You start in what looks like Black Mesa but things get a little strange after that.
Your objective is to stay alive and reach the helicopter.
Good luck.
Basic Details
- Title: Vlokam 1
- File Name: hl1-sp-vlokam-1.7z
- Original File Name: vlokam.rar
- Size : 5.44Mb
- Author: Kamil Janda
- Date Released: 17 March 2004
PlanetPhillip Download Servers
Installation Instructions
- Copy the vlokam folder into your Half-Life 1/Valve folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Vlokam should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the Help page.
Screenshots
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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Reader Recommendations
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Jump to a review
Slightly wobbly mod from Czech author Kamil Janda. But it has plenty of redeeming qualities.
New weapon skins and sounds. Particularly the machine gun. Nice.
New enemy skins but same enemies underneath! These are well done and quite an amusing change from the originals.
Gameplay is the usual HL stuff and that’s a good thing. One departure into a surreal Ispatatel4 style map. Nice.
Bugs:- Don’t stand near a wall when a new map loads, you’ll get stuck.
Don’t try to go back to the previos map through the load trigger point, you’ll get stuck. That’s all.
Overall I liked the feel of this one, and the sequel Vlokam 2 so…
A real drag. Odd spaces where no intelligence is required, only trial and error. Weak boundary design. Apparent dead ends. I didn’t enjoy it. Oh, and what sounded like a recording of children nattering in Russian in the background throughout the first level was the final discouraging touch.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS
I’m in map e3, the tank and the 3 crates. I’m behind the fence now. How do I open the door? The door doesn’t open, the panel doesn’t do anything and shooting both doesn’t help either… Anybody remember?
Hi, thx for playing my old mod. For The Ripper. You must jump on a tank, and from tank jump on rocks. Now you must go foward to bulding and climb on ladder to a roof.
Okay thanks. Finished it now. Maps are very small. So it’s a short mod. A few minor bugs. Nice reskins. Not bad if you can stand the weirdness.
I have to admit I am surprised piledriver gave this a Play It Now!. I have to be honest and say I was close to an Avoid It! because it makes some terrible design choices (see below in the spoiler)
It’s obvious that the author worked hard and it’s nearly always nice to have new content but I felt it was just too disjointed to be fun. I was actually relieved when I released it had finsihed.
[spoiler]In the area with the tank, do not, I say, DO NOT, jump OVER the fence. Jump to the righthand side along the wall and climb up the tower ladder.[/spoiler]
All in all, not much fun for me and I am a little apprehensive about playing Vlokam 2 tomorrow.
This is one of those mods with crappy architecture, but you would still try it for the weird stuff and see some new gameplay elements. Kinda like half-quake, really, but with alot less quality in the presentation thereof. As for vlokam 2, it has the same number of maps but with different content, but the premise is the same. Weird stuff, some custom content.
There isn’t much to experience here except frustration with trail and error gameplay, unfair fights, occasionally broken level transition, hideous level design and poor lighting. There’s no English translation so you don’t have any idea what’s going on with the small text snippets popping up throughout the maps.
[spoiler]Seems like this map pack was designed to be played through on the easy difficulty level. At one point you encounter an enemy attack helicopter and a RPG weapon close by, problem is there’s only one rocket that you can use and if you’re playing on normal or hard you can’t destroy it. The only possible way to pass through this is to just run past it and try not to get hit.
There’s also a slide door that you can open but by doing this you’ll notice that there’s nothing behind it except a Hall of Mirror effect. If you try to walk through the door you’ll fall for an eternity.[/spoiler]
Can’t really recommend this to anyone except those that admire these broken and bizarre user maps with lots of custom made models, textures and sounds with no real goal. Very poor.
Um, what the hell did I just play?
This pack contains 12 maps including a useless training map, but some of them literally last for seconds. It’s as if the mapper said, “Why don’t I make a map with a _______ in it?” Fill in the blank with: Half-Quake style instant-death jumping puzzle, Apache, Gargantua with a human model, etc. and you kind of get the idea of this set. I really suspect that’s how these maps were put together. There’s no coherence, and the level changes are so frequent you’ll feel like you have ADD.
And in general what is there is pretty ugly. The mapping is really basic with poor lighting, and things aren’t used right (example: the Apache just spins in place over your head instead of flying around, though it does try to shoot you). The level transitions are quite jarring and you’ll get stuck if you backtrack.
I don’t really get some of the choices in this pack, like the section with the Apache. You’re given one rocket (did anyone find more?) which isn’t enough to take an Apache down on medium. Why bother?
The only good parts are some of the new models (although the slave is just a glowing human soldier for some reason) and the combat. You basically have reskins of existing weapons, with new sounds, and many of the enemies look different but act the same.
