Half-Life: Opposing Force

I can't shake the fact that this was marketed as a game where you are the antagonist force from the base game. The expectation is that your team likely would have a solid set of missions - including to snuff out witnesses of the event - that you would attempt to execute before shit hits the fan. On the contrary, the game starts with your platoon having no knowledge of the mission, and shit hitting the fan before you even get control of your character. When you come to, you're in the same position as Freeman - attempting to find some evacuation point from the facility while aliens roam the grounds. More of the same is good, but some potential was missed here.

In Half-Life, you see militaristic cruelty towards the scientists in the facility, but here you are merely given indirect, anecdotal stories from scientists of other soldiers who have harassed them. You are not ever given orders to execute them, because your squad never received orders, and despite you being outranked by everyone you meet, they are under your command because you're the protagonist, or something. Only one event of soldier-scientist interaction do you actually see in person, and it's simply the scientist being (aggressively) held in a room to await evac. I cannot understate this - by the end of the game, Corporal Adrian Shepherd is even less aware of the military's influence on the situation than Freeman was.

You are subject to battles with black ops agents and Xen aliens, same as Freeman. You have no more knowledge of the interior design of Black Mesa than Freeman did, despite working for the military that employs them. You crawl through the same vents, use most of the same weaponry, and solve similar long-form puzzles - including the Pit Worm section which is almost exactly the same as the Tentacle Pit. I don't think anybody wanted an expansion whose sole selling point was a new character perspective to be a watered down version of the base game.

About halfway through the sewer section, I found myself asking if Shepherd has any unique advantages over Freeman, and the only answer I could muster was the occasional companionship of other soldiers, whose AI I personally found fairly frustrating to reign in. This isn't exactly Brothers in Arms, and their actual utility is drastically overstated in the tutorial. You'll hang onto a small group of soldiers for 20 minutes at the most, with 5 of those being futile attempts to get them to follow you. You also have the unique pleasure of occasionally having to utilize the worst rope physics of all time to cross a chasm. Great.

Despite all of this, nothing can take away from the fact that the original Half-Life was a masterpiece, and being able to experience more of it makes this recommended by default. Even though Shepherd knows almost nothing at all about what's going on, he is subject to interesting treatment from the G-Man, and he sees a side of the story that is unique in the Race X invasion (which was very hard for me to distinguish as a separate event from the Resonance Cascade, but we'll roll with it). The industrial-horror elements and tone are mostly preserved. On some very basic level, this is new content, and you get to see even more of the experimental weirdness in the facility.

Half-Life: Opposing Force is absolutely a Half-Life game, and one worth playing simply to experience more of the magic that is the Black Mesa facility, but the opportunities Gearbox Software had to offer a truly unique perspective on the events of the base game were mostly squandered to preserve an acclaimed gameplay loop. For that, its lack of ambition makes it a less memorable experience.