I'm surprised I haven't reviewed Dark Souls III, considering my strong feelings on it. There will be spoilers.

TL;DR: Good action-rpg, bad Dark Souls.

DS3 is a huge disappointment and a horrible "Dark Souls" game. That is not to say that DS3 is a bad game in itself. In fact, it's pretty fun and can offer good challenge, it doesn't have any game-breaking issues, enemy designs are fine, game doesn't suffer from hitbox issues that plagued DS2 nearly as much (though it still does have bad hitboxes in a lot of places). If you are simply looking for a fun action-rpg, then DS3 is a great choice. However, overall gameplay in it barely feels like Dark Souls, and is much closer to Bloodborne.

The story in the game is yet another repeat of linking the fire theme. This is pretty funny to me since I still remember how people were very annoyed with the fact that DS2's story was a rehash of the original, with the player being forced to kill 4 great beings, and yet DS3 does more or less the same thing, but everyone was fine with it. The amount of fan pandering and overall fanservice in the game is also off the charts. Half the time playing it I felt like developers were constantly trying to get me to feel something by constantly throwing stuff from the first game at me and saying "hey hey remember that character / area / covenant / boss". This can work in a few places, but not when the entire game is like that.

Level and world design are a mixed bag. On one hand, level design itself is pretty good. Levels are pretty big and open and offer shortcuts and different challenges, with Cathedral of the Deep probably being one of my favorite levels in the entire series with its level design. However, the world itself is incredibly linear. Unless you try to kill the Dancer of the Boreal Valley first, which is quite a challenge at low levels due to her attacks mostly one-shotting you in the beginning, game progresses in a linear manner. When you hear that you have to kill lords of cinder, you'd imagine that game would probably allow you to choose to fight them in any order you like. However, instead the game forces you to kill Abyss Watchers first, then locks the access to Irithyll until you have done Cathedral of the Deep, and only in Irithyll does it give you a choice of either going after Aldrich or Yhorm first. You might say "but you just mentioned that you can kill Dancer early and get access to a different area", however, you can't actually kill the lords of cinder that reside in the castle, since access to the archives is blocked until you kill all the other lords. As the result, your progress through the game is likely to be more or less the same every time, which is horrible for replayability of it. Technically, you can access the Ashes of Ariandel DLC as early as Cathedral of the Deep, but it's considered a late game area and not the "intended" way to go. Not to mention that doing DLC doesn't actually progress the main story.

The gameplay is where my main issues with DS3 lie. Dark Souls III has the worst build variety of all souls games to date. Dark Souls 1 allowed you to make pretty much any build and, with the exception of a few areas or bosses, it would work. Dark Souls 2 expanded on that by making crossbows and bows much more useful and adding power stance, which further expanded your choices. Dark Souls 3 however has the worst build diversity by far, and developers clearly intended for the player to be a dodge-reliant fast hitting character, with every other build coming with huge tradeoffs. Magic has been nerfed into the ground and is pretty much useless due to requiring mana, which is replenished by the same estus that you use to heal, and due to stronger spells not really being worth it most of the time due to the amount of mana they require. Most people respond to that by saying that magic starts getting better after you increase your intelligence to ~60 or so, but by that point you'll be at more or less halfway point of the game. Magic can be useful as a tool in addition to your melee build, but a pure sorcerer has never felt as weak as it is in here. Bows and Crossbows now come with a limit of 99 arrows / bolts that replenish from your storage at bonfires, which limits your options severely, and the game's overall faster pace makes using them unpractical. You can carry and use different types of ammunition, but it's still worse than it was in the past. The nerfs to poise also make tanking builds impractical and more of a self-imposed challenge. They are not as bad as magic and can be fun and viable at times, but they are completely outclassed by dodge-heavy builds with fast weapons. Blocking attacks, especially from bosses, is also no longer a reliable way of avoiding damage at all. This has been an issue in DS2 as well, but in DS3 shields might as well not exist at all. There are some good additions to gameplay, namely, weapons now have "weapon arts", special techniques that can be utilized with specific weapons. For example, daggers allow you to use quickstep, which allow you to quickly move around foes, straight swords can break the opponents guard, katanas can either do a lunging attack or a parry from Iaido stance, etc. These moves also utilize mana bar, so it's not absent for people who don't use magic at all either. I am also not a fan of how embers and leveling up works. When you are embered, you gain additional HP and can summon people / be invaded. This is fine and I like the health reduction mechanic, however, problem is the same as in DS2: you can reach the boss fog and then pop an ember to become human, summon people and go kill the boss without any danger of being invaded. Leveling is annoying because of the same issue DS2 had: game constantly forces you to return to the Firelink Shrine to level up at a specific NPC.

