SUITABLE CANDIDATES SELECTED FOR EVALUATION. OBSERVATION OF CANDIDATE #12 AUTHORIZED.
A modern day masterpiece and a mod of the year. Thank you for letting us play through your vision of Black Mesa incident through a different perspective. Perfectly crafted, directed and executed, seeing that someone utilizes the engine to this extent just warms my heart and reminds me of how truly awesome half-life community is. It was a huge, indescribable pleasure to play through this, and we're all as a community can't thank you enough for all your effort and time you put into this awesome project.
Valve should take notes, because this is a true work of passion and art made for the fans, and they seem to have forgotten what that is. Kudos.
Prepare yourself for the real masterpiece in Half-Life universe! This game gives you great Black Mesa feeling - vast highly detailed space, full of deadly surprises. You have to Run, Think, Shoot, Live again to make your way through this horror and danger. Be aware of monsters and be sure to explore surroundings - it's your chance to find vital supplies and secrets (the greatest thing is that you'll have to play the mod more than once to be sure that you found most of its secrets, it makes the game interesting even on repeated playing). Be faster and smarter than your enemies, because there are a lot of them and everyone wants to put you down ;) Top notch mapping, living environment, chilling athmosphere, nerve-bending moments await you!
TO PREVENT GAME CRASHES:
Add " -num_edicts 2048" without the quotes to your command line for hl.exe. Command line means launch parameters, which you can add into "Target" field in a shortcut's properties for hl.exe. Or it can be a string in *.bat/*.cmd file (if you know how they work).
Something like:
hl.exe -game echoes -num_edicts 2048
If your path to hl.exe in your shortcut is something like:
"C:\Bla-bla-bla and other things\hl.exe"
then add parameters AFTER quotes:
"C:\Bla-bla-bla and other things\hl.exe" -game echoes -num_edicts 2048
Alternatively, you can set the parameter in Half-Life launch options (in Steam). Just add "-num_edicts 2048" there (without quotes).
For Xash3D quit the game once and find gameinfo.txt in "echoes" folder. Open it, set "max_edicts" value to 2048, save changes, start the mod again.
P. S. If 2048 value doesn't fix the crash for you, try 4096. Or try to load the saved game or autosave from previous map and continue from there again.
The mod overall is great but it has those darn cheap headcrab spawns.
Most certainly a mod to remember.
Beginning with it's climatic introduction all the way up to the mapping & texture choices.
I believe this to be the master grown jewel in regards of detail love. While I can think of several masterfully created Gold Source Hl1 SP mods none of them were so detailed such as Echoes is.
Without wanting to spoil to much. Expect brilliant script sequences. (The Facility feels alive) A thrilling story plot that seems to portray the Events back at Black Mesa while being told to you during a post hl2 ep2 timeline. That at least was my impression.
What are you waiting for. Go and play it right now. You won't be disappointed.
I've been playing HL1 mods pretty much my whole life, and this is one of the best I've ever played. The fact that someone can make such a phenomenal mod for a twenty year old game amazes me. The fantastic level design, graphics, and especially the cinematic scripted moments are going to leave an impact on me. Never before has a scripted sequence in the GoldSrc engine left my mouth hanging open like this mod's sequences.
The "Black Mesa" of the GoldSrc engine.
Story and scenes - 8/10
Well-made, mostly imaginative, but there's little to no interactivity aside from walking around and hitting scene triggers - you don't get anything like blowing up microwaves and messing with alarms, only watch things happen. Story of "yet another person surviving through Black Mesa and being considered by Gman for hire" didn't seem to tie with HL2 references which made them feel like fanservice. I liked the scene after a certain crystal in a dark room, but Epistle3 thing at the end was jarring to me.
Levels and atmosphere - 7/10
Maps didn't look like HL1's Black Mesa to me, but that is more of a positive. Scale is huge, and mod tries to impress with sheer size of maps that you have to walk and walk through, but it causes the effect to lose it's impact slowly, certain areas were confusing to navigate (like part with ladders in elevator shaft). Lighting mostly consists of primary colors, and can get monotonous, contrast of green and red light feels overused, player guiding was unsubtle in some places. Backtracking and seeing gradual changes in same locations was convincing.
One little thing I really liked for some reason is heavy boxes making loud sounds when dropping to floor.
Gameplay - 5/10
Headcrabs after every corner (quite literally at some places) and zombies spawning behind your back were not fun. Luring zombies and other npcs under barnacles was way more fun, fighting alien grunts with only shotgun and pistol was not fun again. Soldier fights were much better because by that time you have hivehand and explosives. Other than that it was standard, if only harder than usual (I played on medium), puzzles were just fine, and big locations helped with NPC followers not getting stuck on every corner. Certain parts in final battle, like garg in tunnel and gluon, felt unintuitive.
Seeing working suit chargers, but not being able to use them was distracting.
I used a version of steam HL that still has D3D support and had no performance issues at all, but I did have to further increase num_edicts because of crashes.
Overall, as a first release, it's great and worth playing.
Gameplay: 10/10
Mapping: 1000/10
Storyline: 10/10
Models: 9/10
The Mod is the most impressive thing i ever seen, its Mapping and Lightning is like HL² you would not believe its just Goldsource, it has a good load of puzzles and a good load of funny moments like /SPOILER/ at the end when a alien steals the baby of the gman /SPOILER/
just 9/10 for the models as the Standrd Weapon Models were used :(
What can I say that hasn't been said before?
This is a very well made mod with the best portrayal of the Black Mesa disaster to date. Fantastic maps that are among the most detailed ones made in GoldSRC. Tons of scripted sequences that are very clever and well coordinated. The list goes on for Echoes. Despite all this, this is not one of my favorites. Though the work done is very impressive I don't feel like I'm playing HL. This feels more like a HL2 mod or Black Mesa. Even mods with very different themes and settings that completely change the gameplay such as Point of View still feels like HL to me, I'm not getting that feeling in Echoes.
We all know this is a good mod that is brimming with quality, so, let's do something different instead. Here's something not commonly done when it comes to Echoes, some cons:
- The playtime isn't that long and the prologue takes a bit too long. Even after the disaster strikes you have to roam around without much of anything happening. Whacking zombies and crabs with the crowbar gets old fast.
- Weapon progression is slow. A good chunk of the earlier levels have you roam around using crowbar / pistol combo and a shotgun if you find it. It starts to get a bit dry after a while.
- You have to do a lot of backtracking. Granted, the environment changes but still, walking through the same halls three times isn't that exciting. Especially when you know the creator has fantastic mapping skills and could have made equally better new environments.
- The ending is a bit of a mess. I initially thought back in 2018 that we were playing as Eli in the epilogue, in my recent playthrough I noticed it was our nameless character. We never got any answers for the Kingpin, who is he? Why is he an enemy of G-man? Also, the scene were Alyx and Gordon is on Borealis was handled pretty badly. If you have to create brush letters in red saying "Borealis" and stick it to the wall that means there is a problem. Obviously it's not that clear where the two are and this was the solution. It's not ideal. Generally, I'd prefer the mod didn't tie it's story to HL2 and beyond.
Overall, this is one of the most impressive mods ever made and I'm not just talking about HL. Everyone who loves HL and mods in general should try it. Though, if you prefer old-school style with a less serious tone and zanier events, you can get bored after a while.
Half-life
Half-life Opposing Force
Half-life Blue Shift
and then Half-life Echoes
What a gold old times games ! This is perfect for the 20 years of Half Life.
Thank you.