In this mod you play as an alien grunt.
Follow the instructions given on-screen and you will serve your masters well.
VICTORY TO XEN!
Most of this info is also provided during the Xen Course training!
Gain health and armor by feeding on dead enemies. Weapons slot one is a close range attack, weapons slot four is the usual hornetgun.
While using it, only close contact to the target or secondary fire mode can destroy or move things. Parasitic Xen animals are still hostile, also angry allies. Do you remember where you saw the last level before ;)?
Xen lifeforms show a red aura, Earth lifeforms a green one, others..
There is an elevator that only has a button inside. So if you somehow missed it, just press the wall where the button was for it to return.
Also sometimes feeding on enemies continues after you have left them, one teleporter works – and there are two small texture errors.
- Title: Xen Warrior 1.5
- File Name: hl1-sp-xen-warrior-1.5.7z
- Original File Name: xenwar.zip
- Size : 6.86Mb
- Author: Werner Spahl
- Date Released: 31 January 2003
- Copy the xenwar folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- No Escape should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the Help page.
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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2,765Overall
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0Today
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0Last 7 days
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7Last 30 days
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112365 days
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 3 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 34 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 20 Mins by melzaru
Longest: 1 Hours by yagnos
Total Time Played: 2 Hours, 16 Mins
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Hi, I have played it and would like to post my comments about.
The Idea is great. You really feel to be a alien grunt as you see them in action.
disapointing is, taht the maps where took from teh half-life chronicles part 1 mod. that means, after teleporting from xen world you will directly spawn in on same place as gordon comes up with the elevator and you will take same route as well.
diapointing 2: xen allies like head crabs and xen slaves, bullsquids attacks you.
Headcrabs and Bullsquids will attack because they are wild animals and not tamed by the Xen aliens. The alien slaves should only attack if you hit them accidentally…
Setting/Gameplay
Although the idea and the first parts of this mod are nice and the author seemed to be inspired, later it becames a bit boring. One big point that disapointed me as well was, that you are forced to solve puzzles and make progress the same way Gordon would. That mean, the aliengrunt ist duckjumping (Ever saw a aliengrunt in Half-Life make a duckjump to take cover? You wouldnt’t able to stop laughing, I’d bet), pressing buttons like a progamer and at that point it would had not surprised me if he starts to use shotguns and rocketlaunchers or drive a tank.
The positive point about this mod: The maps itself are good sized, designed, well-thought, the lightning is nice but decent and you won’t remember it as outstanding. Mostly because you only visit the old settings (which is of course story-given, but mods like Azure-Sheep are proving well, that the Black-Mesa Facility hasn’t to be look the same in every mod again).
Conclusion
An overall average experience, maybe a little bit better thant most average mods but anyhow not good enough to enter the list of “very good mods”. You’ll get some fun out of it, but it’s not very long.
Why shouldn’t an alien grunt be able to duck and jump? Why shouldn’t he be able to push a button? After all he is moving inside a human environment and adjusts to it just like Gordon adjusted to the environment on Xen.
Especially compared to several of the IMHO boring and uninspired levels of Azure Sheep or Point of View the levels from HL: Chronicles Episode 1, which this mod was based on and which were not made by myself, are much closer to the quality of the original HL.
After all keep in mind that this mod was just an experiment on how to create a cool and different experience without actually creating a new map but instead by just by editing an already existing one…
Played Xenwar14. (Thanx to Wesp5)
Short – 5 maps plus end scene.
A bit like being Gordon with a crowbar and one alien weapon. Your fellow warriors won’t help which would have been more interesting. Health and power seem to be available in infinite amounts from your dead opponents as you eat (nice!) them. As such, it’s a bit too easy. Maps are from HL1 and Chronicles.
Overall, a good idea that could have been very good if developed further.
I don’t like how wild xen aliens and slaves attacked you but other than that this was a good mod.
PS I don’t think alien grunts can use key cards and fit in air ducts.
