Author’s Note: “Mark 2 is a vague sequel to my Quake map Assassin, in that you play an assassin in both. In this one you’re off to kill several scientists (as everyone likes slapping scientists round the head with a crowbar). This level features an awful lot of puzzles, and it taught me that people either love or hate puzzles. Nobody thinks they’re just ok.”
21 hours ago a top secret government agency sent a team of its elite assassins to a government laboratory on a mission to neutralise all of the Scientists there. When the Assassin team exceeded its mission time and failed to report in, the agency decided to send its lone, experimental Assassin Mark 2 into the laboratory in an attempt to complete the mission. Your mission objectives will be supplied to you when you enter the laboratory. If you cannot complete your assigned objectives you will be expected to terminate yourself.
- Title: Assassin Mark 2
- File Name: hl1-sp-assassin-mark-2.7z
- Original File Name: assassin-mark-2.zip
- Size : 1.48Mb
- Author: Stuart Maine
- Date Released: 21 August 2002
- Copy the assassinsmark2 folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Assassin MArk 2 should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the How To.. section of the Help page.
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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1,660Overall
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Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 3 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 21 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 14 Mins by Dmitry
Longest: 0 Hours, 30 Mins by PsyWarVeteran
Total Time Played: 1 Hours, 4 Mins
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Rating: C (77%)
Play Time: 50 Minutes
Review:
This is one of the three releases that Stuart Maine did for Half-life (he has made several maps for Quake1 including Assassin 1 ) After improving himself through mapping for Quake, Stuart skipped (moved) to Half-Life… with success.
Stuart has really his own mapping style with a different approach (does something different than others). In Assassin mark 2 you play the role of an … guess what? and your mission is to eliminate 5 scientists who have the power to destroy the Earth. The whole mission happens in an atmospheric base (green-black wall texture, concrete structure and snow). This 4-map pack features a well balanced gameplay between fights and puzzles (sometimes tricky). Surrounding atmosphere enhanced this pack especially when the music from the original game starts, it’s never too hard and it’s gonna keep your interest for less than 1 hour.
Worth downloading especially if you got bored of the classic HL pack.
Note: The first Assassin release is worth to play so if you never try it on Quake 1, it’s never to late especially if you like Challenging gameplay.
Very dark (on my machine). Plain textures and no variety to the design. A couple of unrealistic narrow paths. Find the scientists and eliminate them. Find the buttons to trigger things elsewhere. A sort of extended puzzle with soldiers to fight.
I didn’t particularly enjoy this one and had to cheat once to get past a door.
The textures and design were a little depressing and the whole thing never got me excited.
Perhaps it was the colours and feel.
Anyway, definitely not the worst release this week but neither is it one of the best.
Wow! What can I say? Other than BORING!
It looked as though it had largely been made with Lego bricks. It was dark but not in a good way. The gameplay/combat was sporadic. The puzzles, such as they were, were far from taxing. By the way did I mention this was BORING?
OK to be fair, this is another one where the author had some good ideas but not the knowledge to put them to best use.
One last thing in the download there was no assassinsmark2 folder, I had to put the maps and graphs into the correct folders and start it by typing ” map mark2″ to play it.
Yeah, Bolx wasn’t exaggerating when he said this was boring.
Personally the place where this mod was really poor was the difficulty of action and puzzles. The action was incredibly easy, quite possibly the easiest from the 100SDoN so far, yet the puzzles were hard, for me anyway. Quite honestly there is no point in talking about the action as it was easy and boring. There were many puzzles in this, and three of them took me a good while to figure out. Luckily I didn’t actually need to cheat to get past the puzzle to the next level, but there were many times where I came close. For some reason you kill scientists, this probably should have been explained within the game although it didn’t affect me because I already knew what I was meant to be doing.
This isn’t too fun, but if you like tough puzzles then it’s worth a try.
Yeah, although I wasn’t really bored with this, it’s not really exciting or memorable and the limited combat is pretty much a breeze. Do hunt for the crowbar at the start though, it’s sitting nearby and is of good use and you can easily miss it. I also had to cheat past the door, it didn’t open for me after getting past scientist 3.