The music is also a mixed bag. On one hand, the tracks in the game are very good and much more memorable than the mediocre soundtrack of DS2, which is interesting since it was made by the same person. However, the tracks are also very similar to each other. Most of the tracks are grandiose orchestral pieces with choir singing along. While this is of course an oversimplification and might imply that the soundtrack is bad (which it isn't at all), all I'm saying is that the soundtrack ends up very repetitive. There are some tracks that stand out from the rest, such as Deacons of the Deep, Dancer of the Boreal Valley, Abyss Watchers, but for the most part they are very samey. Each track is not that bad on its own, but when entire game is pretty much nothing but grandiose orchestral performances, it all starts to blur together. In fact, you can open the soundtrack yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrYPqtWWB3s , and randomly click in the middle of each song. Chances are, they'll start blurring together really fast, especially songs towards late game.

Graphics and style are fine for the most part, I don't have any issues with those.

While this review might come off as very negative, this is simply because I'm focusing on how much the game, in my opinion, fails as a Dark Souls I sequel. This doesn't mean that the game itself is bad, but for me personally it was a huge disappointment.

DLC is fine if you get the season pass. Ashes of Ariandel is very short and doesn't have much going for it except for the fight against Sister Friede, but Ringed City is pretty good both in terms of length and quality.

The gameplay complaints were aimed strictly at the PvE experience with occasional invasions, not at the PvP-focused experience with constant dueling and such.

Note: I'm playing post-patch. Afaik, some game-breaking bugs and level design issues have been fixed, or at least an attempt was made. I might also change some parts of the review later to elaborate on some issues.

Is HTDF good? Nah, not really. It doesn't even reach mediocre to be honest.

But is it an abysmal insult to FPS genre as a whole and one of the worst games ever made? No, it's not.

The bad:

-Bugs. While I haven't encountered anything game breaking that prevented me from progressing, they do exist and are very prevalent. Enemy AI glitching out is a standard occurence.

-Laziness and / or incompetence. From what I've seen online, majority of people who worked on HDTF did try to do their jobs, and most of the blame seems to lie on the project leader, Berkan "Frank" Denizyaran. He had grand plans, constantly changed things up, would be gone for days at a time, and overall kept the team in the dark. Among the things he did was buying a weapon model of some mutated Saiga 12K and sending it to an animator. The catch? The model had two billion polygons in it and almost broke the animator's machine. It's sad how the core team that worked on the game itself screwed it up, since stuff like weapon animations, cutscenes and music are well made. Among the "lazy" parts, Humvee and Bike you can use are just reskins of the buggy and control exactly the same. Driving a bike that feels so heavy is quite bizzare.

-The price. Game was incredibly overpriced on release, and even now I wouldn't recommend buying it at full price. The reason I bought it is that it's much cheaper in my currency.

-Act 2. While some think that it was made so huge just to make sure that people who went through it without cheating would be past the refund window, I don't think so. For one, considering the issues people seem to have with level design, they would pass the 2 hour mark long before reaching it. It is, however, an awful level overall. The sniper section is stupid, but not very difficult. The second moment when combine drop some pod that has like 3 sniper rifles sticking out of it is abysmal, and I have no idea how anyone is supposed to pass it without cheating, and the spotlight section wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be, they are pretty easy to avoid and it's obvious where you are supposed to go there. Blizzards are a ♥♥♥♥♥ though. Overall, a long and boring wasteland of nothing that just wastes the player's time.

-The performance. While it is stable for the most part, there are sections where it falls to 20fps or even lower. Ones that come off the top of my head are:

The ship defense section

The docks

The city sections in Act 1, but rarely;

-Canon got ♥♥♥♥♥♥ in every pose imaginable.