Xen slaves will attack you only if you shoot near them
nice short mod 🙁 cold be bigger
and at the end we all know what destiny await`s this warrior 🙂
such as point of view where you are an alien slave but there you are a alien grunt whoa cool mod
You should make a longer version of this because this is a realy good idea but way to short. Another thing is wild xen life shouldn’t attack you (they didn’t attack alien grunts in the real game). As mentioned in my earlier post I don’t think Alien grunts can use key cards and stuff (there not stupid but I don’t think they have adapted to Earths technalogy that fast) and last alien grunts can’t fit in airducts, kind of funny imagining an alien grunt trieng to fit in a small airduct. This may seem like alot of critisism but there only just suggestions for any for when you feel like adding to this mod. I STILL SAY PLAY IT NOW!!!!!!!
I know this was a long time ago, but I just replayed my own mod and remembered that your alien grunt was born premature. Therefore he is smaller and will fit through vents :)! Also in the tutorial Xen Course it is explained that alien grunts are informed about human technologies…
HEY! You get to play as an Alien Grunt! That’s a great start to begin with and it works really well, in fact so well, I nearly gave this a WOW recommendation.
Firstly, let me say that I didn’t read the readme or play the training room before playing this mod and I should have done both and so should you. Once I have posted this review and updated the 100SDoN page I’ll go back and play the training.
I got a little lost at the beginning on xen but it’s not as if it’s a huge place and you can get lost forever. I suppose it’s nice to wander around a bit and have a look etc.
Once into battle everything looked pretty good but I lost a lot of health and not having read the readme I didn’t realize that standing on dead enemies regenerated my health and amour – which is a good idea and well done. My only suggestion would be to have a time limit as to how long after they die you can get benefit from them. And maybe how much health from each body – but these are minor details.
I loved the nightvision (seen in a couple of screenshots), it’s just a shame I didn’t need it during the mod.
There were some nice central areas but I never felt they were used enough. I would have preferred the army grunts didn’t have grenades but there were more of them. I full on firefight from a few different directions would have been great.
I felt the architecture and lighting were good and mostly felt like BM, although some textures seemed a little strange – the wooden floor for example.
The mod really came a live on the tram ride and the author deserves a huge pat on the back for that – wish it had been 3 times longer with more height movement etc.
If you read the comments previous to this one, one of the main criticism is the ability to crouch through air vents. Personally, it didn’t bother me too much, and as the author states you are a premature grunt and therefore smaller.
The halos were cool, as was the inclusion of G-man, although I didn’t understand the cutscene with him. Did I do something wrong?
All in all a fantastic mod with a nice change – although I prefer to be human.
Go play it now!
Okay, I just played the training room and feel it was very well done. Really wish I had played this first. Shame there’s not a system that forces you to play through it the first time you open the mod.
An Alien Grunt’s story in the Half-Life universe!
This mod reminds me of Point of View (where you play as a Vortigaunt) and I love that mod, and the idea behind it. In this you play as an Alien Grunt with a melee hornet and normal hornet and tells you all you will need to know via the training room, so make sure you play it before the game (I did).
The game is both very hard and too easy. Some of the fights were really tough and required many F7s, although once you kill an enemy you can recharge you health and Alien Grunt HEV or whatever it’s called and it doesn’t run out unlike the dispensers although it does go at a much slower rate. The Barneys were also incredibly easy although the grunts were tough. I think this mod also needed more killable scientists as there was only one in the whole mod. The gameplay was very fun too.
There was one huge flaw, and that was the stability of the alien allies. Not only could you not order them to follow you (yes not even Alien Slaves) but they would attack you even if you had done nothing wrong. The most notable was that I hit a metal crate in the area where a door opens and grunts come out and then the Vorti started shooting at me. Needs more stability, like in POV.
Overall this was really fun especially if you like Xen Alien adventures instead of the typical Gordon Freeman stuff.
