Ok. So. Lets imagine this was a free custom map. Nobody hates it . So then, add some custom content including a new pistol (which looks and feels worlds better than those in half life) textures for characters (or rather corpses), scripted sequences, decent music, voice acting and a second level. Now suddenly everyone hates it.

Why?

Now, I admit that some of the points are valid.

It lags. Yes, but that's because in the setting it's raining.

The amount of health kits. True, there are way to many health packs, but considering that you have to cross the deck twice, both times being attacked by the fearsome creatures of Xen, I think the developer made a fair assumtion that we would need this many.

The boss. I agree. It's crap.

The story. I don't think everyone has even thought about it.
So. You are aparently in another dimension, yet we spawn in a flash of lightning on a boat.
Does anyone remember how the xen monsters spawned? IN A FLASH OF LIGHTNING. How do you think a human would arrive? Also, the boat. Let me insert an extract from the Combine OverWiki.
"In addition to this legitimate research, several secret projects are also carried out at Black Mesa, which are deliberately left vague. A large amount of classified research is carried out, including the development of high-tech weapons and defense systems, research into extra-dimensional travel, teleportation, and the study of Xen."
So, we already know that Black mesa have been to other dimensions-is it so far fetched that black mesa have a boat in one of these dimensions?
So you travel to this dimension expecting it to be an easy collection; get the test sample and go-hence, you have no weaponry. But, you arrive and everyones dead. Xen creatures have manged to get aboard. How? we don't know You don't know Your character doesn't know nobody knows! But they are here and you have to fight them off. You eventually reach a survivor who opens the CARGO doors for you.

And before i finish, i'd like to mention a great scripted event most people have probably overlooked. As you make your way over the deck, you see the gman watching you. Then, just as you get close to the point he's at, you are distracted by some turrtes. You have to destroy them, and when you look back to where the G-man was, he's gone. That's just an example.

There is more I could mention, but multiple issues mentioned in other reviews have been cleared up now.

If we had to pay as much as a penny for this, I would agree. But we dont. ITS FREE. No price, no problem.

norm for mod

!!SPOILERS!! THE WHOLE PLOT IS BELOW !!SPOILERS!!
This game started off ok but got bad quite quick.
First off you get almost every weapon in the first area. Not that bad but you also face almost every single monster in the game in the same stage.
After this fight you get to the tower. In my case I was below half health. You encounter a room with 3 soldiers in it. Ok. Kill them and begin to explore the room. Now after this fight you're probably low on health. So what happens next? The room is flooded with snarks. Took me several attempts to survive.
You get through that and go into a room in which you encounter the first living other person. You get the crossbow and he opens a big door. Really thinking of Jurrasic Park. Apparently theres a big scary monster in the hanger. So we open the doors.
You are then forced to back track all the way to the begining. Which has magically been repopulated with aliens.
You eventually reach the hanger and face a really glitchy cutscene. Which is unskippable. The "big scary monster appears" which is really a reteaxtured barnicle attached to a ragdoll of the final Half Life boss.
You get into the fight and realise that you have NO weapons. They are lying around you. This means that, no matter how conservative you have been, you combat the boss with next to no ammo. The boss is not even that hard. Although if you get caught on the barnicle tounge its almost an instant kill. If you die you have to go through the cutscene again.
You kill the boss and take the crystals. End of the game. Thats it. Its meant to be backstory but its just a shoot em' up. The final boss is just a bit stronger than the rest.
The best bit of the game was probably the final, non glitchy, cutscene.

This game is an insult to the Half-Life name. An incoherent story mixed with crappy level design and a play time shorter than the length of this review. I'm being nice right now.

I was concerned when I saw this game in the steam library having mostly bad reviews. "Hmm," I said to myself ",a Half-Life fan-made mod that has bad reviews? Surely these reviewers are too picky." Well the picky reviewers were right, Half-Life: Before was bad. It's not like, 'unplayable' bad, or the 'spit-shine-on-game-release-shelves' bad that Call Of Duty does, it's just, bad. Creashock Studios, you could have made something cool out of this 1.5 level map (the map-count being one of the problems) but you didn't. The one thing awesome about Half-Life is everything isn't given to you in the first five seconds of game-play. As said erlier, this could have been really cool, telling the story of how the Crystal that was used in the first Half-Life game was discovered, it's power, etc. etc. AND answering the question of how the Crystal was aquired (without going to any lore videos and/or articles). Also, I was confused how Mr.Winner (I now realize why he was given that name) got onto the ship to begin with, a lighting bold hit it, and Poof, he's there. The map count could have been increased, the boss could have been more than a moveless shell with a barnicle as it's wepon, and the list goes on and on. I think what was supposed to happen is they were trying to make Half-Life a (do not quote me on this) Spunk-Gargle-Wee-Wee game, like Call Of Duty. But over-all, it was bad.

Node Graph out of Date. Rebuilding...

Half-Life Before is well... REALLY REALLY short. Like mabey 15 minutes. But this doesnt take away from the fun of the game. I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a good time but doesnt have much of that time to their disposal.

The game can be finished in about 5 minuites, this is something you would download off a mod website.

It is just 2 maps, thats it. The final boss dies in under 20 seconds.

Basically, Celery of games. it took longer to install than it took to complete.


