The controls for this game can be very confusing at first. You do a horizontal slash (or pull back and let go of arrows, which involves holding down and letting go of the mouse button) by left clicking, a vertical slash by right clicking, you stab by rolling the mouse wheel forward, and block by pressing down on the mouse wheel. It’s slightly more confusing than it sounds, but you get used to it in about 5 minutes. Even blocking is included as you can be hit in the exposed body parts (such as the head) when shielding yourself, and the body part you get hit on determines the amount of damage you take (arms/legs=minimal, torso=moderate, neck= critical/decapitation, head=instant kill).

The community is pretty good for a mod whose players more than doubled after being released on Steam. The dark side about the increase is that most servers are nearly full on weekdays. Upon entering a game, you’ll find that the community is friendly (and that the search was worth it), at least those players that have a microphone are, since you only have to hold a button to speak... those without mic don’t really converse, probably to not stop the slaughter just to type “LOL”, luckily, on a server with 32 people there will be about 10 or so people with mics... but the servers (at least all the ones I’ve played on) have no all-speak... so you can only mic-chat with your teammates.

In the end, this is definitely one of the better HL2 mods out there, though all the mods released on Steam are the most popular or best ones, and with this mod now having 100% Steam support, not only is it free, but you don’t even need Half-Life 2 to play it; all you need to play is a source-engine-run Valve game. The currently supported games are: Half-Life 2 (episodes 1 and 2 are supported also), Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and the upcoming horror game Left 4 Dead. At least those are the games it says can run this (you only need 1 copy). You’ll know if you can play this as it’ll show up on your not installed games list on Steam... just waiting to be installed.