Why is Fan Half-Life 3 So AWESOME and BAD?!

Overview

The video is a start-to-finish review of The Closure, a fan-made attempt at Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Creator Leon Brinkman reportedly worked on it alone for more than five years, building over 35 maps and roughly 11 hours of gameplay.

The reviewer finds the mod messy and often frustrating, but also recognizes its ambition, detailed environments, visual effects, and sheer amount of content.

Storyline

• The mod opens after Eli’s death. Gordon Freeman meets Magnus, who says the Borealis expedition must wait because Alyx is grieving. Gordon is sent to investigate the missing Dr. Kleiner.
• Gordon travels through mines, facilities, and parts of City 18, encountering unfamiliar headcrabs, Combine forces, returning HCU soldiers, and other threats. The story hints at new enemies and mysteries, but often leaves the player unsure what is happening or where to go.
• Gordon eventually reaches a secret Combine lab. Kleiner appears and disappears several times, offering confusing explanations. The mod eventually reveals that Kleiner has gone to the Borealis and intends to destroy it—an objective that seems to match Eli’s earlier wishes, making Gordon’s opposition difficult to understand.
• The journey includes strange visions and crossovers, with appearances or references to characters and elements from Portal, Halo, Quake, and other games.
• After a final stretch of combat and explosions, Magnus and Barney help recover a mysterious cube from the Borealis. Gordon takes it toward Aperture Science, but his car crashes, and the story returns to fighting Combine forces and antlions.
• The player must choose whether Alex or Barney survives. The ending shows Gordon with the chosen character in a graveyard, followed by a long credits sequence and a brief G-Man scene. RadioRebel provides a wrap-up of the uprising.

Gameplay Highlights and Critique

Combat and Weapons

Gordon finds a pipe wrench, Bison SMG, KSG-12 shotgun, revolver, sniper rifle, and rocket launcher. The reviewer especially enjoys the sniper, which is powerful and reloads instantly.

Combat ranges from helicopter, APC, and Strider encounters to repeated battles against Combine soldiers, antlions, and Hunters.

Enemy-Count Option

Early on, players can choose how many enemies appear. After a chat vote, the reviewer chooses the high-enemy setting. Despite the large crowds, resource placement and enemies fighting one another can make the campaign manageable, though some encounters feel overwhelming.

Environmental Set Pieces

The mod features detailed maps, collapsing buildings, exploding bridges, physics destruction, vehicles, and several dramatic-looking scenes. The reviewer praises the visuals and effort, even when the story or level design does not hold together.

Puzzles and Navigation

Progress often depends on finding keycards, buttons, levers, batteries, or concealed vents. Some puzzles work well, but many solutions are hard to spot, and objectives are frequently unclear. The reviewer gets lost repeatedly and sometimes needs a chat member to consult a walkthrough.

Recurring Frustrations

The campaign reuses combat and puzzle ideas throughout its long runtime. The reviewer also criticizes hidden routes, confusing layouts, invisible barriers, awkwardly placed controls, unnecessary cutscenes that reveal nearby items, and occasional bugs. Many maps rely on enemies from the original game, making the campaign feel repetitive.

Overall Takeaway

The reviewer sees The Closure as an ambitious, visually inventive fan project, but believes stronger playtesting, clearer navigation, more coherent storytelling, and less repetition would have improved it.

The practical design lesson is to have others test a mod and give honest feedback—especially on whether players can understand where to go without relying on luck or walkthroughs.

People and Sources Featured

• Leon Brinkman — Creator of The Closure.
• Rocky Rockhead — Livestream chat member who looked up a walkthrough clue during a difficult section.
• The livestream chat — Voted for the high-enemy setting and chose Barney in the final character decision.
• Phillip from planetf.com — Narrator for the mod’s ending; the video notes his role with RadioRebel in the Half-Life community.
• War Thunder — Sponsor mentioned in the video.