Seriously though. It isn't bad, but no way would i go to my friends and demand them to play this

Ever thought you'd see a bad half life game?
Well now you do.
Let's do the checklist:

Stupidly small
Stupid AI
Story not well written
No lipsyncing
Baad gramur al aruund
Final boss is easy (run and shoot at him, end of)
Easy as hell puzzles

I can go on, but i'm not wasting time on this
Half-life is great, this isn't.
Greenlight control is needed

Why?

This game started off ok but got bad quite quick.
First off you get almost every weapon in the first area. Not that bad but you also face almost every single monster in the game in the same stage.
After this fight you get to the tower. In my case I was below half health. You encounter a room with 3 soldiers in it. Ok. Kill them and begin to explore the room. Now after this fight you're probably low on health. So what happens next? The room is flooded with snarks. Took me several attempts to survive.
You get through that and go into a room in which you encounter the first living other person. You get the crossbow and he opens a big door. Really thinking of Jurrasic Park. Apparently theres a big scary monster in the hanger. So we open the doors.
You are then forced to back track all the way to the begining. Which has magically been repopulated with aliens.
You eventually reach the hanger and face a really glitchy cutscene. Which is unskippable. The "big scary monster appears" which is really a reteaxtured barnicle attached to a ragdoll of the final Half Life boss.
You get into the fight and realise that you have NO weapons. They are lying around you. This means that, no matter how conservative you have been, you combat the boss with next to no ammo. The boss is not even that hard. Although if you get caught on the barnicle tounge its almost an instant kill. If you die you have to go through the cutscene again.
You kill the boss and take the crystals. End of the game. Thats it. Its meant to be backstory but its just a shoot em' up. The final boss is just a bit stronger than the rest.
The best bit of the game was probably the final, non glitchy, cutscene.
5.5/10

this mod has 2 gunskins with better textures than the rest of the guns

it's boring and is short as hell

why is it on steam, it doesn't deserve to be here.
What you are seeing in the screen shots is the full game. There is only ONE level. That's it. Boat surface , pilot room, and storage (boss battle, which is also in the pictures)

Honestly, I expected better. It was way too short, being literally two maps long.

I also don't like how it forces you to use the 'HD' models which I sincerely hate. I'd much rather play a classic game and/or mod for that game with its original style, not some supposedly 'higher quality' component to it.

You basically start off with all of the guns in the game, and it doesn't present a challenge whatsoever thanks to that. The boss, what appears to be some kind of mini-boss from HL1's ending, is far too easy. All you have to do is shoot, shoot, shoot, dodge, shoot. Perhaps if a little more effort was put into making this, I'd give it more appreciation. I literally beat it in about 20-25 minutes on the first try. I might even find a small mod like this excusable if it was released earlier, but this was made in 2009, 10-11 years after HL1 was released.

How a mod like this, and not one of the many other mods that are 1000% better than this one, made it onto steam I have no idea...

Look, I can see what they were trying to do. Some people who loved Half-Life tried to mod the game and create a prequel for their favourite franchise. You can appreciate it for it's heart.

Not much else.

honestly, why on earth is this even doing on steam? and more importantly....WHY ISN'T ANY OF THE GOOD HALF LIFE 1 MODS NOT HERE?!?!?

Short and definitely not sweet. I was expecting more of a story, something to get my Half life fix but ended up playing something I couldve passed on. Cutscene at the end was my favorite part

While I like that there are Half-Life mods still being developed and now released on Steam (for free I might add), I'm pretty sure the only reason this is even on Steam in the first place is Greenlight. Before is short: only 3 levels long and that's including the credits. It has its good points, but it is very extremely obviously an amateur product.

The plot is explained in the main menu background. It is a bit strange and laden with typos, but from what I can gather this is how Mr. Winning (presumably related to Charlie Sheen) 'acquired' the Xen crystal used in the last experiment Black Mesa would ever perform. I don't know why they'd tell him so much about it other than to inform him of how to get back to his dimension, and I think it's handled pretty damn quickly and unceremoniously, but I guess it's not an unworkable plot.

I found the atmosphere mostly great, with the rain and the storm and everything. More background information/flavor about the parallel universe Mr. Winning is in and what's happening on the ship (other than CONTAINMENT TEAM and ICKY MONSTERS) would have been great, but alas I did not find much.

The music was also pretty good, the custom textures and scripted events weren't bad, and the new pistol skin is superb - probably one of the best things about the mod.


Now, the bad news.

There are some obvious graphical glitches: bodies of Controllers that you kill in the first level float in the air, hitting certain crates with the crowbar colors them white. I should also mention that every level (all three of them) needed to rebuild their node graphs when I first loaded them.

The game gives you a good number of weapons early on, but you don't exactly have a ton of ammo. I'd say it can't be helped considering how damn short this mod is.

Not to mention that some of the ways to advance in the first level could be made more obvious, including where the weapons are lying in front of you when you first start. The first level is good aside from that - it remined me of the ship level from CS: CZ Deleted Scenes - but the boss battle is just stupid and weird: the first time I tried it, the boss eventually traveled through the wall and eventually the level restarted. Turns out you just have to shoot it a lot while dodging enemy attacks.

After it died, the game ended and I got to see the 'Spacial Thanks' in the credits, which were otherwise nicely scripted.


I'd say give this a try if you really like Half-Life and feel like a bite-sized taste with some flaws and a seriously great pistol skin, or if you just like your HL with glitches. Otherwise, there's not much to recommend about it versus the multitudes of other, superior HL mods. I really wish there was an option betwen 'yes' and 'no', because I'd use it here.

At least it's free.

I am Andrii Vintsevych and I make good mods I think?