Hype: "The closest thing to being an action movie star"? Maybe if you bind in your own witty one-liners. Other than that, the only thing that's similar to an action movie here is the use of guns, and the fact that you can have a pistol in each hand, which is really only John Woo territory. Other than those bits, just about any other mod out there can claim to make you an action movie star (except SvenCoop, I'm thinking more "camp movie star" for that mod). My brother and I DO happen to have the "witty one-liners" bound, mainly to the keypad. Here's some examples. "KP_HOME" "say Ok plan b, let's just kill each other" "KP_UPARROW" "say Just because we're bereaved doesn't mean we're SAPS" "KP_PGUP" "say Hha coudchoo ged scars fro eatin pussy, mang" "KP_LEFTARROW" "radio teamdown; say_team TEAM MATE IS FUCKING DEAD (%l)" "KP_5" "say Choo jus jealous uv clans caus yoo canh get een one, youunsdnan mang?" [This one is more in reference to our tag.] "KP_RIGHTARROW" "say YOO WAN A WAR YOU FPHUCKKIN COCKAROACH" There was a lot of advertisement of this mod as the mod that "CHANGED THE FACE OF ACTION GAMING," or some such propaganda. Maybe back with Quake 2, when the only other competition was Jailbreak, and the one hundred other Q2 deathmatch clones, all with their own version of the rocket launcher. I notice that in most AHL games, whenever someone says something about AQ2, they say how it's the best mod ever. Even without the precious stunts you've been waiting a year for? Oh well. The only thing that leads me to question their judgement is how extremely touchy they are about anything Action Quake 2 or Action Half-Life. They can throw quite a tantrum. It just doesn't seem to be a good idea to put so much stock and faith into a mod that a single complaint can get you to stop playing all together and start typing non-stop.

Pros:

John says: The return of the dives has been highly touted, and for good reason. The dives work extremely well, and are fun to use. It's pretty impressive to any witness when someone dives backwards out of a window, no matter if they get the one-up on an enemy, or are immediately blown away by an assault rifle. The added weapons are a nice plus. The single/akimbo Colt Single Action Army pistols are a nice innovation, reloading bullet by bullet, which is slow but is made up for in good power and wall penetration. Style is a big plus too, if you're into that kind of thing. The new single/akimbo golden Colt 1911s, straight out of Face/Off, are well balanced with a small amount of ammo but good accuracy. Bonus style points if your name is "Castor Troy." Most of the other guns have gotten a facelift, with much nicer arm and hand models, improved weapon model detail, and nice animations. All of these new improvements add up to a pretty good time, blasting away. They also fixed that damn lump-spawning bug, in teamplay. Most of the new maps are good in design, not very laggy, and have good play.

Josh says: It didn't work with our good computer at first, and it's still very prone to massive computer crashes/lockups. I was looking for any reason to deflate this mod and it gave me a huge one before we could even start the game. Eventually, somehow, we were able to get it working. After the initial reaction of "we shouldn't need to do this shit for a mod," we were plesantly surprised by the fact that the game is very good. The accuracy has been taken down on all the weapons, apparently to make it harder to kill people. While I did miss that, I guess I will live without it.

John says: It's true, I really had to talk Josh into giving this mod its fair shot, because we both were looking forward to it, and I didn't want to waste the chance to enjoy it based on crashes. We actually had to reinstall Half-Life (and OpFor) to get AHL in proper working order. WickedGL also helped, with the performance boost.

Cons:

