17 from Half-Life 2, but we're not really sure. This would be a perfect time for Mitchell to speak up to tell us where the heck we are or where we're going! We're confused, especially when our motorcycle's texture glitches and we end up with a completely bronze bike! What the heck is going on here?

But now it looks like we're in Nova Prospekt. I say this because the security outside has "Nova" written on their backs, but nobody is home on the inside! This very large level is empty—no enemies, no allies, no interactions! We wander until things start exploding.

"Do we need to escape?"

Sure, why not? Nothing tells us where to go or what to do! We crawl through a vent and witness whatever this is. We get tossed away by a river in blackout, only to then wake up in a cell. Mitchell looks pretty comfortable. Did we miss something?

A woman named Sasha, claiming to be the Alaskan administrator's daughter, has come to break us out. She opens the doors and promises to meet us up ahead. Now we have a mandatory stealth section! Yay! We have zero equipment! If any guard sees us, we get swarmed!

Once we sneak past them, we meet up with Sasha again. We catch up, share stilted conversation about good and evil, heroes and villains, and bad Half-Life game. Adam shoots her in the head!

"Why?"

"Shut up! That's why!"

You may be wondering how the bullet that entered the back of Sasha's skull and exited to the front did not manage to hit Mitchell in the face directly. We don't know! But if you did notice that, we just want you to know so did we!

"Mitchell, run!"

Now the brutal murderer escapes the facility with us. Adam says the G-Man's waiting up ahead, waiting to straighten out the game's plot. I'm using air quotes on that word "plot." But things don't get straightened out! No! Instead, we're given what the creators probably considered a major plot twist!

"You liar! You used me!"

"Let me correct you, Mr. Mitchell! We used each other! If you are looking for the truth, you only have to look at where this all started—Black Mesa!" [Music]

We were never hunting Freeman at all! No! It was Adam in the hazard suit! What purpose did that serve?

"Your services were so very useful, and we had a good return for our investments!"

What has Mitchell's impact been in the world of Half-Life? The closest he got to participating in Half-Life 2 was when he was tossed into a series of its levels that were barely stapled together! Even then, Gordon Freeman never shows his face! And do you blame him?

The game is called Hunt Down the Freeman! It had one job: hunt the guy on the Half-Life box! But this whole game—how can I put it? The game is a lie!

The G-Man informs us that we're probably about to die at the hands of the Combine. This leads to the final level, which starts with 15 minutes of mindless gunfire. We arrive at an abandoned tower with a handful of turrets to prepare for an onslaught of endless enemies until the timer ends.

Our good friends, the snipers from Alaska, are back! And no, you can't kill them! We try to set up turrets and fire at anything that moves. It's not all that hard—just tedious! What you want in a final level!

At the end, Mitchell returns to his ship where he finds Adam. He kills him! He don't care! Mitchell drops one last Half-Life 2 reference by telling his crew, "We're going to Borealis!" And since there was no Borealis level to borrow from official source material, this title comes to a close.

There is so much fundamentally wrong with this game; it is beyond fixing! It's a cobbled hodgepodge of assets and ideas with no grand direction or vision! You can't patch this if you tried!

Funny you should mention that because they tried! They did! Yeah, on April 1, 2022, some of the developers released a surprise patch for the game almost four years after Hunt Down the Freeman originally launched! A patch on April Fool's Day for this game? That's gotta be a joke, right?

It's actually not! Remember the start of the game? That first big room where we felt lost? The one with the secret door that looked like a wall? Yeah, post-patch, it's much more open with four distinct switches that unlock a far more recognizable door! There's even additional voiceover to usher you along correctly!

Wow! They even added a trail of blood in the next room to direct you towards the cutscene activation! My gosh! Have they learned their lesson? Is this game actually good now?

Oh fudge, no! The April Fool's Day patch is a significant upgrade, but the devs pumped this out in four months! That's nowhere near enough time to fix a game this broken! Instead, levels they couldn't fix were just removed entirely, which causes problems!

"Where's the rest of you?" [Music]

"They're dead! All of them! Combine got 'em!"

