Gameplay

Shorter than Willy coming out of a cold shower

Now I know how my girlfriend feels. Blue Shift is short, as in "not worth your $29.95" short. This was a complaint we had with OpFor, so we're going to be much less forgiving this time. Sure, it comes with OpFor, but any self-respecting Half-Life fan already has it, and Half-Life fans are the only ones likely to pick Blue Shift up. So is it worth $19.95, after the $10 rebate? Now that's up to the gamer in question - is he a die-hard fan? Does he enjoy Half-Life's style and isn't tired of it yet? In that case, by all means, pick Blue Shift up.

Oh Dear God

In the words of Bart Simpson - whuh-oh

Blue Shift does a lot of things better than OpFor or Half-Life. Most importantly, the Xen sequence is compact and short. It does take up a large part of the game but the Mario Bros. jumping is kept to a minimum, though there is a very frustrating sequence near the start of Xen. In fact, there didn't seem to be as many jumping puzzles as in the two previous HL titles, but they leaned towards the more fiendish. Now, you not only have to jump, you have to stack crates to make your jumps, or move barrels across a pit of acid, and so on. Are these more involved jumping puzzles easier to forgive than the regular kind?

What happened to that texture?

Don't complain about the caves. Fewer jump puzzles!

Of course not. What kind of sicko forces the player to create his own personal hell, and then go through it? Does Joe Gamer really want to line up the crates in an orderly fashion so he can get up within jumping distance of a ladder? Probably almost as much as he wants to drive out across Death Valley in a roadster with no top and no air conditioning. Human beings just don't make each other do that. For the last time, developers, this is not Half-Life: Mario Invades. If you're going to make jumping puzzles, do them right (Mario 64, MDK, MDK2) or don't do them at all. In fact, this goes for any game, not just Half-Life.