Half-Life Blue Shift just doesn't provide that great Half-Life gameplay that I've come to know and love.
In Half-Life: Blue Shift you get to play as Barney Calhoun, a security officer at the Black Mesa Research Facility. The game Starts at the exact same time as Half-Life, in fact you can even see Gordon Freeman near the start of the game. The game basically focuses on you, and several scientists escaping from the facility.
Half-Life had been released nearly three years before Blue Shift, so as you can imagine the graphics would start to be looking on the old side. Thankfully a Hi-Def pack was added. This changes nearly all the models and makes them look so much better.
The problem with Blue Shift is that it really lacks any of the real excitement of Half-Life or Opposing Force. It just ends up feeling bland. Shoot this guy, run around, shoot this alien, etc. It never really does anything terribly exciting, or even really attempts to add anything new. There isn’t anything you haven’t seen in a Half-Life game before, no new enemies, no new guns (although the sub-machine gun is replaced with a full assault rifle thanks to the hi-def pack), it just feels boring which really isn’t what I’ve come to expect from the Half-Life series. It’s also a fairly short game. I think I passed it in about six or seven hours, so don’t expect a lot of play time.
Half-Life: Blue Shift is simply put a boring game. It really doesn’t do anything special. It would have been great to see some new enemies, or some new weapons, anything, but it’s just feels like it was intended to just make a quick buck.