Half-Quake Amen Coop - GrandmasterJ

 

    Half-Quake Amen is a rather famous mod with a focus on save scumming and nasty traps. I haven't played the standalone mod but from what I hear it's really focused on messing with the player. Now it is available for Sven Co-op at the expense of some of its features.

SCMapDB page

Original mod authors: Muddasheep

Conversion authors: Royal-soldier

Date of original mod release: 2002

Date of final Sven Map release: 2009

Maps in package: 26

Map review of Half-Quake Amen Coop

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by GrandmasterJ | December 1, 2021 | 3283 characters

    I remember when the original Half Quake came out and my friend absolutely raved about it. He kept trying to get me to play and but I wasn't all that into the modding scene at that point. So when we got back into Sven and saw that Half Quake was converted we finally got to playing it.

    I had fun. I love the concept of the creators themselves having a conversation with the player, not in a self-insert cringy kind of way but in a "I made this game and I'm talking to the player" kind of way. Sure, the creators are doing their best to be mean to the players and the whole premise of the map is dying in unfair ways, but its a gimmick I can get behind.

    The biggest problem I had with the map series were a few parts where I could not figure out how to progress, then I died and spawned in the next area. It was real confusing and I'm not sure if that was the point. It was originally a single player mod where you had to save scum to actually beat it so I'm leaning more towards bug than feature. There was this one particularly bad part where my teammate and I were trapped in a room with scrolling textures. I died somehow and ended up outside the room, which was where I had to go next. But my teammate could not get to me, there was nothing around the room that seemed to do anything or signal anything. He committed suicide and appeared next to me. If this was a map series made on Sven for Sven I could see that being the solution, as a port of a singleplayer experience is reeks of jank.

    There was another part where we were supposed to wait in a map for 20 minutes. For some reason the map changed after about 3, which was disappointing because we didn't fully explore the area yet and I had planned to use this mandatory wait time to go get food.

    The textures are simple black and white, probably made on MS Paint, but they were used effectively. The black texture was used a lot too. This gave the game a minimalist style. There are these phone booth looking things labelled 'Life' and 'Death' and I made it a point to go into every single death booth. I can attest that all of them do exactly what you think.

    Overall I had a fun. The maps were not challenging, spawns updated frequently and despite dying so much I didn't feel like it detracted from the experience. The maps were exceedingly easy, probably because there was no combat and no penalty for death. I can see the map series being completely different as a single player game with saves and reloads.

Pros:

• The best part of this map were the creator voice overs, even though they were mean to me
• The textures worked well together and gave the map a unique look and feel
• I love the death booths

Cons:

• Some parts are very unclear on what to do next, I progressed only by accident
• The map where you wait did not work as intended
• Difficulty was extremely low, if the creators are going to brag about torturing me then torture me.
• The maps are supposed to be hard and unfair, but in Sven come off as novel gimmicks, perhaps even boring
• This didn't feel like Half-Life or Quake

Score: 6 / 10