The vast majority of Act 2 in Alaska—all that roaming the wilderness, the mountains, the snow, the sniper towers—[Music] all gone! You can clear Alaska now in just over half an hour! They even added an absurdly long-looking walkway just so you don't get lost!

There are some sections with absolutely zero fixes, and most of the game's third act with the cut-and-paste Half-Life 2 levels remains unchanged! They did, however, give us a new final level! Instead of 50 minutes of tower defense boredom, we do the same in three speedy minutes after a new climb to the roof section!

For some reason, they decided to add new mechanics here that didn't exist previously! You have to use the alt-fire of the Combine weapon to power equipment and move forward! Why bother? This is the end of the game! The final test should be challenging us with the systems we've already learned as we tripped our way through this pile of terrible!

It's not even a challenge! Shoot all you want; there's an infinite supply of ammo that continuously reappears! In the end, it feels like padding to distract from the rest of this messy game! And even with the April Fool's patch, Mitchell feels just as disconnected from the Half-Life mythos as ever!

"That's how Freeman drives! I may not have to kill him after all!"

It's not from lack of trying! In fact, there was another attempt at linking this character into all that precious Half-Life lore, but you wouldn't know it unless you were paying real close attention!

"Oh, it also happened to, like, die at a certain point!"

What are you talking about? Start of the game, that weird first-person cutscene with the children, the dead body, and the one kid being carried away? Well, that other person may actually be someone pretty special!

In the final level, if you die, a totally unique cutscene plays revealing Mitchell's brother, Adrian! Adrian Shepard, the main character from Half-Life: Opposing Force!

Wait, that means this whole game's goal was to act as a strange sequel-side story hybrid to Opposing Force! That's why the training sequences look so similar! Yup! And you wouldn't know it unless you happen to accidentally die at one specific spot where it's really hard to accidentally die!

I think I need a moment! All of this built from the desire to play again in the world of Half-Life after Valve unceremoniously dropped the franchise for 13 years!

Speaking of Valve, after Hunt Down the Freeman was released, they officially revisited the universe again with Half-Life: Alyx—a whole new experience putting the player in the shoes of character Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2. And as crazy as it sounds, they broke one of our Gordon rules!

"It's good! Dad, metricon movement is normal! Same for the Combine patrols!"

Miss Vance, she speaks as a side story to the traditional Half-Life games we've seen before! This entry was done with new technology—virtual reality—putting the player almost literally in the world of Half-Life!

Ah, they broke a rule! And you know what? They proved you could nix one of our precious Gordon rules and still have a decent Half-Life experience! Why did Valve choose to do this? Well, it could have been a give-and-take situation: drop the silent protagonist, breaking one tool of immersion in exchange for helpful hints and a different take on a Half-Life story!

Heck, the sense of immersion created by virtually being in and around City 17 more than compensates for a strange voice coming from your virtual avatar! Alyx utilizes all new mechanics and game concepts that once again furthered an entirely new genre of game design!

The game was so good, in fact, that it very quickly became what many have called the greatest VR game to date! Half-Life: Alyx proved you could shatter rules by building something better!

Hunt Down the Freeman, though? Well, let's save your friends from spiders with vaginas! While Freeman was designed by a group of people clearly passionate about the franchise, it was ultimately marred by strife within the dev community, leading some to regret being associated with a project in any capacity at all!

The game became as destructive as the Resonance Cascade itself! The what? That time that Gordon Freeman pushed the thing into the thing? Money was likely a big factor in the problems the team faced, as this was a fan project made on a shoestring budget!

Yeah, that's not necessarily hidden from the public! So what did this game accomplish in the end? Well, the gunplay barely works, characters are boring, enemies are no fun to fight, the narrative is a convoluted mess, original levels lack originality, and official Half-Life 2 sections are pale retreads held together with unlicked envelope glue!

This is not a successful tale of a man desperate to kill a well-known gaming protagonist! This is not a Half-Life game! Heck, it's not a finished game! It wasted our time, patience, and money! In other words, it's just bad! [Music]