Minerva

Since I have Half-Life 2, and people put out free mods for it, I availed myself of one, by the name of Minerva.

The game sees you as J. Random Shootering McShooterson, and you are infiltrating (where stealth = shooting the other guys before they get you) an island base where some weird things are happening. You progress down through the levels until you find the big thing... and then you blow it up. Sounds exciting, right?

There are a number of connected areas, and I can't recall a lot of loading screens, but I'm sure there were separate chapters. But what happens in each area is basically: go through the area, solving a very simple puzzle, which may be as basic as pushing a button, then fight your way out as guards suddenly appear. And this basically repeats for the entire game. Even the final level is just running back through the entire map from end to start. With shooting.

While the story is minimal, and works in its minimal way, the maps do take some slogging through. More than once I got lost as to where I was supposed to go next, and only got through because I tried going everywhere. And yes, I threw on a basic cheat because endless dying and respawning is not fun.

So the basic story is all right, and the feel is Half-Life-y, but the maps get in the way and repetitive nature of each area works against it.

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