And what on earth was with the door that opened to the void (see Phillip’s last screenshot)? You could just walk right out of the map there. Actually, some of these maps make me wish I could do just that at certain points…
Uhm… yeah… I don’t really know what to say except to not to touch this, at all.
Personally for me this was the worst in the 100SDoN so far because it offered no enjoyment whatsoever. The positive about this was that it had different textures to the original HL. A few of them were ripped off from other places but I don’t care, it was nice to have a change.
Now onto the negatives, I’ll guess I’ll start with the black and white map. First of all it was completely pointless and came at an inappropriate time with no explanation to how you got there (maybe there was a little one if you can speak Czech) and it was also a complete rip off from Half-Quake Amen. The vortis (only enemy in HQA aside from a grunt) were way too powerful and fast and their grunt skins (also looks like the grunt from HQA) didn’t work well. You had to carefully shoot them otherwise you would be unbelievably buggered, and that was especially hard when you are dropped right in front of one. The hud was very hard too see in that map too which made matters a lot worse. The colourless void which instantly kills you (a regular in HQA) was very unnecessary and the spikes that crash you (also a regular in HQA) were just annoying and pointless. I went around the map seriously expecting a >) or a hand hammer to randomly pop up. Thankfully they left those alone. I figure this would be the time to point out how ridiculously hard this mod is. I only played it on normal and it felt incredibly hard. I usually enjoy hard mods, but this was just frustrating.
Well back onto this mod, the next place would be the castle area with the tank. I can see two huge errors here, one of which will force you to load a previous save. The fence with the door is just pointless and you will be stuck down there. Once you have reloaded your save you either climb up the ladder and instantly shoot the grunt in front of you, or go around the side and try to shoot the grunt camping at the top of the ladder, only to realise that he ain’t getting hurt. So you have to guess where the wall is and with the difficulty and the fact that there is another grunt, this may take some F7s. Then we see the reskinned zombies as humans which squirt green blood and cannot be shot at the top of the head (poor modeling) which is annoying when you always go for the head.
So to the most pointless part of the mod… the door which opens to an empty void, or the “Hall of Mirrors Doorway”. First of all why even make it open if there is nothing behind it? Second of all couldn’t it of just been a wall or a wall which looks like a door? This just showed bad mapping. I also noticed in the description that this area is the end, but it isn’t. It’s only about half way through the mod, if that.
The next area for improvement will be the dreaded Apache area. First of all I never bothered to shoot at the Apache and it didn’t trouble me, although the four grunts at the other end did and I took quite a lot of damage. Luckily for me I just about had enough for the drop not long afterwards in which you have to take damage and there is no other way around it (I think). This really is a gamebreaker, if there is anyway around this without losing damage I’d like to hear it. Not long after this you come to an area with loads of health and metal boxes, I grabbed what I needed and left one that I didn’t need, ready to pick up later! So imagine my surprise when I have the hardest fight in the whole mod and I try to go back and get that health pack, just to be encountered with two problems. First of all I was stuck in the ground (which happens at every backtracking opportunity that I tried) and secondly, when I noclipped past it, the health kit had magically vanished. This brings me to another point right after that hard fight where you go through a transition only to be pushed into the sight of two grunts (which makes things tough with the health you have after that hard fight from before), so I go back only to go back through the transition and get stuck AGAIN.
In the last area there are two grunts which you see through a window and a reskinned Gargantua which is now a human sized creature (I liked that model a whole lot to be honest, nice to see the Gargantua not a big ass ugly thing) and they start to fight. The Gargantua wins because the grunts had no explosives or gluon and so you have to run past the Garg, which should also do some damage to you too. When you go through the transition the garg will probably come along, as it did with me twice. The first time it was right next to me and ended up killing me, the second time it was stuck behind the building but was stuck there and could still be heard. It also killed me when I noclipped past it. The final complaint was that there was no indication that it was the end, unless I missed something.
I really don’t like being harsh on mods, but this was just so terrible and near enough unplayable. If you want to play this, go on easy.
EDIT: I just noticed that there is a Vlokam 2, we’re doomed if it’s anything like this.
You can as I painfully discovered after having 4 HP left and after reloading about 10 times. Check the screenshot below.
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/8318/vlokam.jpg
It might require a few tries but it’s completely doable. There might be another way to do this as well though I didn’t find any.
The training course consists of some simple obstacles, wooden tank and target range, where we first time see the new smg model. I jumped to the target range from the tank’s muzzle to prevent it from being totally boring.
