Azure Sheep - GrandmasterJ

 

    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 GrandmasterJ | September 8, 2022 | 5918 characters

    Azure Sheep is a long mod converted for Sven Co-op. I did not expect it to be this bad. The almighty Hallway is a staple of any video game, but I feel like lately I've been playing a spate of Sven maps that are comprised mainly of hallways. Hallways are not interesting. Azure Sheep is about 90% hallways.

    Azure Sheep has 45 maps in it. That's a lot of game for so little to actually see. There was some really fun stuff at the beginning, there are cutscenes and we get to see our favorite theoretical physicist coming to work late and sporting his famous ponytail. Later on we get to see his rad sports car and another good looking car that I can only assume belongs to Eli. But shortly after that we get endless hallways. The map is made pretty well with good detail, some hallways had different architecture to break up the monotony. There were some cool looking rooms and the eventual branch. One time I got to glimpse a large warehouse through the window of a hallway, I didn't get long to look because at the other end of the hallway he hit a level transition and I got whisked away. This happens a lot, one of us would go down a hall and the other would find another, then one would hit a level transition and we'd be done.

    Each new map gave us more and more starting weapons and ammo. This must have been the work of the map converter, and it helps tremendously. At one point my teammate asked why we were given the rocket launcher in a sewer (otherwise known as a series of hallways) and I told him it's just the natural progression of better weapons, we are at the point in the map where we are granted rocket launchers. The next map we had egon guns.

    In all that endless hallway there were two or three points where the game broke. The first time was when we were in a pipe and the pipe broke, careening down to crash onto a catwalk. I was in the pipe, and then I died, my partner died falling on the way down. When we both returned to jump down to the catwalk we found the pipe segment had disappeared and the pipe was too small to allow us to jump out, we had to crawl out of the pipe and drop straight down, narrowly missing the catwalk and dying. We had to noclip to progress, there was no way to do it legitimately. Another time my partner and I were trapped in a glass tube full of water, the same tube right on top of each other. There was a cutscene with the G-man and some assassins, and then Kate comes in to rescue us. She got stuck in the doorway and I noclipped to get her loose, but the scripting was broken anyway and we had to restart the level. It worked the second time around. Endless hallways and game breaking bugs.

    I said there were two or three points where the game broke, I give options because at one time I noclipped through an elevator and finished the level. I have no clue how to open that elevator and maybe the map wasn't broken, but I was fed up and noclipped and I have zero interest in going back to confirm. Either I had two problems that required cheating/restarting or three, still not great.

    The map set is one big escort quest once we get Kate, our love interest. She looks like The Baroness from GI Joe cosplaying as Jill Valentine from Resident Evil. One would think this would be the worst part of the series, but this is wrong, the hallways are still the worst part. Honestly she was fine most of the time, I mean yeah there were Kate-only doors that only she can unlock that we had to lead her too and that was mildly annoying but her pathfinding was usually ok. There was one point we had no weapons and had to rely on just Kate, Kate is bad at combat and shy at shooting. That part sucked. There was really only one part where we had any trouble protecting Kate and that was near the end, in a map that otherwise was probably the highlight of the series. We were in a ruined, burned out building filled with human and alien grunts. Kate does not know how to sit still and refused to stay behind, so she kept running forward and taking many bullets directly to her face numerous times. My teammate offered to stay behind to babysit while I cleared out the building and shot down two apaches.

    Kate has a lot of custom voice acting, there is a whole credits sequence that I sat through at the end and I specifically read the voice actress's name but now I can't remember. She's fine but her lines are annoying, she's really cocky yet can't shoot her way out of a paper bag. I guess I understand why she is so cocky, if my workplace tuned all the retinal scanners to fit just my eyes then I would have a bit of an ego as well. There is also another character that is just a female Barney, named Barniel. She has voice lines too but they were so quiet I couldn't hear anything.

    There are some cool set pieces in this map, but they are buried underneath so many hallways. There are some fun cutscenes, voice acting, and cute story, but the gameplay is walking through hallways. Sometimes the combat is fun, but sometimes the combat is in a hallway. I think my teammate said it best, "More is not better". This map could easily get cut down to two or three maps worth of gameplay and lose nothing but tedium.

Pros:

• Great production with cutscenes, custom models, voice acting, story
• the map was made well, good details, even the hallways were visually different
• the escort mission parts of the map set weren't horrendous
• Players spawn with better and better weapons
• That final fight in the burned out building was very fun

Cons:

• Too many boring hallways
• I encountered two or three bugs that required cheating or restarting
• the series is long and most of it is walking down hallways
• the map overall is just really boring

Score: 3 / 10