John says: I know it sounds subjective to judge the decisions of the mod makers, but there are a few bad ideas that made through here. This is, after all, the cons of the mod, so there's no point in not airing the observations. Whenever we speak about some of the below stuff while playing the game, we usually get a lot of flak from players, not because we're complaining during a game, but because they seem to be so in love with the mod that they can't stand anyone saying anything remotely bad about it. The mod-makers themselves have a pretty bad attitude about this, since they will absolutely NOT tolerate any criticism about their mod. This is our site, though, and we will have no MOTHERFUCKING mercy. First, the physics of the handcannon are flat-out retarded. You can be standing about five game-feet away from an enemy, and have the buckshot literally shoot around them, yet you'll see the bullet mark decal appear to have covered them in about 20 pellets or so, even if firing with both barrels. Apparently, the handcannon only has about 4 or so impact points, so even if you're standing pretty close, the buckshot flowers out by about (literally) 2,000,000,000,000%, which, even in "movie logic," is pretty much impossible. The real gripe about this weapon is that you'd have to be standing right in front of the person to kill them, which is the idea of the gun all together. So the handcannon becomes an LPB only gun, since if you're close enough to kill someone with it, chances are that the other person will be a millisecond away from shooting you anyway, and if you have the higher ping or lower framerate, you don't have a chance, which is elitist in its own nature. I know it's the mod designer's choice, but this is just bad programming. And I absolutely refuse to soften the blow of this criticism by saying "but there are other weapons you can use," because that would be pretending to make less of a problem than what there already is. Another problem is map size. They work fine if you have plenty of players, but no matter what the max amount of players is, if you're on team deathmatch or LMS, eventually it's going to be a square mile filled with two people on opposite ends not being able to find each other. This problem, however, IS softened by the fact that you can change your name while dead, so you can reveal someone's location, which is a pretty good deal, since you can still play on big maps, and you don't have to wait for some guy who's not at the computer, or someone who's camping in a tiny dark corner while everyone waits for ten minutes so the round will end. My brother and I are extremely glad they left this in from the last version, and we hope they don't change that, since it's pretty necessary to keep people from leaving the game out of boredom. I'd have to say that the BIGGEST problem, the one that's been eating away at Counter-Strike too, and many mod or game communities, is the players. Where CS usually has the problem of the 12 year old white kids infesting each game with "duh what's hostages for?" mentality, and throwing away all aspects of teamplay (and that shit doesn't fly in Day Of Defeat, Firearms, or Front Line Force, by the way--teamplay is a MUST in those mods, no matter what), AHL is riddled with the occasional ready-to-start-a-fucking-war, loves-anything-from-China-with-guns, will-go-into-extreme-red-faced-fits-if-you-criticize-the-mod, trend-mongering fanboy. I say "fanboy" and not even "fanperson" because a girl would go play Counter-Strike, which is at the very least free of any pretense, be it of changing the face of gaming forever, or anime and blood operas being superior to everything America has ever done in the past ten billion years. These types of AHL fans are more likely to think they're just playing an updated version of Action Quake 2, not seeming to know what's happened to games in the past five years. I know this turns the review partially into a "rant" on the social structure of the game community, but it's still a valid point about any online game, since there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the "awareness impared" players except for making a high learning curve. AHL does require learning about the weapons and moves, but the theme of the game begs to invite the more pretentious gamers who will pout like Veruca Salt until their mental territorial bubble is no longer being violated. There's one other tiny crumb of a con, that just gets inflated by the attitude of the AHL team. A new small chat feature in Half-Life is the ability to have little word aliases. For example, you can type %l in the chat of TFC, Front Line Force, or AHL, and it'll tell everyone your general location (according to what sections the map maker has labeled). Other aliases work, such as %v for the last player you saw, %h for your current health, and so on. There's one small problem with this in AHL: whenever you type % at all, it disappears, since it assumes that anything used with it is an alias. So you can't use it at all unless you're using an alias, which is just a tiny bit unhandy. TFC, on the other hand, DOES NOT do this, so you could say that "the blue team is 100% fucked," and it would show up just like that. In AHL, it would say "the professionals team is 100 fucked." A bug like this shouldn't be too hard to fix. Here's where the REAL problem comes in: the AHL team blames Valve for this. I was in a game with "oddjob," who claimed to be on the AHL team. He proved it when I asked if they could fix the percent sign disappearing, and he replied that IT WAS A VALVE/HALF-LIFE BUG. If this was true, TFC, Valve's first official mod, would have the same bug. If it's not specific to the ENTIRE Half-Life game, then it's up to the AHL team to fix (and no, I've never coded anything before myself--and that's no excuse to ignore my point, doing so would only make you ignorant). The AHL team has a reputation for passing unnecessary blame to Valve, and it's really not a good attitude for any game designer to have, period. It reflects as bad judgement on their part, and we know that bad judgement doesn't just stick to opinions. Eventually, you'd get the idea that you shouldn't offer any single idea to the mod team. After all, they have enough problems with Valve trying to destroy their mod than to hear what someone thinks about the FUCKING HANDCANNON. One last thing about the mod team's touchiness: last year, my brother was in an AHL deathmatch game (playing the rats map, I remember), with "oddjob" again. The same problem with the handcannon that's in this beta was in that version also, and Josh mentioned it. Oddjob's infuriation, along with other touchy AHL fans, had no end. Now I like AHL and all, but can't we get a doctor to prescribe a nice heaping dose of Ritalin for these people? And have someone cut down on the "GREATEST MOD EVER!!!!!!" spazzing. It's just a bit out of hand.

