Basic Details
- Title: Half-Life: Infestation
- File Name: hl1-sp-infestation.7z
- Original File Name: infestation.zip
- Size : 3.74Mb
- Author: Peregrine
- Date Released: 08 December 2001
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Screenshots
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WARNING: The screenshots may contain spoilers.
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Reader Recommendations
Total Downloads
Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
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2,789Overall
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0Today
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1Last 7 days
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11Last 30 days
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161365 days
Meta Review Data
Statistics based on 5 comment(s) with meta review data.
Installed:
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 5 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 1 Hours, 16 Mins
Shortest: 1 Hours by Avantgarde95
Longest: 2 Hours by monster_urby
Total Time Played: 6 Hours, 21 Mins
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 5 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 1 Hours, 16 Mins
Shortest: 1 Hours by Avantgarde95
Longest: 2 Hours by monster_urby
Total Time Played: 6 Hours, 21 Mins
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Jump to a review
It’s not a map, it’s an mod (11 maps). No new models, textures or sounds, except a little voice-acting at the end. The mapping is high-quality, and you have an alternate path near the end.
From the readme: “The Brief-case toting guy’s employers are wanting Black Mesa to take care of itself, but it seems more and more aliens have gotten a stronghold on the base, their terraforming projects making it look more like Xen than Earth. Your mission is to find an abandoned nuclear device and arm it. Once you are teleported out at a mission success, the Black Mesa will crumble before the power of the nuke, eliminating the aliens and their inter-dimensional portal. One nuke has already been detonated, the Gman tells you, by one Adrian Shepherd, and you must activate the second one to close the portal.”
It’s worth a download.
Strong level design, good fighting, and clever (as opposed to nearly impossible) jumping problems. I am unfortunately stuck on the level with the laser…
In the room directly below the laser, one floor down, there’s a button that will turn off the transparent barrier.
Once that’s out of the way, you can turn on the laser. The controls are below the yellow conduit.
It will knock a hole in the wall, leading to a portal.
I’m stuck on In8 where you go above the panels to activate the door to open once in side there is a large picture of the transit system and a jump to a couple of pipes and the water has electricity going through it I can figure out how to get to where the guard and the doctor are above on a platform
Jump on the lower pipe and follow it to the left. Safe ground beneath, with a crab. When you reach the end, look up and jump on that ladder of some sort, it’s climbable. Say Hi to the guard and the doctor for me 😛
Definitely worth a download! And one play or more! Haven’t been so entertained in months. Everything is so well put together, I love the Earth infested with Xen parts and the architecture and texture combination; no lighting problems. The jumps are neat, enemy placement is great, I had fun trying out all the weapons, solved a puzzle here and there. Nothing too hard, but certainly enjoyable all in all.
Two more maps to go; right now I can definitely say:
Thanks for your help now stuck with the big blue meany at the end of the hallway where the railway system goes through a closed door?
That’s the final map you’re talking about but you’re in it for a long time, I’m not sure what you’re referring to as “big blue meany” 😐
SPOILERS:
The railway carries a rocket that needs to be activated for the mod to end, but you can’t get to it yet. You have to go around.
Outside, to the right, after fighting all the grunts, there’s a hill and a big rock with a small one under it. Shoot the small one so the big one will roll towards the explosives. Further on, after several enemies and wall holes, you get to that rocket..
END OF SPOILERS
If that doesn’t help, please be more precise 😛
V Good
Yes, agree with everybody, this is a very good mod. Great gameplay, fights and puzzles. I like the way Peregrine sets up all the crate searches. You have to break them in the right order to get every goodie. Attention to creating an enjoyable experience is highly commended. One of the best shortish mods around.
A classy medium-length mod. Nothing particularly new, but very well put together. You know how within a couple of minutes you can usually tell whether a mod is going to be good or not? This one has that “in safe hands” feel to it which means you can relax into some excellent gameplay without bugs or glitches, well-paced, and maintaining interest throughout. Although there are some major firefights, most of them can be accomplished with minimal damage provided you employ planning and forethought – I like that sort of thing, the very antithesis of run-and-gun (which has me yawning and reaching for god mode!). Highly recommended.
