Half-Life: Before Steam Charts & Stats

Red-Mesa Should be the greenlit mod, not whatever the hell this is. Thats how bad this mod is.

Have you every played half life 2? Well this is half life 3!!!! The new graphics are stunning and the sound quality is off the charts. This game introduces many new gameplay aspects and I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who is begging for a half life 3! This is more than a perfect game. Infact, it sets the bar higher for games. This game wasn't created by valve but is based on a gam from them. Valve needs to step up their game!

A fantastic mod for a fantastic game. This isn't a mod in my opinion, it's another game! Half-Life: Before is a mod for Valve's 1998 Half-Life, which is regarded as one of the greatest shooters ever. Half-Life: Before takes the intensity of Half-Life combat and puts it all in a short-fun first person shooter. Half-Life: Before succeeds in fun combat and also provides many puzzles that can take minutes to solve. The combat in Half-Life: Before is fun and quick. Half-Life: Before, dispite having many pros, also faces many cons. The game is very short, and some parts will annoy you, and the final boss fight can be anymore exciting? (sarcasm) Visually, Half-Life: Before is poor. This mod runs on an engine from 1998 anyway, so I can't blame it. The character models are spot on anyway. Overall, if you're a fan of Half-Life, pick this one up!

Noclipped the whole game and unless including combat, didn't miss a thing. To beat the boss you just have to run backwards in a circle and shoot upwards. I played this on a laptop that doesn't even have a working mouse1 yet finished it (yes, this is a FirstPersonSHOOTER) in under an hour. Personally, although being released over 10 years later, this game somehow has worse graphics than the first half-life. On the plus side of this game I would actually LIKE the story.. if the fact the creator didn't understand that there isn't an ocean in Xen wasn't being shoved in my face the whole way through. Overall, if this is some student's first full game, good on them! But if this game took more or about 5 people to make, if this game took more than 2 months to make, considering this is a 2009 release... not even having to consider the standard of a game on steam, big thumbs down.

Why do people hate this game? It's a fan made mod, it does its job of entertaining you for about half an hour, and probably one of the better made mods of seen since it doesnt rely on a complete ghost town of a multiplayer mode. Give it the try, you will enjoy it if you remember you're playing a mod and not a fully fledged game from Valve.

I'll make this short. HL Before is a kick in the balls not only to every HL fan, but also for the whole HL universe and Valve. Poor english ("Spacial Thanks"? Are you kidding?), unstable framerate, easy boss battle, badly looped music, very short and please buy a decent microphone to the voice actor. This should be take as example of how NOT to do a videogame. At least it's free, so if you want to waste half an hour of your life without spending a cent, go play this.

For a mod of Half-Life, it isn't really that good. Which begs the question: why did this mod get greenlighted on Steam instead of better Half-Life mods? We will probably never know. Since this game is so terribly short, I'm going to some up the story on this one review. I'll try to figure out and explain it as best as I can. You magically get teleported onto a boat by a lightning bolt (no, I am not kidding). After appearing on said boat, you find out that most of the crew of the boat are dead or tuned into Zombies, with other different creatures blocking your way. After killing them and getting through some weird and confusing level design, you find a man on top of the boat that's "guarded" by some sort of soldiers, who instantly attack you (why? I still don't know. As for the man, we'll just call him Bob). After "rescuing" Bob, he tells you that they (whoever "they" is) have made a "very smart genetic modified creature". He gives you a medkit and activates the cargo lift at the front of the boat that has the creature inside. You leave him and go back to destroy it. But you also have to get through one of the more stronger enemies from Half-Life, which is still pretty easy since it gives you almost all of the weapons from that game. After plowing through them, you jump into the cargo lift which triggers an unskippable cutscene (which is gonna be very repetitive since everytime you die from the boss, you have to sit through this cutscene over and over again). The cutscene shows the "very smart genetic modified creature" eating some sort of yellow crystal. The yellow crystal might have been the artifact that Bob was talking about while you were talking to him. But why does the creature eat the artifact? I STILL DON'T FUCKING KNOW! After the cutscene, you are greeted with both the first and final boss of this game, the creature. The boss is... interesting. It's the same final boss of the original Half-Life only smaller, has an instakill attack, and spawns Snarks. I found a glitch where the boss kept going through the walls and didn't attack me at all. Anyway, he is kinda easy to take down aside from the instakill attack. After killing him, you are greeted with the credits. And that's it. I got this game because I was curious, and it was for free. If you wanna try it out, then go ahead. However, if you don't wanna waste your time, then just don't bother.

Not exactly bad, but you don't really NEED to play it. It has little to no story, other than "This is how Black Mesa got hold of GG-3883". That said, that doesn't really explain why there are Xen creatures on the boat with you, there having been no Resonance Cascade to bring them there yet... Oh, and about "entering another world?" as the description says? Not a part of the plot. That, and it's also very, very linear and has considerably more shooting and enemy concentration than the base game. Final score, 5/10. It's OK, but ultimately not worth your time.

I honestly don't understand why this gets so much hate: Half-Life: Before takes around 20-30 minutes to finish and has a bland story, but how much story can you fit in 25 mins?! I didn't care much for the story, the gameplay was good, not great, good, and the pistol and other redone models look great in my opinion. The game gets slightly harder at the end and you gain new weapons around every new corner. I enjoyed the addition of the cutscenes as well as the music. The boss was interesting but I felt like it needed something more to it beyond just strafing away from it. Also, its free! In short, I DO recommend that you get this and have half an hour of fun.

If it wasn't so short and for free I wouldn't have any reason to recommend it. Don't play it unless out of pure curiosity. It has no story, bad gameplay and looks like shit. The only really good thing in it, that doesn't come from Half-Life 1 itself, is the music, and the way it was implemented. Few of the stupid things I've noticed: - if you shoot the guy you find on the bridge (who is apparently a ventriloquist), he won't die, but you will still get the "mission failed" message, even though he's needed only to push a button, an action which the player character could've done by himself; - the boss is just a HL1 final boss, facing the ground, with an instakill attack, moving at ridiculous speed, the only technique to defeat him being running backwards in little circles, at the same time shooting at him from all the few weapons you have; - the said boss has a poster of himself on a wall in the first level; - at the begining of both (!) playable maps in the mod you get attacket by enemies almost immediately after opening cutscenes without a chance of avoiding damage; - during the credits, the author misspelled "Special"...