Azure Sheep - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Azure Sheep is a Half-Life mod made a long time ago in 2001 with an 8.5 on moddb. It introduces new characters while also showing us old favorites with Gordon Freeman, Adrian Shepard, and the original Barney which is a bit hard to tell since pretty much every other NPC in the mod/map set is Barney.

SCMapDB page

Original map author: DAVLevels

Conversion author: Chocolate IceCream

Date of original mod release: 2001

Date of final Sven Map release: 2020

Maps in package: 45

Map review of Azure Sheep

(originally posted on SCMapDB) 

by dunkelschwamm | September 8, 2022 | 5343 characters

    Azure Sheep is a prolific Half-Life modification known for having a shitload of maps, decent visual quality, a few new actors, and a very fanficy alternative take on the Black Mesa incident from Barney's eyes.

    Before Episode 1 introduced players to leading your NPC handgun toting wisecracking waifu through alien and military infested industrial and urban ruins, Azure Sheep introduced players to leading your NPC handgun toting wisecracking waifu to the corner of the room to wait while the players clear out the alien threats ahead to ensure their continual escort mission does not take a stray bullet and end gameplay. The escort-missionness of this mod was a problem at the time, and it's a problem in this Sven Co-op port just as faithfully. Kate is an almost comically optimistic character in the face of how literally useless she keeps proving to be in any battle. She can barely handle a zombie, and takes quick L's against any medium threat. Thankfully, Sven's friendly fire protection extends to her and prevents trolling. It's made even funnier when the mod includes a scripted sequence when my teammate and I had to reload the map to get her to actually perform the necessary scripted actions to proceed the map. You have to understand: Kate was one of the biggest selling points of the mod at the time of its release, and I need to insist here that she is not implemented well and manages to be almost nothing but a hinderance. Everything that Alyx gets right in Episode 1, Kate gets wrong. The biggest positive of Kate is that she (usually) stays put when you find a nice corner for her.

    Now, I don't want to gloss over the busted scripted sequence. There are times where this port unfortunately failed to keep the maps break-free. That scripted sequence was one of them, but another included a pipe which players climb in, which falls with them inside of it to a cliff. If the player inside of the pipe when it falls dies, the map becomes unwinnable without cheats. Gnarly. Beyond this, there was an elevator at one point which was meant to open for the players to progress but when we played it did not open, thereby breaking the map and rendering it unwinnable at that stage. I feel like this map breaks often enough for me to consider it unstable at best, broken at worst. I do not recommend for public servers.

    The maps here are about as well brushed and textured as Half-Life itself, which is quite the accomplishment for the time. There are some custom characters, including the aforementioned Kate, but also including Barniel, the HEV Barney, some new soldiers, a new vortigaunt, and even a panthereye boss battle. The positives for the presentation don't end there, as the mod also includes some superb voice acting that is full of character and charm. Kate's voice actress's reading of her lines somehow really fit with a character who runs head-first into a battle without a care for how she will be quickly eliminated. I don't know what it is.

    Presentation is most of what this map has going for it, however. The maps themselves are mostly long corridors which occasionally convolute in hard to read ways. When it's straight forward it's boring, and when it tries to make things more interesting it often ends up confusing. There are some places in the last few maps where players engage in larger scale urban battles where the mod starts to come alive, but it's very short-lived. Much of this map exists in heavy battles in hallways, boring battles in hallways, and annoying battles in hallways. There's also a water level, which thanks to the hyper-aggressive nature and unreadable hitbox of the archer fish is aggravating as hell. The broken nature of a few of the maps also makes some maps where navigation is buried within, say, one of several identical doors, the others of which are all locked, a lot more stressful.

    Overall, I think that Azure Sheep is one of those early Half-Life mods that gets by a lot on parenthetical stipulations: it's well made (for the time). The Kate escort gimmick is a great idea (if by great you mean novel at the time). The tons of weapons heaped onto the players is great (when any more than hall-sweeping weaponry is necessary). The new enemies sure are cool (if you are easily impressed by any new content). Before coming back to this, I remembered Azure Sheep as the mod which taught me that "more" is not always better in a mod. Given how boring sweeping AS's halls is, I still feel that way.

    I recommend playing the singleplayer mod where your resources between maps will actually matter. As a co-op mod, it's especially boring and frankly a bit broken. I don't recommend this port.

Pros:

• It's all of Azure Sheep with all of its features
• Azure Sheep's great voice acting and custom assets are present
• Golly is there a lot of content

Cons:

• The content is mostly boring
• The escort mission style of the overall game is bad
• Parts of the maps are broken
• A lot of the new stuff is annoying
• This is the second map I've played with terrible archer fish which made me consider just waiting for my teammate to finish the map without me

Score: 4.5 / 10