I wouldn’t really call this one full of puzzles, it’s more about finding where you should go next. I suppose those are puzzles too, but figuring where you should go is not a good feature in typical Half-Life mods. The only real puzzles are of the find-the-button variety.
I did like the reactions you get from the speaker system, it gave some life to what was otherwise a set of maps that lacked atmosphere. The architecture is passable but nonsensical, and the texturing is dark and drab and unfortunately probably a relic of the author’s Quake mapping experience.
Skip this unless you’re desperate.
[spoiler] Did you blow up the generator that said 13 in the room with the Gargantua?[/spoiler]
Yes, I mean an earlier door (has a red button outside it).
Oh, well then [spoiler]shoot the broken pipe that is shown in screenshot 6.[/spoiler] After that just walk through the door.
I can’t get this to work. The file contains a few folders but no main folder called “assassinsmark2”. I tried creating that folder in the Half-Life directory and extracting the files into it but the game doesn’t show up in Steam. The readme file said to create a folder called “Mark2” but that doesn’t work either. What am I doing wrong?
In the zip file there’s a folder call called “maps”, open that folder and copy the .bsp files to your:
valve > maps folder
open the graphs folder in downloaded ” maps” folder and copy the .nrp and .nod files to your:
valve > maps > graphs folder
To run the game start Half Life, open the console and type:
map mark2 – (I used lower case and it worked)
Great, I got it to work as maps instead of as a separate mod. Thanks!
This is the continuation of blocky and sometimes too bright Quake map Assassin. In some laboratory, something happened, and it was so bad that the government made a desperate decision to kill all scientists. First team didn’t contact mission control at the designated time, so now we’re taking the mission over.
We find ourselves in some snowy mines. Some time will be spent in perplexity, because the door to the right don’t want to open, and door to the left too, and it’s protected by turrets! But soon it will be over when our stare falls on… No, I won’t spoil the fun of solving it by yourself.
And then we are in the server rooms – big rows of servers stand right in the cave. It reminds of similar rooms in Chaos Theory offices: rows of computers, lights which hang in the air… These server rows are a fun battleground. We enter the elevator and “enjoy” z-fighting, and then… Then there will be the same mines, but with more complex layout, and tricky puzzles. The puzzles themselves are not bad, but not here, because they make our stay in this nightmarish place longer. The number of used textures is very low, and many things are textured with the same blue texture. Awful.
Ok so sorry im going to give the worst for this mod, I mean from the begining I have troubles with this one!!, files so desorganized and without a proper file name so it never appeared on my steam mod list, so I charge them manually, and the only map I get was wierd andso ackward, I don’t have too much time to waste if the files of the author are not propper organized, I tried to make an assassinsmark2 folder from zero and then put everything in there but it was useless I didn’t have the mod propper instelled and that’s annoying from the start, I wont waste more time with this mod……
The story in the readme sounded nice, but I got disappointed and bored quickly.
To shorten it, your mission is to find and kill all scientists.
Pro’s:
-Some decent design, architecture
-A little action
-A few puzzles, tricky jumps required for example
-A few scripts
Con’s:
-Odd story, also other oddities
-No atmosphere to me (altho quite often music is playing)
-Short playtime (~10-30 mins)
-Bad lighting, some poor mapping, bad textures
This level is a great and original idea, but not so great was the actual gameplay 🙁
Assassin Mark 2 is a innovative level that has its moments, but those moments are sparse and shadowed by stretches of boring and oft confusing parts. In this level, you work for the government, in fact, you’re a new kind of deadly assassin! Your mission is to assassinate five scientists, how’s that for a twist? While the idea is fresh, this is where the problems begin.
I found the interesting theme hard to believe at times, it would’ve been great if you could fight a whole bunch of Barneys protecting the scientists, but instead all you get to kill are marines and turrets. The story also mentioned that the last team of assassins sent for this mission failed to report back, it would’ve been cool if some ambush by aliens were the cause but, despite the wonders it would’ve done for variety in the action, this was not the case. But the most major of my gripes that came as a result of the unique theme was the fact that you could get scientists to follow you, they even will give you health when you’re in need (and your mission is kill them!). These little nitpicks in realism, I suspect, are very hard to fix so I guess it’s acceptable but worth mentioning to you nonetheless.
