Evacuation is one of those Half-Life 2 mods that desperately wants to be a modern AAA first-person shooter. From the weapon limit, to the ADS, to the view bob and sprinting animations, the opening turret section, and even Resident Evil 4 remake-style yellow paint on key items, the mod tries its hardest to appear flashy, modern, and professional. None of these are necessarily bad traits, but playing through Evacuation, you very quickly understand that these aspects are surface-level and aesthetic only. At its core, it is just another HL2 mod. Nothing unique is attempted in terms of level design, and oftentimes the levels can be downright poor. The mod takes place entirely within a forest which means player railroading can often be confusing, with things like fallen tree trunks simply looking like parts of the environment but being required for progression and traversal. Enemy encounters aren't very interesting and there aren't any "wow" moments like you'd see in HL2 community classics. It feels like moving from arena to arena without regard for Half-Life's famous sense of progression. Some of the puzzles feel pretty obtuse, such as having to search for a full gas canister in an encampment full of gas canisters to power a generator. It's all serviceable but not very interesting, and there are plenty of other, better HL2 mods that take up far less space on your hard drive (11 gigabytes!).

At least it looks nice visually, with nice amber lighting giving the forest an attractive autumn look and nice details such as leaves falling from the trees making the experience more atmospheric. However, I did seemingly run into a frequent lighting bug where the color correction/ambient light in a scene would flicker rapidly between tones depending on where the camera was facing. The original soundtrack was a nice surprise to hear and it compliments the game just fine with its ambient, electronic tone but compositionally isn't that interesting on its own. I still do want to praise the dev team for including a free .flac album on their Steam page for individual listening, though.

Despite its aspirations, Evacuation just isn't a very interesting mod. The level design is bland, player railroading is problematic, and it lacks key elements of originality or experimentation. At least the presentation is nice when it's working as intended.

My critisms, ranging from most positive to least:
- Story is uninteresting
- Voice-acting is ass
- Fine visuals, but rough in parts
- Highly derivative of other games and mods; no original ideas
- There's a Russel rip-off
- The axe feels like shit because it doesn't attack in a swiping pattern like you'd expect it would; it's just a reskinned crowbar
- The combat overall is bad, just Half-Life 2 but with worse level design and annoying recoil
- Speaking of which: The level design is atrocious, in some parts. It's just moving from bad arena to bad arena with little sense of direction

Maybe I just went into this with a bad mindset, given that I went in thinking of Entropy : Zero 2 and already slightly stressed, and if so: Fair enough. But this is my review, and the game just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Short and not too sweet.

Playing this so recently after Entropy: Zero 2 will likely have me a bit biased, but still, Evacuation is a HL2 mod you can miss out on and be just fine (unlike the former). It doesn't offer you anything too grand unless you've been dying to shoot at Combine with an AK.

It will kill about an hour of your of time and won't be showing you anything new. You survive a helicopter crash, you want to live, so you kill antlions, raiders, and Combine on your way to Evacuation. That's it.

Something that bothered me: there's an M1 Garand but its only job is to sit on another character's back. You can use it, but seemingly only in the shooting range, where it's missing the iconic PING anyways. Just a disappointment. Apparently other people suffered bugs, I didn't notice any, but I didn't really enjoy myself either, so.

Just another mediocre mod, the dude just trained his skills for himself, if you still don’t sleep from such mods - then you can spend an hour, by the way, I met too many bugs, in front of a sniper in the church, you can generally bypass the map and break scripts. There are also some "Metro" vibes and a soviet-developer)
I also immediately remembered Thunder Leaves from the screenshots, it seems to me that Andrey Gorkin not only helped here, but simply collected the entire mapping for the dude)
///
Просто ещё один средненький мод,чувак просто для себя тренировал свои навыки,если вы от таких модов ещё не спите - то можете потратить часик,кст багов чет слишком много я встретил, перед снайпером в церкви вообще можно обойти карту и сломать скрипты. Также есть немного вайбов метро и совка-разраба,
а еще сразу вспомнил про Thunder Leaves по скринам, мне кажется, Андрей Горкин тут не просто помогал, а просто весь маппинг чуваку собрал)

Check my 2023 top: https://www.backloggd.com/u/grihajedy/list/2023/