alf-Life: Opposing Force is an add-on mission to Sierra's
best-selling 1999 game Half-Life. In Half-Life players assumed the identity of Gordon
Freeman, a mild-mannered scientist who worked in the Anomalous Materials Lab
of the Black Mesa Research Facility. When an experiment went wrong, Freeman
was forced to fight his way out of the complex, battling mysterious aliens,
the military forces sent to wipe out the aliens and "rescue" the scientists,
and the government-sponsored "Black Operatives" who were sent to wipe out
everybody.
In Opposing Force, the aliens and soldiers and Black Ops are back,
and Gordon even puts in an appearance or two. But this time players experience the story from the perspective of Corporal Adrian Shephard, one
of the military grunts sent to secure Black Mesa. Adrian doesn't have it
much better than Gordon did, however. His chopper is knocked out of the sky
before it can reach the landing zone, and Adrian is left more or less alone
and weaponless at Black Mesa. His only chance for survival is to fight his
way past the aliens and Black Ops (whose side are they on, anyway?) in hopes
of reuniting with his unit and reaching safety.
Opposing Force uses the same game engine as Half-Life, and in
that respect it's a simple first-person shooter similar to Quake and Unreal. But like Half-Life, the goal of Opposing Force
is not just to kill everything in sight, but rather to figure out just what
in the heck is going on at Black Mesa. Of course, Opposing Force has
plenty of weaponry to help Adrian stay alive long enough to do his figuring,
ranging from traditional terrestrial armaments (guns, rocket launchers,
grenades, etc.) to some cool alien gizmos. On occasion he can also team up
with some computer-controlled grunts, including soldiers,
medics and engineers.
A game that's half-great
Half-Life was considered by many to be the best game of 1999, not
because it added anything new in terms of actual game play (the first-person
shooter market was well saturated by the time Half-Life made its
appearance), but because it immersed players in a compelling story while at
the same time placing them in the role of an interesting character.
Opposing Force tries to create an equally compelling story, with the
twist that gamers are now put in the role of the "bad" guy. It's a great
idea that unfortunately either isn't or can't be carried all the way
through.
The chief problem with the game is that while Gordon Freeman spent much of
Half-Life battling soldiers, as a soldier in Opposing Force
gamers will see precious little of Freeman. That's understandable from a
design perspective--after all, first-person shooters rely on a lone player
fighting off hordes of enemies, not the other way around--but it gives the
game a bit of bait-and-switch feel. Instead of really taking the opposing
side and hunting down Freeman, players quickly learn that the objective
of Opposing Force is pretty much identical to the objective of
Half-Life. To make things worse, anyone who has played
Half-Life will already know much of the mystery that Shephard is trying to solve.
On the plus side, playing a game that's essentially the same as
Half-Life isn't much of a hardship. After all, Half-Life is
probably the best first-person shooter ever made, and
Opposing Force does add enough new twists (from different weapons to
a new take on some major plot points) to keep things interesting. As far as
an expansion goes, Opposing Force actually does deliver everything
that gamers would hope for. It just doesn't quite deliver what Seirra
Studios promised in the title.
