8 Comments

1. Kyle

   25th January 2006 at 9:00 am

   Ahh, Soft Boiled.
   Loosly based on the movie “Hard Boiled”, or so I hear. Never seen it.

   Reply
2. piledriver

   24th June 2007 at 9:37 pm

   

   single map. not good. poor gameplay. poor attention to important details.

   Reply
3. Mel

   3rd April 2008 at 11:58 pm

   

   This one goes back a long way, I got it on a give away disc from the magazine “Complete Game’.
   Rated it then 4/10 but only commented then that it was ‘short with grunts only’. See piledriver comments above.

   Reply
4. Ten Four Reviews

   31st July 2012 at 3:35 am

   Seeing as this map is inspired by John Woo’s Hard Boiled, it’s a shame that Half-Life doesn’t include akimbo pistols. Perhaps in a future mod this level can be more authentic.

   What’s also a pity is that this level is rather lacklustre. It is one of the best single-player add-ons for Half-Life so far but, at the current time, that really isn’t saying much.

   While the gameplay is reasonable and the visuals could be a lot worse, it’s never that much fun and there are many things that seem to have been put there purely to annoy you. The lack of a HEV suit, for example, is extremely irking and is something that, in my opinion, map authors really must include in their maps. To be one bullet away from death and not know about it is ridiculous, as is the added difficulty in selecting weapons, and it really detracts from anything else the level might have to offer.

   It starts off reasonably well with a decent prefabbed helicopter and a nice foyer to the building – although the helicopter seems to be employing some top secret military technology seeing as its engines are clearly running without making a sound. From there it’s a rather pedestrian level, with too few enemies and too much tedious wandering to find your next destination.

   Enemy placement is fairly dire; in some places it’s far too sparse while in others the grunts are in groups of five. This would be acceptable if the intensity of the battles increased as you progressed but when the distribution is as random as this, it makes for a very inconsistent, unenjoyable challenge. When you finally do find your way around the maze-like complex and defeat all the grunts and automated enemies, the ending is a bit of a let-down and technically flawed too, which makes the amount of exploration you’ve just endured seem even more pointless in hindsight.

   At such an early stage in Half-Life’s …er… life, this level isn’t too bad and there’s plenty of evidence that the co-authors could go on to produce some excellent levels. With the scant availability of new levels right now, it’s certainly worth picking up provided you don’t expect too much from it.

   Notes
   This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Wednesday, 3rd February, 1999 by Morgan.

   This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.

   Reply
5. Dmitry

   1st March 2024 at 2:18 pm

   How can someone download with a link broken?

   Reply
   1. Unq

      3rd March 2024 at 6:17 pm

      Fixed.

      Reply
6. Dmitry

   6th March 2024 at 1:18 pm

   The pipe has stunned me, it is climbable from any direction, first time seeing this. It’s not even a ladder, but a circular grapling area. And when you reach the top there’s no way to determine where to shoot or hit to make the crack open so what we do is hit everywhere. If someone studied acrobatics, it’s impossible something like this in real life. There’s not enough stability.

   Installed:
   Manually

   Difficulty Played At:
   Hard

   Playtime:
   15 Minutes

   Reply
7. monster_urby

   8th March 2025 at 12:23 pm

   

   Sooo, Soft Boiled. I don’t know how I came to have a copy of this map in my youth, but I can guarantee you two things. First, I had no idea it was called Soft Boiled, running the command “map sb3,” I figured it was just called sb3. Second, had I known it was called Soft Boiled, I wouldn’t have made the connection to John Woo’s Hard Boiled because I’d never heard of it and to this day I’ve never seen it. Perhaps if I HAD seen it then some of the stuff this map expects me to just know would have been more obvious…

   First of all, if you do not hurry through the lobby right at the start and the shutter closes? Never mind soft boiled, you’re straight up soft locked, son. If however you do make it through, what we have here is a fairly straightforward grunt fest through an abstract re-imagining of a hospital. I say abstract because even by 1999 standards, this map’s detailing is SPARSE. Like… Quake sparse. Furthermore, the means to progress is so nonsensical sometimes that I had never finished this map without noclip until today. I looked up a walkthrough and apparently I’m supposed to… CLIMB INTO A FURNACE AND UP A PIPE? Again, maybe this is a moment in the movie but how on Earth am I supposed to figure that out otherwise. Everything about this furnace screams “Do not enter. I am a furnace.”

   After some more winding corridors, I was reminded that this was also playable as a deathmatch map and, if memory serves, not a particularly good one.

   You are then expected to bust a inconspicuous on a wall to reopen the shutters, then return to the lobby and take the other path to the end which involves, YOU GUESSED IT, more winding empty corridors before finally ascending a wooden staircase, shooting open some wooden doors (which again I needed to look up) and shoot Gman right in his smirking mouth.

   I wish I could tell you this final moment made the whole thing worth it… but it didn’t.

   Installed:
   Manually

   Difficulty Played At:
   Medium

   Playtime:
   15 Minutes

   Reply

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