Gameplay also had its problems, mainly it was a matter of being too confusing. I dreaded the sound a door made when it was locked because that usually meant back-tracking and head-scratching. Perhaps more than half the doors in this map were indeed locked and they can rarely be discerned from the unlocked doors. Although the layout gets non-linear at times, this may not be a good thing as the design was repetitive and this caused a feeling of confusion.
In the midst of all my bitching and complaining, I could not help but mention that this was a great map in terms of originality and Stuart shows great potential to make stuff that is different as well as good. There are some neat scripted events in here, and at least two of the fights were heart pounding. A better design and more than just a couple of heart pounding fights is what this level needed, but this map is of much better quality than a boring gruntfest level and I can’t exactly recommend you to avoid this as this is something that I feel at least, should be seen.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Friday, 30th July, 1999 by Jiang.
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.
Wow, this mod was very, VERY close to Think Twice for me.
The story is that you’re an assassin and your goal is to go in this sub-dungeon (that’s what it looks like!) and assassinate 5 scientists.
The combat was easy, even though that part with the tanks is extremely annoying.
The lighting was incredibly weird, but in a really bad way. It could have been a lot better and the textures were really random. It made me feel like I was in a lair or something.
Overall, try it just for fun.
For 1999, this mod is pretty nice and unique. You hunt down scientists in mostly cramped, underground maps while the grunts try to stop you.
Some memorable setpieces here and there, doesn’t overstays it welcome – not a particularly long mod.
Manually
Hard
30 Minutes
This was a pleasant surprise. It’s easy to tell it’s a mod from 1999, very basic, very blocky, not much variation in textures, but it has a few cool ideas and I like the whole idea behind it.
The bad: Little variation in textures and the textures are drab. This sort of works in its favour because I feel it gives a bit more immersion to the cold cave base that it’s set in, but in some places this is really poor for no reason, for example the toilet stalls that are all entirely made of the same metal texture. The textures and lighting can make this map a bit grueling to look at (this actually looks like something straight out of my dreams, blocky architecture, obnoxious bright lights, the dull textures, lots of dark-ish areas, but I digress) but as said before, that could also be an intentional design choice. The design of the map is very blocky and this is ultimately what stops me from recommending it further, the rooms are all the same types of cube or cuboid. The level design does improve slightly as the mod draws to a close. I don’t think a crowbar should ever be easily missed unless there’s a very good reason to, I think it’s mostly intuitive in its current location but still I can’t say I approve.
The good: I like the idea behind the mod, sneak into a base, kill scientists, and then leave, and this style of gameplay is reinforced by the use of grunts talking through speakers as you progress through the level, often tied to triggers when scientists and other grunts die. The combat is unremarkable but still manages to be fairly fun. There’s some really cool set pieces in the mod, the most memorable part was probably when you go outside to press a button and some airstrikes attack your zone, it’s easy to avoid but I thought it was cool.
I can’t say I really had any trouble figuring out what to do, mod seemed mostly straight-forward to me. Maybe I just got lucky, I figured out the generator puzzle so quickly that even I was surprised. I recommend against cheating in this mod, if you think something broke you’re probably just not looking hard enough.
The mod is let down by some blocky architecture and lack of variety of textures, but I feel it does well in terms of atmosphere and manages to be a decent early map pack. If you want something short with a decent balance of combat and puzzles I give a solid recommendation.
Manually
Medium
20 Minutes
Gordon walking over a thing pipe and if he falls down, he dies. It’s hard to believe that you are in the middle of the mountain and there’s a pit hole in a some place of the mountain and you need to walk over a pipe and jump to cross that little pit. It seems the main mission is to kill the scientists, so why HECU is your enemies them, they should be your allies since you kill scientists and they do the same as you. It’s kind they are protecting them here. Are you see this is Half-Life or maybe it’s Alive mod?
Manually
Hard
14 Minutes