-Final section of the game where you have to defend against combine for 15 minutes. The game gives you 4 turrets, which is overkill and makes the section incredibly easy, and you just have to sit there and wait for 15 minutes until help arrives. There was also an annoying part in City 17 where an NPC tells you in cutscene to wait for a bit, and game literally makes you sit there for like a minute or 2 doing nothing.

Depending on how you look at things, screenshots and trailers that have shown Freeman appearing in the game are false advertising. The man himself never appears in the game except for a hidden cutscene at the end if you die during the 15-minute segment

Neutral:

-Voice acting. I'm putting it under neutral because, while the voice work for majority of characters ranges from bad to mediocre (talking about quality, not the material they had to work with), Mitchell and G-Man are voiced incredibly well. While a lot of people make fun of G-Man actor for how he pronounces Black Mesa, he overall does a good impression of the original VA, and Mitchell's actor goes all out on the "Badass action hero / edgelord" type.

-Level design. While there are some parts where I agree it's awful and hard to understand where to go, such as Chandelier in the mansion, and there are levels that are just huge areas of nothing, such as the combine installation in Act 3 and the infamous Alaska part, I disagree that the majority of the game is a confusing mess. The hospital part was easy, the city part afterwards was simple to navigate too with exception of that moment with strider at the end of the city level, before Mitchell reaches the parking lot. It should be mentioned though, that from what I've seen, devs changed the city part. When the game came out, you just had to rush past the soldiers and combine fighting, while now there's a fence in the way, and you have to help the soldiers out for a little bit before a combine Heli crashes and opens the path for you. The forest in Act 3 was also pretty simple to navigate. The docks, which also got a lot of bad rep for being huge and hard to navigate, gives you a humvee near the start. Again, this might be because of the patch and wasn't available on release. Finally, the factory level, which also got a lot of flak for being a huge map with nothing to do, gives you a humvee too, so while I agree that it's pretty hard to understand what the hell you are supposed to do after you get out, at least you can drive around and shoot aliens with the MG instead of just running around.

-The plot. It's laughable and makes no sense, but since it made me laugh I'll put it in the neutral category.

-Character models. Mitchell looks pretty good and Adam is alright, but many models that aren't taken from other source games are awful, like Sasha.

The good:

-Weapon animation and variety. There are a lot of guns in the game, and animations are amazing and really well made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R08tL992W-A

-The cutscenes. Once again, they are well made, tho color correction in them does stand out when they happen mid-gameplay, but overall the guy who worked on them did a good job, especially considering what he had to work with.

-The soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zutc9YwJI8A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh_QNV_u300

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1_CgGC2q7A

Attack on Black Mesa East is amazing

Unlike Doom 3 Protagonist, Mitchell actually CAN tape a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ flashlight to a gun https://gtm.you1.cn/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1498751001

Overall, Hunt Down The Freeman is a great example of what Valve has become. They don't care about Half-Life, they don't care about Steam, they don't care about quality control. The game itself fills me with sadness, since a lot of people who worked on it clearly cared about the game, or at least the idea behind it, but all of it was ultimately ruined by incompetence, lack of skill and questionable design decisions. Still, I hope that those who worked on it will be able to continue working in the industry, and, if Royal Rudius does somehow get out of all of this without shutting down, that they will take their future projects more seriously in the future.

After all of this, you might be asking: Why the ♥♥♥♥ am I recommending it?

I dunno, I enjoyed it. After hearing about how awful it was I expected something on the level of really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ g-mod maps made by kids or something like that, but all I got is a game that is not very good. Sure it has issues and is overpriced, but it's not the end of the world. The worst thing about it is that it carries the Half-Life name, but considering how even Valve clearly doesn't care about the series at this point, we might as well have the modding community try and finish the job, one way or the other.

Concerning the "stolen assets" controversy: from what I've been able to gather, the majority of assets weren't stolen, but rather reused from other Valve's source games. A lazy move, but not criminal.

Also, I never had the "node out of graph" error.

As mentioned at the beginning, review content might change in the future, but the recommendation itself still stands.