Huge disappointment. I was prepared to defend this, but nope. I liked this even less than Opposing Force. Barney is my favourite character from the HL2 games, so this was very sad.
Blue Shift simply has nothing going for it. The story's fine, and honestly it has a lot of potential (being a security guard during a containment breach in a top-secret research facility has certainly been the impetus for some awesome stories in the SCP universe), but the game is too short to take advantage of it. Halfway through, I got the sense that I might be evacuating people, unlike Freeman and Shephard who take a more direct approach to the alien incursion, but Barney only really saves a handful of people. There's little to differentiate the plot from that of the other two games. You get the guns, you shoot the military and the aliens, and you do what you can to get out.
Additionally, the gameplay kinda sucks. It has all the same problems that the other games do with the clunky controls but not enough cool combat encounters to compensate for them. There aren't even any new weapons. You get the missile launcher towards the end, but I didn't use it once because you simply don't need to. It's not even as if there are any interesting puzzles, either; just some annoying platforming sections that would fare much better in a game with smoother movement.
Half-Life: Blue Shift feels like nothing more than a tacked-on epilogue to Half-Life and Opposing Force. Hardly anything about it stands out (except for the brief trip to Xen), it's not fun to play, and the atmosphere is a step down from the other games. It's only worth playing through for the sake of getting Barney's side of the story (which isn't even referenced in the later games as far as I'm aware) and because it's so short.
Blue Shift simply has nothing going for it. The story's fine, and honestly it has a lot of potential (being a security guard during a containment breach in a top-secret research facility has certainly been the impetus for some awesome stories in the SCP universe), but the game is too short to take advantage of it. Halfway through, I got the sense that I might be evacuating people, unlike Freeman and Shephard who take a more direct approach to the alien incursion, but Barney only really saves a handful of people. There's little to differentiate the plot from that of the other two games. You get the guns, you shoot the military and the aliens, and you do what you can to get out.
Additionally, the gameplay kinda sucks. It has all the same problems that the other games do with the clunky controls but not enough cool combat encounters to compensate for them. There aren't even any new weapons. You get the missile launcher towards the end, but I didn't use it once because you simply don't need to. It's not even as if there are any interesting puzzles, either; just some annoying platforming sections that would fare much better in a game with smoother movement.
Half-Life: Blue Shift feels like nothing more than a tacked-on epilogue to Half-Life and Opposing Force. Hardly anything about it stands out (except for the brief trip to Xen), it's not fun to play, and the atmosphere is a step down from the other games. It's only worth playing through for the sake of getting Barney's side of the story (which isn't even referenced in the later games as far as I'm aware) and because it's so short.