A 5 level mod that offers indoor action through Black mesa, with plenty of nostalgic content. There’s not really much to say about this except that it’s set in Black Mesa and offers plenty of action.
Basic Details
- Title: Half Secret
- File Name: hl1-sp-half-secret.7z
- Original File Name: secret.1.rar
- Size : 4.68Mb
- Author: TTK/Freeslave
- Date Released: 08 August 2008
PlanetPhillip Download Servers
Installation Instructions
- Copy the secret folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Half Secret should now be listed in your Library tab.
Screenshots
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots may contain spoilers.
Reader Recommendations
Total Downloads
Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
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2,940Overall
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0Today
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4Last 7 days
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11Last 30 days
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134365 days
Meta Review Data
Statistics based on 3 comment(s) with meta review data.
Installed:
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 3 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 3 Hours, 55 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 45 Mins by Cardiomyopathy
Longest: 10 Hours by fleetlord
Total Time Played: 11 Hours, 45 Mins
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 3 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 3 Hours, 55 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 45 Mins by Cardiomyopathy
Longest: 10 Hours by fleetlord
Total Time Played: 11 Hours, 45 Mins
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This is an enjoyable mod. The first part is a little plain but it gets better. I almost was able to run through to the third level without killing anything or being stopped.
The inclusion of some nostalgic content is quite nice and I loved the start.
If this were a school report it would read:
“Needs to pay more attention to the beginning”.
Some sections were a little repetitive and the ending was a little abrupt.
5 Word Review
Balance the action, finish better.
—Summary—
***WARNING SPOILERS***Half-Secret follows the story of another BlackMesa scientist who seems to be caught up in the resident cascade we are very familiar with. Much like the beginning of Half-Life your journey through the shoes of Dyson Poincare begins on a tram. That tram suddenly experiences some technical difficulties as the beginnings of the cascade start to shine through. Without much story you are casted through the halls of BlackMesa to arrive at your first themed area a sort of storage pit. As you continue through the large storage rooms you encounter your first signs of alien life forms, then the human grunts are soon to follow. As you exit the storage facility you enter what seems to be a sort of Biodome for Xen-like creatures.
As a Half-Life player you begin to encounter some life-forms that were excluded from the original Half-Life series. The Biodome/science facility acts much like the storage facility, large rooms with long hallways; although this time there seems to be a lacking of human grunts. Have no fear, because soon after the science facility you enter what is called “The Tunnels”. The grunts are in full force ready to stop your every path. By this time it seems like you are trying to track down what the community likes to call “the Kingpin”. By this time it seems the grunts had too much to handle with the Xen creatures. You are almost completly alone in the final stages of this mod. It feels like the end when you are approached by a Gargantua in a long wide tunnel. After defeating it you finally come face to face with the Kingpin, the camera fades out and the mod ends leaving you wondering what happened next.
—Review—
Although the mod covers three general areas they all seem rather rushed into a 5 map series. It almost feels like the Half-Life 1 timeline was played in fast-forward as you experienced everything in under one hour. Critically it might of been better for the developer to concentrate on maybe one specific area. Clearly they he had some intentions of using the “cast-away” Half-Life model set, so why not develop a story about a lone yellow-suited storage worker? With that said there is clearly a good use of mapping space, they seem to be built upon eachother making it feel like a real complex instead of series of rooms strewn together by a labrinth of hallways.
There isn’t a lot of dialogue nor story so you tend to apply your own. Does the kingpin at the end destroy you? Do you destroy it? Or do you have a casual game of Chess. I prefer the ladder. The mod is fairly easy so I suggest playing it on a hard setting, you might get frustrated on some Human grunt areas, but with careful planning even you will be able to destroy the Gargantua. With plenty of medpacks and ammo this task is even simpiliar. The map design is a bit basic and block, texture work is repetitive and uninteresting; also used in improper areas. However, there are plenty of interesting “bunker down and gun” fighting situations.
The environments are open enough to leave for lots of pistol sniping from afar. There are basic animated sequences, but yet still interesting to watch. Try not to take the mod too seriously especially when you get the buggy laser guided exploding bats.
It’s worth a go, though there isn’t really a story. The extraordinary accuracy of the pistol means you can deal with many enemies from a safe distance, so I did the old “try to keep your health and armour at 100% throughout” routine to force me to take it carefully. I couldn’t manage that against the Gargantua though!