Actually Headcrabs, Zombies and Barnicles (or Pullers as the mod author calls them) are the only enemies that are always hostile. Vortigaunts, Bullsquids and Houndeyes are friendly unless you attack them or hit metal crates.
When I saw this, I was expecting something something like POV, but it turned out much easier.
According to the Combine Overwiki Alien Grunts stand about seven feet tall, so how the hell can they get into an air duct a human has to crouch to get into? That aside however a great fun mod if a little easy. I liked the idea of only two choices of weapon, but the vampiristic way of getting health meant there was plenty to go around, at one point I got health from a dead Vort but the author seemed to have fixed that later on. It was also good to go back through some old Xen environments as it then made sense how the Aliens got to Earth and the overall look and feel were just about right.
The second mod in a row with a tram ride but thankfully this time much shorter and if you duck you can avoid damage from the two grunts in the other tram. This is another one I wish the author had followed up with a part two or continued to make a much longer mod.
Because you come out of your pod prematurely, and are therefore much smaller.
Protip: Always check out the training section of a mod or map pack; the author/s may have put something useful there for you to see.
A unique, great idea and the actual execution is fairly good, however there are a few aspects and nitpicks that bothered me. I enjoyed this pretty much throughout though and thought it was fun for its brief period.
As mentioned there are a few things that I didn’t like. All of the locations that had you on Xen were pretty much ripped from Half-Life but with the absence of hostile aliens and dead humans. I’d preferred if the author would’ve made his own Xen locations as you proceed through these parts pretty much in the same vein as in Half-Life but in a reverse manner.
Another issue I had was that the regeneration process in that you had to stand on the corpses of fallen humans in order to replenish health and armor was slow and a bit distracting from the actual gameplay at hand. It also made it very easy due to the fact that the corpses never faded away so basically you had unlimited supply of health and armor in your possession.
Another thing, though not an issue but nevertheless a bit silly, was that further on you’d come across a locked door that needed a security card in order to open. Really? You need a card to open a locked door even though you’re a bulky alien that could just smash the door open instead? The security card was unnecessary and just didn’t fit in at all.
The ending was pretty neat but at the same time a bit depressing and short-lived.
With that out of the way I still did enjoy it very much. Think of it like a smaller and less ambitious alternate version of Point of View but still with good combat sections and level design. Easily recommended.
Okay, so as this is my mod, I’ll reply to some of the comments :). First of all you should be aware that this mod was not made from scratch but only using entity editing! The base was the great Chronicles Episode 1 mod and Half-Life itself. Therefore you shouldn’t complain if you recognized levels ;). As for slaves attacking, this should only happen when you provoke them, another option would be to not have them attack you at all but that might look silly if you do attack them. As for feeding forever on corpses, the alternative would be having them fade which would probably leave too little time to do any good. Nevertheless, if there is demand for this, I could change the last two issues and update the mod. It’s easy to do something like this with pure entity editing :)!
This turned out to be a straightforward rating for me. In Phillip’s descriptions he says Think Twice is for a map that is “…not that much fun to play but offers something interesting.” That describes my reaction to Xen Warrior perfectly.
I did like the training maps, and the use of reworked Half-Life maps from Xen. It was clever and it was nice to see something familiar. Ditto for the opening (and closing) of this pack, it was nice to tie in to the Half-Life setting directly.
That said, it sure is boring to play with just a hive hand for a weapon (I never got the crowbar/melee hand in the main game, just in training). It felt like a gimmick that got old pretty fast. I can appreciate the approach of editing entities in an existing map to achieve a different effect or change gameplay, but I think this was just not a fun result in the end. It’s nice to be able to grab health from fallen enemies, but a couple times I went from a health of like 9/0 (nasty fall) all the way to 100/100 on one grunt. I think this ended up making Xen Warrior too easy, you could top all the way off if you were just patient.