Added 21 screenshots kindly supplied by piledriver.
How come more people didn’t play this mod? Too bad, I really liked this one and it deserves better.
Maybe this is a sign that a lot of people use the highest rated page to search for good mods.. Which is good!
I for one, atm, just look for the newest comments and see what mods people enjoyed most (or where people get stuck 😀 or complain it’s hard) and/or read the descriptions and look at the screenies and I place them in my to-do list 🙂
This was a very good mod.Only problem I had was with the amount of jumping as I suck at that.That being said,if you suck at jumping play it later but don’t put it off to long.
Yes, a very good mod. Xen jumping was a bit too much, but playable. Nice level design an black mesa aganin , so
This one was really excellent, som e very challenging yet fair combat.
Very clever use of the enemies abalities.
But iplayedit on medium and had 7 health when the last enemey bit the dust. I wouldnt even attempt this onhard. 95/100
The jumping in Xen is really hard, but this is a great mod! I am playing it in 2011…HL 1 is still my favorite game. I know I can always come to Planet Phillip to get a HL fix.
Is there any hope on a mod this old to get help? Having too much fun when I became stuck. I am on level 10. I have blown up the helicopter, climbed around the rocks, killed everything in sight, gotten all the goodies, and now I can’t find the next level. I am in a security room with a couple of computer desks, a recharge station, an inactive security door, and with a glass window looking out onto an infested room. On the other side a vortigant just keeps zapping the window when he sees me. There is a big yellow button next to the window looking like it should open it, but doesn’t. The glass won’t break. I can hear Xen creatures just on the other side of the wall. Where do I go next?
Thanks for the detailed description.
There’s a door at the far end of the room wedged shut by a board on the other side, which you can destroy by sliding a satchel or a grenade or even a few carefully aimed hornets under the door.
However, you didn’t need to go back to the beginning of the map. There’s a box of explosives near where you blew up the helicopter, which have the mysterious property of being impervious to any amount of firepower yet highly susceptible to rolling boulders.
Wow Gilfarry, Thanks so much for helping me. I see 2 doors that are candidates for your remedy. One is inside the concrete office, where the 2 pcs are and the window with the zapping vortigant on the other side. It has a sort of black mesh panel on it. And nothing I do gets it to blow open. The other is a door out in the area outside the concrete offices, with a large metal or wood plank propped against it. Again, can’t blow that up. Am I missing the door you are pointing to. Sadly I could not get back to the area with the explosives because I could not manage to jump up from the pipe crossing the pool with the bull shark in it. Thanks for helping. I really like this mod and want to finish. HL Forever!
Carolyn
The door with the black mesh panel, in the room with the two PCs, is the correct door. There’s a gap under it, in fact if you look at it from a little distance you can see two of the floor tiles in the next room. The trick is to throw a grenade or satchel on the floor in front of the door so it will roll under the door. If you throw a grenade against the door it will bounce back toward you, so make sure it hits the floor first so it will roll.
Your other option, the boulder, is not back across the pool but farther along in the same map as the room with the two PCs. One of the windows in that room, not the one with the zapping vortigaunt on the other side but the other window, should have been broken by a zombie (it sounds from your description like maybe it didn’t). On the other side of it you eventually get to a helicopter, then a hole in a wall, then a rock propped up by a smaller rock on a sandy slope. Destroy the smaller rock to make the bigger one roll down.
This is an intricate map with plenty of hidden goodies and alternate paths. There’s a third route where an explosive box is close to a free-standing turret and another, taller, metal box that is electrified. Push a nearby (third) metal box to make contact between the taller metal box and the explosive box to blow a hole in the wall, and then push it inside to climb over a ledge in the newly opened green room.
Any of these three routes will work.
Thanks so much! I did finally get through the wall by rolling the boulder. Going to go back and try it by rolling a grenade. Your knowledge is impressive! I love HL and I never get tired of it, even though it is so old. I am in Turkey currently with a slow connection and a laptop, so HL2 won’t play, but I can play HL easily.