The game starts in some labs where we go to the teleporter. There is some design, but it is a boring cubism. After the teleporter we arrive in the black and white space. And here the baseness starts. It’s possible to fall right through one of the cubes, and around the corner there’s a soldier-lightninggunner which kills with 5 shots. Thankfully, his melee attack don’t work.
Then after some other low traps we arrive at the castle, which is guarded by normal soldiers. The design is limited by author’s lack of experience, and it is very limiting. From time to time we encounter new enemies – men with pipes, and I suspect that the author was very young when making the mod and voiced them himself. At some point there is a door, which leads out of the map. Looks like the author decided that it’s very cool, because of the aforementioned reasons.
There are some boring fights with ninjas and soldiers. The rooms are too narrow and linear. The only sight are destructible columns in one of the rooms. At the map change, it’s possible to get stuck in the wall, and one time I tried to backtrack and the game crashed.
What can I say – the author put some effort and did something, but this something doesn’t work. Even the gameplay is bad. I can’t recommend this mod.
Unfortunately, it was brought to my attention by Unq, that I had missed a significant portion of the maps. Therefore I had to reload my last save and carry on from there. Boy, did I wish I didn’t.
I have changed my recommendation from ,strong>Maybe to Avoid It!. I really didn’t enjoy this at all and it brings up an interesting question…can a mod get worse? Of course, the answer is yes, but does playing a short bad mod make you more likely to be kinder to a mod than if you knew it went on for hours?
Anyway, it’s nice to see creativity and effort but sometimes the results make you wonder.
Im having these strange Riot in Progress flashbacks.
Some decent custom models (his own or?), some Riot in Progress style music etc.. And even had little 3rd person moment like RiP had so often.
And dear god this is difficult one. Sure its good to have challenge, but this is soo tough. I wanna see someone playing this and having large smile in his face.
Can’t wait to try part II…
Not going to waste words on this, just avoid it, it’s only going to make you ill tempered if you play it, so don’t bother.
This is an extreme mod with very good and very bad elements. There are a lot of crashes and dead ends and since the mod isn’t in english you have to blunder through it by guessing. I kept trying to go through the slowly-opening door but everything would freeze up on me. Later I found that I wasn’t supposed to be there. There are great new models which are very interesting. I would say it is worth playing but keep your console commands handy and save frequently. When you run into a bad crash look around for a different solution instead. Oh, and for fun get the crowbar kids to attack the soldiers.
Volkam ohh Volkam, I don’t know why the hell is called like that must be czech languaje or so, indeed czcech mods are so wierd and odd, they have what is like to be an ironic sense of humor or something darker than that and this is not the execption, the maps are too shorty and odd, and that first map at the beggining with the withe cubes, seemed tom me as if they were trying to imitate Halfquake amen or something wierd like that kind of “conceptual mods”, the rest appart from that map is soo diferent and extremely funky-woerd.
What I appreciate about this mod, is: new models, even if they were crappy, I know it musn’t be easy work with them, and the 2nd important to me new weapons, they vary a little from that old mp5 i’m getting tired of that smg, so I like the addition of those new skins and sounds in the weaponery, let’s see how Volkam 2 is like, I don’t know if they have a sort of continuing story, which I don’t care because I don’t understand a dam thing of czech or slovak languaje!!!!!!
There were some good ideas here, it’s just a pity they were badly executed!
I’d like to give the good points first, but I can’t! Obviously the author seems to have a grasp of making mods but not the faintest idea of what makes an enjoyable game. I can’t comment on the technical aspects of this map but one of the killers for me was the music (crappy Euro-pop) which was way out of place in a combat situation. The monochrome bit was just weird but some of enemies were almost like characters from parts of the East End of London:
Zombies — Baseball caps and trainers and a desire to hurt someone.
Assassins — Aggressive women with a mobile phone in their hand.
I’m dreading part 2!!!!
Absolutely Horrible.
Big Red detected! 😀
I have never seen a mod this broken and this unplayable. I rarely put Avoid It! ratings, but I’m sorry I just have to in this one. Broken maps, pointless training room with a wooden tank, random models in every enemy, and here you go. If you wanna be tortured, play it.
I think that to appreciate Kamil Janda’s addons, you should play them in the order they were created(Red Mesa 1-2, Vlokam 1-2, maybe the unfinished Classic Games, too). This way you can see how significantly he progressed as a mapper, even if he still didn’t come too far in the end.
Also, I think that the title Vlokam means VLOdka + KAMil, because the former author had released a mod Sagharmath, and I have read somewhere that it was his maps from “a collaborative mod Vlokam”. It indeed fits very neatly between the first two maps of this one, and that connection explains quite a bit about either mod.