I give credit for the idea, but it’s the execution and end result that doesn’t measure up for me. I just didn’t have fun playing this pack. It was fun enough to feel like an alien, and I liked the new footsteps to match the alien grunt sound. But it just didn’t work for me. Playing as an alien in Half-Life is an interesting idea. Point of View pulled it off; Xen Warrior didn’t.
My main advice is to download the superior Chronicles Episode 1 that these maps are taken from. It’s simply a better experience.
And why does the zip contain all the missing node graph files for BS:Unlocked? What an odd addition.
ok somebody go wake up the POKE 646 and POKE vindeta or asure sheep or P.O.V. guys. we need their touch on this map pack. this was so short but good fun. ok, maybe a alien grunt really can’t fit in a duct. but the premise was great. a few suggestions. when feeding for health, humans should explode in guts and such after they have been drained. working with other grunts would have been cool, snarks where were the snarks, sniffle. anyway great idea good fun. now I am left needing and requesting more.
It’s nice to see some new gameplay. The auras make playing as an alien more believable. I didn’t feel bad with infinite health and armor, because not every human corpse gives them and the shotgunner is now very dangerous even if you have everything at 100%.
I liked the ending which gives the feeling that the fate of the character will be in my hands during the next playthrough of original Half-Life.
It seems that the alien slaves in the storage have no coding behind them, they just have an “Ignore Player” flag, so they stop ignoring me when I shoot, even if I’m not shooting at them.
There are nice design and some really cool events, but I can’t give points for the maps, because the author didn’t make them himself, he just took them from original Half-Life and the mod Chronicles: Episode One.
It’s totally irrelevant to judge this based on mapping, since we all know (hopefully) that the maps are not made by the modder for Xen Warrior, but is actually just Chronicles. The only thing to comment on then is the gameplay, which I didn’t think was exceptional. You’re an alien grunt. Features include gaining health via eating corpses, using only the hornetgun (and a “crowbar” that looks like the hornetgun), and enemies glow team colours. That’s about it. I think that if you are offering a mod with no new maps, there should be substantial work on the modeling and coding. There isn’t any new models and coding is limited pretty much to what was listed above. I think the reason why POV was popular was because of the coding, that allowed for new monsters and weapons exclusively for the vorty. Even Gman Invasion without any new coding was amusing enough due to en masse model replacements. The features currently in here are good, but the mod was just too limited as a mod, there wasn’t really enough to convince me that I’m actually an alien grunt.
not my type of mod but its addicted me for sometime because its short
red and green flashes annoying sometimes
nice design… editing original halflife maps got a big time to make it fixed im sure
hard work
there is custom textures, codes, design and much more worked stuff…
its completed mod, okay, but I think developer released it too quick
he should make this mod longer I think maybe he can do “xen warrior 2”
but I see this mod released at 2003 its sad…
short for me not too good not too bad
play it later I think…
7/10
To everyone expecting more gameplay changes from this mod, Xen-Warrior actually started out as an experiment as to what amount you can change something by entities only and this is just as much as you can do without coding! I already got Laurie Cheers from Spirit of Half-Life to create me some special effects like the night vision but having corpses explode from feeding or similar couldn’t be done at the time. As for new models, I didn’t use them on purpose, because in my opinion e.g. the new weapons in Point of View were not of the original HL quality. Last not least, I just recently discovered Blueshift Unlocked and noticed that it’s node files were missing. I included them just for completeness” sake for collectors like myself ;).
I’ve alredy played this before aboout 1 and 1/2 years ago, or so, and this is just a little but sweet classic piece!!, I mean I’ve played as a headcrab, as a zombie, as a vorti in point of view, really cool mod too, and now as a Alient grunt oh is so cool!!!, I mean the only cool thing someone should invent a mod for, is to play as an Alien Controler, so that would be really cool!!!, also in hl, i’ve been a scientist, a security guard off., a janitor, an engenier, a grunt, a black oops agent, and I mean those roles in HL are just pure gold for modders ready to harvest!!!, so one thing I really love about HL, is that variety of roles and characters that can came out and really be creative in a mod!!