Carolyn
You’re welcome. There are hundreds of HL1 maps and mods here, so have fun!
Woo hoo!!! Never mind..I found the next area! Thanks for all your help…
Hi Gilfrarry, Well, I am back and still stuck in Infestation. I did follow your clues and made a nice circuit opening up blocked areas. Took off a while…lots of work, and just came back. But now after opening up all those blocked areas, the path brings me back to the same place, the security room with the glass window, vortigant on the other side zapping the glass. Shouldn’t I be able to get on the other side of the glass? The button shows as active and makes the correct sound when I press it, but the glass does not open, nor does anything.
Thanks!
Good, solid HL I fun.
Excellent level design, lots of weapons+ammunition and enemies, pretty much fun!
Don’t wait, play it!
As might be inferred from its name, Half-Life: Infestation revisits the Half-Life story told in the original, Opposing Force, and Blue Shift. Infestation, though, picks up where a Half-Life 2 might start – at the end of the original game. In this synthesis of a continuing story, it turns out Black Mesa was only half nuked by Adrian Shephard and needs to be nuked again because the aliens have invaded the facility.
Except in this version of Black Mesa the aliens have taken over, and thankfully the map pack looks the part because there’s a lot of Xen “growth” around. Light plants and other biota from Xen are now inside Black Mesa. Looks weird, but it’s good to see that the author took the time to make sure level design and story are consistent. And for the most part, the level design is consistently good with varied settings, neat construction, intelligent routing that manages to sneak in nonlinearity, compelling set-pieces, and some nice puzzles (wow!). A small map pack hasn’t done this much this well for a long time, it seems. There’s one major disappointment, though – a frustrating Xen section requiring way too many tricky jumps.
Except for the occasional moment when combat might be borderline difficult or tricky (not too frequent), gameplay is reasonably fair. It does expect some thinking on the player’s part, as did Half-Life, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it presumes too much. Fortunately there always seems to be a fair amount of ammo for the more powerful weapons for those unexpected moments. There are some intriguing combat-laden set-pieces too, and these are pulled off relatively well.
Infestation isn’t exactly excellent; some combat can be frustrating, the aforementioned presumption (when it arises) is annoying, level design is (infrequently) inconsistent, and there’s a lack of story integration. Plus the bad voice-acting at the end is almost an insult to the quality standards of the map pack. But this is still an admirable effort and unequivocally ranks as among the best map packs to date.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Tuesday, 1st January, 2002 by Calyst.
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.
I don’t see anything outstanding in this mod. Level design is ugly, in my opinion. Maybe it’s good enough for amateur, but not for experienced mapper. There are very poor lighting and texturing work and disproportionate size of different objects all the way. There are also a LOT of enemies on each level, so up to the final of the mod this grinding of hordes of aliens becomes a bit annoying, if you playing on hard. So I’m giving 4 stars for this mod, but 1 star here is just a bonus for venerable age of this mod 🙂 .
Pros:
Game-Play Time: Infestation took me at least a good solid hour to finish, so in my opinion if you prefer a moderately longer mod as oppose to a short one Infestation may be what you are seeking.
Contrast Between Earth & Xen: Throughout Infestation you seem to switch in between the planet that I assume is Earth and Xen a fair few times. I felt the contrast between fighting marines and aliens with Earth and Xen was a good balance.
Neutral:
Enemies: This mod is one of the most “notorious” for spawning enemies in each corner of every map. You never run out of enemies to fight in this mod, but its difficult to say if their is too many or not after-all the name of the mod is called “Infestation” and the developer could have not made it seem any more than Black Mesa was filling to the brim with aliens.
Difficulty: Don’t expect for this mod to give you a break at any given point. Due to the amount of enemies and difficult platforming in the Xen World this mod is not for the “unskilled player.”, but if you do seek a challenge I highly recommend this mod in particular.
Explosives: Sorry for the spoiler, but this is one thing I came across near the end. Near the end of the mod there is a gargantuan as well as a helicopter and of course the only way to eliminate them is explosives.