One point to note is that though it works fine under Steam, when I tried it under my stand-alone version of Half-Life you spawn at the beginning into mid-air and thus die, and if you noclip your way out of that then you get a CTD after the first cut-scene.
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I enjoyed this mod and may play through again on hard level, not that often I play through a mod twice unless I’m going to write a more formal review. This is mostly a straight forward combat mod with any puzzles being find the key to open a door. The mod does have a rich mixture of human and alien encounters and a nice array of weapons to match with the intensity of the action increasing as you progress. Nothing new unless the exploding bats and frogs are new, plus set designs that are fairly basic with the same said for both textures and incidental content, so it won’t be winning any awards for architecture or originality. Nevertheless this mod is highly playable and contains that fun factor like a good book you don’t want to put down until you finished it.
it is not a good mod,but it is not a complete failure
I like it it’s not perfect but like phillip said it brings back some nostalgia and produce here and there some cutscenes without or with interaction it has everything what is needed even if some place looks sometimes repetitive and also a little empty misses simply a little bit more ambiance but add some small new stuff to so for arround an hour of gameplay it’s well worth
How to survive / start?
I keep falling down and die off the train wtf??
This is a pretty neat combat minimod with five maps.
It starts with a cute little tram ride inside the BM complex.
You are not playing as Dr. Freeman this time, but that doesn’t matter.
After almost arriving at your destination something wents wrong and suddenly aliens appear!
Being lucky you have an HEV suit and found some standard weapon, you can fight back those aggressive monsters.
Sooner or later you find out that one monster is behind all this, I call it the “Brainbug” 😉
So let’s chase this evil thing from outer space…
As I mentioned it’s combat only usually, there are no puzzles besides finding keycards and hit some buttons, which is indeed easy.
The combat itself can be quite tough at times but luckily many crates content several goodies such as healthkits, HEV batteries or new weapons.
If I’m right the enemy hitpoints and values of healt stuff has been modified to make it a bit more challenging.
Apropos weapons, there are also new ones!
You now can use some exotic creatures as weapons, and I’m not talking about Snarks but it’s similar. Nonetheless, there are also many regular weapons available.
The mapping is quite good, it feels like in BM. But the textures and furniture is a bit poor.
It all looks very clean and somehow else than interesting.
That could have been done way better, but okay, lighting is good and textures aren’t ugly.
Atmosphere is quite good too, rare ambient sounds are used, but I wish there were more.
It’s sometimes very empty in those corridors and you’ll probably as well think something’s missing.
A real story would have been great too, altho you can figure out what this mod is about.
Overall, it’s cool combat in BM, enemy placement is very good, sometimes just predictable.
There are a few scripts like spawning aliens or alien-chases-scientist scene.
I’m not sure how to describe balancing here, I’d rate it all from poor to great.
Poor, because there are plenty of healing possibilites and weapons, ammo.
And great because sometimes the combat can really hard.
Pro’s:
-Very nice combat action
-New weapons, models
-Also lot of weapons and ammo
-Decent mapping, good lighting – but far from great
-Sweet little intro tram ride
-A few scripted events
-Good playtime (~15-45 mins, rather 30 mins)
-No bugs (I know I had a weird beginning the 1st time I played it, but strangely it ran just fine)
(-Modified enemy hitpoints, health and HEV battery values (if I’m right?)
Con’s:
-No puzzles
-No real story
-Balancing – imo, it’s too easy when you’re not playing Rambo
-Undetailed maps, not much variety
-Less ambient sounds, no music
-Disappointing end
Starts out slow, but gets better quickly. The end is really fun as you get a barney who can definitely be of some use. Gets much harder later as[spoiler]a garg and several vorts serve as your penultimate challenge[/spoiler].The ending is abrupt though. What, you just [spoiler]die to the kingpin????[/spoiler]
LUV the venting of the hallway, but the ending was anti climatic; felt ripped off.
Manually
Easy
10 Hours
For what it is, Half Secret is a really good mod. It’s a decent BM mod, and that’s it.
Mapping is a bit blocky, but still fun nonetheless. The enemy placement was mostly nice too and quite easy. Also, I don’t know if I accidentally clicked Hard, but I think that there was a minor change when it comes to the medkits (12 HP instead of 15).
Overall, I would recommend this mod. If you have 20-30 mins to spare, then look no further.
Nice mod, maps are pretty basic, but still good enough to tell what each area is supposed to represent.
Manually
Medium
1 Hour
Loved it and the labs look like op4.
Manually
Hard
45 Minutes