So that’s why this one is on the top, because it may have a simply gameplay but u are an alien grunt, who needs human flesh to recover it’s energy!!, and keep on and that end is just brilliant, u assume u are in that bio-research part of BM where Gordon sees you, oh soo cool and play it and if u are a real fan of hl, like me then this must be on ur obligated played mods list!!!
Pretty good. It was a little confusing about whether something non-human was going to attack you or not, but eventually you got the picture. Recharging took a long time but it also meant you had virtually unlimited health/armour.
Just not enough content for me, the idea was fine but the mod was thin and shallow, haven’t much of any issues with the layout and set design, just that the game had no balance being too restricted in its gameplay.
I can’t review this because it blatantly copied the maps from Chronicles: Episode 1.
Yes, I also realized it’s the same maps as in “Chronicles: Episode 1” just like Dr. Amazing said, nonetheless I played it till the end too just as I was playing Chronicles as well..
Pro’s:
-Nice idea to play an alien grunt, similar to “Point of View” mod (alien slave)
-Great level design (altho, same levels as in: see above, except the start)
-Nice healing feature
Con’s:
-Same levels as in “Chronicles”-mod
-Patience is needed for killing / healing
-Kinda short
Conclusion:
If you know “Chronicles” you can save the trouble, only exception is you want to play the same maps as an alien grunt, so for me, after already playing “Chronicles” I only can give an “play it later” now, because there’s only 1 weapon and it takes more time to advance compared with playing “Chronicles” as a human
Xen Warrior promises to let you become an alien grunt for the purposes of practically re-playing Half-Life: Chronicles as well as some maps straight from HL itself. Well this release one-ups Chronicles in a way because it actually works on 1.1.x.x versions, but Chronicles is just better anyway due to minor aspects. And we’ve already played Half-Life singleplayer, so what’s the point?
Let’s just say that a lot is left to the imagination. Health kits and HEV power are usable, so as an alien grunt you inexplicably have both health and power points. If that weren’t weird enough, you incur about the same damage as you would if you were playing as Gordon Freeman. Funny, in Half-Life it takes three .357 Magnum shots to the head to kill an alien grunt, four to the torso, or three double-barreled shotgun blasts [on Difficult skill]. Well it takes less than that for the Marine opposition to kill you, never mind it goes without saying you should have even more hit points for the sake of practical gameplay.
Naturally the only weapon is the hivehand. It’s not enough to deal with the Marines since you may have to re-strategize in the midst of action. An implementation of the alien grunt’s melee attack, its violent side-swept punch, would have really helped out.
Let’s just say that Xen Warrior doesn’t even get off the ground in terms of execution, let alone originality. At least original maps would have been something to play.
Notes: this release claims 9 maps but 3 of those are straight from Half-Life (specifically, Interloper and Questionable Ethics). No screenshots were taken since this release is practically a copy of Half-Life: Chronicles.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Friday, 3rd January, 2003 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.
Pros:
– You’re an alien grunt!
– The “aura vision”.
– The fight in the train scene.
Cons:
– Too short.
– Only 2 weapons: I know alien grunts only have those, but…
Manually
Medium
20 Minutes
I’d like to finish this mod but I only spawn with the Hive hand and not the melee attack weapon… Can’t progress without it. 🙁
Very short but awesome mod. It gives you a unique perspective on the Half Life Universe. Very awesome features and the training level also fits in perfectly.
The ending really connected things for me. Very awesome job!
Using Gauge
Easy
26 Minutes
Nice little mod. Pretty sure I’ve seen something like this already.
Complete playthrough: https://youtu.be/mqqew-WUjiw
Manually
Medium
30 Minutes
ehm, not bad, ehhhh, good good.
Manually
Easy
1 Hour