Unfortunately, if you have run out of explosives or do not have a finite amount at the end of the mod “you are swimming upstream without a paddle.” There is no way around this part either unless you destroy the gargantuan you won’t be able to continue on with the mod and be able to finish it.
Cons:
Tedious: Due to the number of marines and xen aliens in every map fighting them becomes a little “boring” or “grinding” not that it is a bad thing, but there isn’t a huge change of pace throughout the maps its more of a “rinse and repeat.”
Story-Line: Although, Infestation did have an objective at the end of the mod it was never really stated what it was initially. It could have been as simple as “Stop the xen aliens before Earth is taken over”, but it really felt like their could have been a much bigger set-up for an actual story-line.
Difficulty: Unfortunately, do to the difficulty of Infestation with its platforming and the amount of enemies it isn’t necessarily a mod that everyone can enjoy. Although, I do take into account that this mod was not necessarily made for the purpose of pleasing everyone and may have been made for a specific demographic of people.
Nice mod! Nice mixture of small puzzles + some parkours + hardcore combats. I like that there are many boxes and hidden places where I can get the various kinds of weapons and ammo. I was stuck at two parts (turning off the laser wall / explode the explosive box to get to the nuclear bomb), so I took the hints from the comments on this page.
Manually
Medium
1 Hour
First things first, for a first attempt at a singleplayer campaign built in a single summer, I cannot deny that the amount of gameplay here is impressive. It took me around two hours to complete the whole thing on Hard.
That being said, it was not an overly pleasant experience. I’m certain this mod was not extensively playtested on Hard, as the majority of the experience was a slog with little to no health and very little ammunition. The number of times I had to chip away at targets using the hivehand so as not to get into open combat is simply too many to count.
There are some nice ideas and considering this was made within a couple of months by (what I can assume from the voice acting was) a teenager, it’s pretty respectable. With a round of polish with modern mapping tools and some rethinking of the less intuitive areas, this could be something really special.
Manually
Hard
2 Hours
Not the most balanced mod in terms of combat, it’s difficult at times but i love such mods which is why it deserves a play it now!
Manually
Hard
1 Hour, 11 Minutes
I can easily recommend Infestation to most any HL player, especially anyone still playing after all these years.
One of the big standouts is the sets combat, Peregrine doesn’t shy away from throwing 10 aliens at you at once and I’m grateful. It does get a bit tedious on Hard as there isn’t enough health to stop you from crawling around on 10hp for a good chunk near the end.
The other big standout is the secrets. They’re placed more like a traditional FPS, think Quake 2, than HL. This does make the levels feel more ‘gamey’ and less realistic but it also makes them a lot more rewarding to explore. It’s not just hidden paths that lead to secrets but also logic puzzles like having to complete a circuit or create a bridge out of physics objects.
I can’t leave a review without mentioning the ending VO, it’s a great reward for going through the mapset. It’s funny in an endearing way and I’m glad it was included.
Infestation is an easy recommendation with one caveat – you may need a walkthrough as some of the progression isn’t the most well thought out. A notable example being towards the end where there is a garg you must kill to trigger an event meaning if you don’t have enough explosive/energy ammo you get softlocked. Just check a walkthrough on yt if you get really stuck and you’ll be sweet.
Manually
Hard
1 Hour
This mod is nice. When you pick up all the guns and armor it makes you believe everything would be easy and fun, but not. Enemies appears in bunches at first making you save all this ammo. But later in Xen, he gives less ammo, and most of it are simple drained like a water from a dropped glass. I like the idea of spreading additional ammunition around first levels. Then he removed this idea and stepped into adding enemies and jumping challange in Xen. There’s a total secret area in the area with the chopper, maybe it’s not developed. I don’t see any entrance in there. Maybe he wanted to finish the area and forgot about that area who knows. But well, enough of additional items. Usually items are hard to find in bigger areas. In small boxy areas they are well visible.
Manually
Hard
1 Hour, 10 Minutes