Review: terror lies in wait in Slums 2 Extended

So, Slums 2, then. Grimdark mod is grimdark, basically. It’s been around for a little while, but the extended version was recently released. It’s a collection of linked singleplayer Half-Life 2 maps put together by just two guys, modders Diolator and IceFox, it’s inspired by Silent Hill, Condemned and F.E.A.R., and it promises to be ‘highly detailed, dark and scary. Nothing innovative in gameplay, but still good regular shooter. Try it and see yourself!’ So I did.

I thought I’d go with a fairly cut and dried intro since this is largely back-to-basics modding, really. No narrative or over-riding theme beyond an aura of dread; dim (very dim) lighting, fog, blood everywhere and boo-scares. Diolator and IceFox seem to have cranked up the difficulty, even on default settings – I may have been imagining it but everything seemed to hit much, much harder. There’s no crosshair, and no iron sights aiming, so you’re frantically sweeping everywhere room by room – and yes, forget to reload before a firefight and you’re done for. It’s largely shotguns at dawn, with some pistol and SMG ammo thrown in every now and then, the odd grenade and a few magnum rounds – though without aiming this gun is essentially a last resort at best.

It’s Combine troops and regular zombies for the most part, with the odd surprise thrown in. You move through underground sewer levels, up through crumbling apartment blocks, out into the streets, back below ground again and so on. The transitions are pretty well done – there’s pretty much no explanation of what you’re doing or any signposting beyond a couple of messages along the lines of ‘You throw the switch, and a door opens in the distance’, but each of the nine maps flows relatively naturally into the next.

So does it work? Is it a good regular shooter, dark and scary? Well… sometimes. It’s a good map pack, for a fair bit of the running time. There aren’t more than a few new textures and the music is pilfered from Quake 3 and Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, but the lighting, the colour balance and the sound design (such as it is) do manage to create a fairly intimidating atmosphere. There are moments when Slums 2 is terrific. You’re still aware you’re playing a map pack, sure, but the visceral nature of the combat along with the unrelenting urban decay has you whimpering quietly inside, thinking ‘I wanna go hooome!‘.

But it has problems. Worst are some nasty, nasty difficulty spikes around the fourth and fifth maps; too many modders basically seem to believe if they can walk Valve’s game on Hard, then why bother making levels they don’t find taxing? Diolator and IceFox don’t so much fall into this trap as leap in head first; in particular I respectfully suggest black headcrab zombie plus a room full of poison gas plus a boarded-up exit plus double helpings of fast headcrabs is going a little too far, to say nothing of trying to dodge the sniper in the next level when the first charming setpiece meant I had no bullets left and only a sliver of health.

There seemed to be some problems with the AI’s pathfinding, too, where several times they can clearly be seen standing around doing nothing until you’re right on top of them. And the open areas caused the odd graphical hiccup – I’ll happily admit I don’t have a very well optimised PC, but it’s a quad core that can handle most Source games with no issues at all, so I have to wonder whether Slums’ maps have been tweaked as much as they could be.

Still, it was entertaining enough to keep me struggling through to the end. Slums 2 doesn’t convince me these two should be snapped up by a developer just yet, but when a door swings open within earshot, running footsteps draw closer, the music kicks in and Combine flood the room their mod still has enough emotional punch to be hugely gratifying. Monolith have talked about how their aim with Condemned was to repeatedly almost kill off the player, to keep them hanging on by a thread, and for all its faults Slums 2 does exert that kind of compulsion, the feeling you’re not dead just yet, that if you can keep going a little longer you’ll have come out on top.

It’s far from perfect, but if you want to root around for some quick and dirty, satisfyingly brutal gunplay in a gloomy, netherworld City 17, then by all means head over to ModDB and give Slums 2 Extended a shot.

Slums 2 Extended’s page on ModDB can be found here.