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Nosz kurka chatka to jest Mass Effect, muszę mówić więcej?

Czyste, niewinne dzieciństwo.

INFRA is an interesting piece of cake.
It does state itself very well that it's not a fast-paced game, but still it's gameplay is ridiculously slow so it's already a no-no for people wanting any dynamic experience.
No, when I look at INFRA I think more about urban exploring, when you enjoy just being in different places and investigating it's infrastructure for clues, puzzles and secrets. We are after all playing as an inspector, searching and documenting any damages, maintenance caveats and any traces of work environment and ethics violation (empty beer bottles next to a power transformer type of violation). We do that while traversing through many industrial and urban areas where the main advantage of the game shines and that is the level design.

Seriously, this has to be the best Source mapping since forever, each and every area is very huge, rich in detail and different, all together presenting a very big range of environments we're finding ourselves in like forest woodcutter mills, a hydroelectic dam, an abandoned coal mine, city sewage system, subways and downtown areas. With that rich level design comes great optimization, the maps are huge but I did not encounter any game-braking or visual glitches, performance hiccups or crashes. Loading screens happen only between the big chapters so without taking them into account, the game is a very fluid and smooth experience from start to finish. Every place has it's story waiting for us to explore, every note is a single dot in a whole board of a city-wide conspiracy happening behind the scenes. It's all there for us to find out and interpret.

And that's where unfortunately a huge con shows up, just as big as it's advantageous level design. The complete lack of guidance for the player. There is no hud, no iconography, no visual clues nor any game journal with tasks or stuff. It's just us and the massive environment. It's hard to tell where to really go to proceed and the huge open level design is not helping with that. The main character keeps no record of collected notes and hints so if your memory isn't the best then you're gonna have a bad time with the game's puzzles. And these ones, while they are pretty sophisticated and interesting, they're also very badly explained and hard to figure out as they're resembling actual real-world machinery construction, logic and systems. As I recall I studied IT, not Civil Engineering, so I often found myself looking at walkthroughs done by someone who did. This shouldn't be a case at all, protag has his goofy-ass iPhone which he could use to store some notes and thoughts on puzzles and help us figure this stuff out, not tab out to Wikipedia to read on water purification diagrams[en.wikipedia.org].

Overall, INFRA is a one-of-a-kind game. If you're tired of all these shooters, horror or other stressful games, got a lot of free time and patience and just want to literally netflix & chill alone in some virtual environments then INFRA is the game for you. If not then you better not torture yourself.

God I love LSD and depression-based livestreaming.

I'm still glad that to this day we're getting solid and expansive HL2 mods, I just love that game too much to let it die with time.

Swelter is a mod that takes the HL2 universe to an unusual location, the steppe of Central Asia, looking a bit like a border between Russia and Afghanistan. As an agent of the Liberation front we are sent to City-545 to track down the leader of Anarchists and "make amends".

I'm gonna straight up say it, the story is on the same level as Snowdrop Escape (their previous mod), it plays like a badly written Wattapad fanfic. I know creative freedom and such, but when you want to expand the existing HL2 universe then you should get well acquainted with Marc Laidlaw's work and at least try to keep it on it's quality. Conspiracies between different resistance groups when there's a Earth-wide invasion and occupation done by an overpowered alien race is just unbelievable.

My second big con is the voice acting. It almost seems to be guaranteed that the voice work won't be high quality when it comes to fan-made content and I can't really blame anyone for it, but I also feel that if someone decides to use custom dialogues then they should put a lot of work into it. Some dialogues are broken by accent, some by delivery and some by their pitch, when the voice actors speak so muttered so that their mom won't hear then downstairs.

Cons aside, everything else in this mod is just pure joy. The level design is fantastic, with maps filled with details and keeping that Eastern European atmosphere combined with the Caspian Sea climate. You can see Metro Exodus references everywhere, even when some models from Stalker or Metro are used, they're put into good use. Maps feel complete and make sense gameplay-wise, apart from one puzzle I didn't feel dumbfounded anywhere and kept progressing fluently. The steppe segment is long enough to keep me entertained and not exhausted, although it could do well with a little bit less emptiness and a little more side exploration. The Overwatch Nexus raid is okay, expands nicely on the one done in HL2, but definitely needs some more background action, like occasional fights outside the building or additional scripted sequences. It needs to feel like an actual raid, not a casual stroll through Combine forces.

The soundtrack is also a banger, Paweł Perepelica really did a splendid job of mixing sci-fi action tunes with balalaika shredding. I also liked the usage of remakes of original tracks from HL2, really helps in reminding you that this is still the same universe with all its features.

Here's where my main problem arises. We've reached a point where HL2 mods are becoming more and more ambitious with level design and voice-work but are heavily limited by the open Source Engine just to keep them free, they get into that space where we can't call them basic fan-made mods anymore, but they don't have enough quality to call them professional yet. Some animations in scripted sequences are wonky and, combined with that goofy-ass voice acting, take away the seriousness of the moment. There was a big idea behind this, a lot of willpower and determination to make it work, but engine limitations just break it all. I believe if some budget was considered, to afford the commercial Source and some professional voice actors, sell it as a game for let's say 10$, then the mod would definitely have a chance to hit it's peak point and be talked about a lot more. Black Mesa went very well with such direction.

Overall, it's a very fine piece of work, a very well done HL2 mod, but held back by the usual quirks of fan-based projects and modding when it has the potential to become so much more.

10/10, you can punch the cows.

O kurwa ale z tej gry bije gigasperma

Currently playing it on RTX3080 Ti with everything on Ultra and using DLSS 3.0 custom with Super Resolution set to quality and upscaling to 1440p.

I have to admit, it's not a comfortable experience. The performance is ass and it gets worse the more reflective surfaces or light emitters are visible simultaneously on screen. For a 15-year old game with closed spaces like Aperture test labs, re-rendering it with ray tracing shouldn't be such a performance hog. Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn't murdering my PC like this tech DLC. There is a serious optimization issue in here somewhere.

But I still can't deny it's really damn gorgeous. Everything that has even minimal reflective capabilities is reflecting everything, all of the models are casting real-time dynamic shadows that change their density, length and shape depending on the light emitters alone. Light passes through portals now and it does some real graphical magic there. Cold, metallic environments of the test chambers really benefit from ray tracing. It's just such a damn shame that it comes with such a performance cost.

For that alone I can recommend this, but NVIDIA needs to get their technical ♥♥♥♥ up. Real-time ray tracing technology is with us for 4 years now, but there's still a lot of work to be done regarding the performance side.

But hey, at least it's free.

115 hours in and I still haven't finished this game.

UPDATE: 195,5 hours, still playing.