First Person Shooter > PC : HL2 MOD > The Island

The Island (PC : HL2 MOD)
Release Date: January 10th, 2006
Publisher: N/A
Developer: Stalk3r
Genre: First Person Shooter

Posted: April 21st, 2006
Last Updated: November 6th, 2007

Latest Release: 1.0c On-Site Links Secrets Downloads The Island 1.0c (19.57 MB .exe)

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Off-Site Links Official Site ModDB Entry

ESRB Rating: N/A Also Available On: N/A Also Released As: N/A

Number of Players: 1 Player Prequels, Sequels and Expansions: N/A Average Completion Time: 1-2 Hours

Similar To: Half-Life 2 (PC) Related To: Half-Life 2 (PC) Rating: Average rating: 2.600000000002 5 Ratings 5 4 3 2 1

Currently as I am in my intense Half-Life 2 single player mod review mood I bring to you another review of "The Island". There is a lot of things I can commend in this mod, and some things I just shake my head at. The Island has some incredible great first impression qualities. The screenshots, the starting screen all have great professional qualities to them. In fact the mapping in the game is fairly good, but can get a bit linear at times, as I will explain below.

First I will talk about all the problems I had with this mod in general. When I first started the game I couldn't even move. I had to re-map all the keys as they were set up very oddly. It's okay that people use different keyboard layouts, but why change them and release them and force them on the public? Just leave them as the default. Unfortunately, just like the The Lost City HL2 mod, the weapon titles were flawed and appear as things like "#HL2_Pistol". The dark hallways that seem to plague this "island" are very unrealistic, serve no real purpose but to annoy the player and make it a little bit challenging as you have to manage your flashlight use. And unlike Half-Life 2: Episode 2 the darkness doesn't seem to fit well into the design of the maps. Furthermore the enemies are somewhat abundant and crowded in this mod, especially the damn fast zombies. Too many mods use these zombies just to make the game harder, but this mod even takes a step further and throws bunches of them at you, but also triggers more and more as you run away from the first batch. There's other ways to make your modification harder other then throwing all these fast zombies at the players!

The maps like I said were fairly decently designed, but those hallways are just too poorly designed for me to give credit to the overall design. There was definitely a challenge aspect going on for this modification though, besides the jumping zombies, there was also low amounts of ammunition and weaponry which really makes it challenging, especially with the high amounts of aliens spawning about. There is a few secrets you can find which may help you out in that department though. Overall it's a pretty nice experience and kept my attention for a couple hours.