Josh sez: I need to point out how this new version was not needed to "revive" AHL, because the problems with the former version were so fucking small. But to hear it from the AHL team, the mod was CRIPPLED and they blame Valve for killing their mod, when all they needed to do was release a very small code fix or perhaps release a new set of maps or reworked oldies to get past the one major problem: team lump spawning. Even without stunts, AHL is not a bad mod. And yes, while the new release is certainly worthwhile, I don't see why it took a year and a half to create it. The animations certainly don't show. It seems like they spent most of this time coming up with new ways to blame Valve for the demise of their mod than actually work on it. Look at DOD or Firearms, these mods all work when Valve releases a new version. They have an actual team that spends their free time on a free mod for a game called Half Life. There is no hype and no claims of being the best. Just solid good work. Look at Diakatana and Deus Ex. Both released at the same time by the same company. One was worthless and hyped so badly you can't help but feel scammed. Then the other one is released with normal amounts of coverage, while most of the work goes into creating the game, and the result is a great playing experience. Even after all the hype, AHL still hasn't returned from the grave. It has a fraction of the games it had before the team went to sleep on it and let it die. For one and a half years of work, the effort was not really worth it, but it at least is fun. Yes, I do say way up there how I understand how nerfing all the guns was required to increase the innings for players, but the handcannon was totally killed. You have to be in physical contact with another player if you want to damage them. Why not just make all the pellets weaker? The one thing that really irritates me (other than the buggy play) after all the hype is how terrible all the original model animations are. They are frightfully bad. Some of the worst in the mod world today. I said it before, I'll say it again: DID WE WAIT ONE AND A HALF YEARS FOR SOME STOLEN ANIMATIONS AND MODELS, AND SOME SHITTY ORIGINALS?

John says: While the player model animations are an extremely small matter, and really not even remotely related to how the mod plays, I have to agree that after the huge delay, not a single player model animation seems to have been touched, and for all the hype, the team doesn't seem to want to admit that they just plain slacked on the mod. Still, I think Josh is kind of tough on the new originals--while they aren't really high quality (most look like generic human models with Chow Yun Fat's face pasted on them, or whatever), they're still not bad.

Josh says: The old maps really helped launch the mod past the "shitty old quake 2 mod" world and into the high tech world of HL. They contained little features that made each map special, yet were crafted for a great time in all the play types. However, the new maps have lost that spark, and a few of the really great old maps are now gone. There are certain parts in the new maps that just make you wonder why the fuck they were released that way. And then you remember the AHL team's laziness.

Overall: Still very fun, good weapons, and the stunts work great. The few bad ticks don't detract much from the gameplay. Just don't get annoyed in front of the more fervent AHL fans, or you won't hear the end of it. Unless you'd rather pick verbal fights in games to see how many fanboys you can distract from playing for, oh, about the rest of their internet-obsessed lives. The cons section, while massive, is not an overall judging of the game. It's merely a complex issue and takes much more typing and words and shit to get through than saying "well the new stuff is really good."

Playing hints: 1: If you see anyone in an AHL game with the word "oddjob" anywhere in the name, for God's sake, never say anything even remotely bad about the mod, or else you will be in a WORLD OF SHIT. 2: Don't say anything bad about the handcannon in-game, or else you'll be in a non-stop typing war with some other touchy AHL fanboy. 3: Don't use the handcannon at all unless you have a ping of 30, since you can't afford to use a weapon that requires you to be standing right in front of your target. The whole thing comes down to who has the better framerate/ping in order to shoot first. There are several other guns that will kill instantly when you're right in front of a person, so there's no point in picking a weapon that WON'T kill at long range. 4: Don't camp--have the balls to get your ass kicked against the entire team every once in a while. 5: Sniper-pistols are lame. Don't run around with the sniper rifle, like it's a big, slow-firing handgun. That's what the handcannon is for. 6: Don't dislike anime in front of other players, or say that perhaps John Woo is totally overrated by pasty-faced acne-ridden white teens.

Screenies!

IN THE ABOVE PICTURE, I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO SPLOOGE AT ALL THE HOT ACTION GOING ON! But I didn't, because that would be totally fucking retarded.

I thought I was going to bust a big fucking nut again here, but only in mom's car, after she went to sleep, on her queer Jose Felicionorhjor CDs.

These pictures are so filled with insane Action Half-Life action, that they aren't even of Action Half-Life! I didn't want to bother making and fixing up some real AHL screenshots, since they would be completely unnecessary for our review. You might've noticed by now that we don't review like everyone else does.

Review by:
John Cable

Josh Cable

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