Hunt Down The Freeman
Hunt Down The Freeman aka Hunt Down The Refund was a desperate attempt by some edgelord to try and sell a buggy Half-Life 2 mod for $̶2̶5 $17.99, and yet it failed hard. The game was released on February 24th, 2018 by a team called Royal Rudius Entertainment, and somehow, to this day, it hasn't been taken down from Steam, despite the game being even more hated than Ride To Hell: Retribution. If you are going to look for it and buy it so you can play it yourself, please, just use a torrent instead.
How the mod came to be
You know those cutscenes made in Source Filmmaker that occasionally play during the whole game? The same ones that people consider the only "good" part of the game? All of them combined seems to make the whole thing long enough for full length movie, right? Well shit you not, that's what it was originally supposed to be, but half way during the production, the team realized that instead of uploading the movie to YouTube and hoping that the video doesn't get demonetized, they were to make it into a full game in order to make money that way. And that's what they did. They got the mod greenlit by Steam thanks to the help of r̶e̶a̶l̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e bots since they knew no one asked for this.
The production of HDTF
The team hired a lot of people to make them work on this shitty fanfic of a mod, some of which they didn't even pay after they were done. They even got as desperate as to hire YouTubers as voice actors. But while every thing seemed like it going well from an outsiders perspective, the truth is nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. No devs were allowed to view the product, with the except of Royal Rudius's inner circle, until it was in it's final state. They made a Indiegogo for the game, which only received a grand total of $12.
The demo before the shit storm
Of course, they couldn't leave people in the total dark, so in 2016, they released a demo that isn't ANYTHING like the final game. Already people noticed how edgy n' shit the game was by the demo alone, and how the voice acting was absolutely dreadful. If that wasn't enough, there were many stolen assets from many different games/mods. Anyone who pointed out the stolen assets in Royal Rudius's comment section, steam group, or Discord server would get the banhammer. The team came out said the assets were "placeholders". Nevertheless, the demo is unironically better than the final build, considering the fact that it's fucking free.
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Hunt Down The Refund
The game was delayed more than 5 fucking times before it finally released on February 24th. Before the game was released, the dev team finally got to see the final build. Understandably, they begged Royal Rudius to delay the game. Unfortunately, they were too lost in their own mind, thinking about how they were going to get rich off of the game. They released the game on Steam, but not before fucking uploading the wrong game build. The game came out without cutscenes, had even MORE bugs, and dev/missing textures were still present. They updated the game so it will play in the right build after a few hours, but that doesn't say much, as the game was still a pile of shit. After that, they went on damage control for a few more days, in which they banned even more people from their servers and blamed the Half-Life fans for the whole game failing at launch.
The abridged version of the "story"
You play as Mitchell, an edgy H.E.C.U soldier sent out into facility called "Black Messa" to clear the mess before being brutally attacked by "Gordan Freeman". This apparently made Mitchell really angry at the Freeman, promising revenge for him, since he practically fucked up his face. The Gman shows up, talks for a little bit about some shit, and then leaves. Mitchell meets up with Nick and some other retarded soldier named Larry before heading out into the city.
He climbs up a tower filled with zombies before meeting some sniper dude named Adam. They both leave, traveling through the city and tunnels before meeting up with more soldiers planning to run away. They meet up with Nick and Larry before they all traveled through the subway. Once they arrived at station 8, they all walked in a room and turned on a radio, revealing that Keemstar, the fucking president, surrendered to the Combine, since he thought that this was the best chance for survival. Really though, it's just a shitty excuse to make another fucking DramaAlert video.
Once they are done listening in on the surrender message, Pyrocynical runs in, telling everyone that the aliens are coming and that "they are so fucked". After battling through the Combine, they all hoped onto a train. Mitchell then fights off gunships with a minigun, yet you can just skip this by grabbing that same minigun and walking back to the front of the train. Either way, it's fucking pointless as after the ride, Mitchell claims that all of the soldiers are now "dead". Once he met up with more soldiers in a camp, he and his team travel through more shitty levels, while meeting more unimportant characters in the story.
They then hopped onto a ship and met with Captain Roosevelt, who dies after 7 minutes. For some god damn reason, Roosevelt thinks Mitchell's name is a gift from god, and assumes that Mitchell is god himself, coming down to doom them all. Even after all of that, including the fact that Nick says Mitchell is cursed, Roosevelt still lets them on anyways. They fought against the Combine for a brief few minutes before setting sail.
FLASH FORWARD 3 YEARS LATER
The Combine took over the world, so where does our hero go? To a fucking empty arctic so he can fight the Combine and steal a couple of child slaves from a factory. After killing them and destroying the generators, he is just randomly warped back onto the ship.
It turns out it's been 20 fucking years since the last level. It also turns out Mitchell trained the children for many years so that they can serve in a military of his own. The Gman has another conversation with Mitchell, basically telling him to go out and kill Freeman like he promised.
Mitchell goes on a "suicide mission" to try and take out the Combine in City 17 with his army, only for him to quickly change his mind and to also switch sides, just to get revenge on Freeman. He, his military, and the Combine attack the resistance base, only to find out Freeman isn't there. He travels through many random filler levels with no transitions at all, destined to kill Gordan Freeman. Yet somehow, Mitchell got captured and was sent to prison by rebels.
He then meets Sasha, a whore who you'll only meet for 2 minutes before she is just killed off by Adam. They escape the prison, only for Adam to randomly leave Mitchell behind. He runs across the Gman again, and in the biggest gaming plot twist ever, he reveals the person who attacked Mitchell back in "Black Messa" was actually Adam. Hooollyy shiiit.
After their conversation, the Gman quotes The Dark Knight Rises and leaves. Mitchell faces the off against the Combine one last time before Nick rescues him and takes him back to the ship. He then chases down Adam, now knowing he was the one who caused all of this.
He shoots him multiple times, saying that Adam lied to him, betrayed him, used him, and fucked up his face.
After quoting The Dark Knight Rises one last time, he finally kills Adam. The game ends in cliffhanger, with Mitchell saying that they are heading to the Borealis, thus setting this whole story up as a shitty prequel for Episode 3.
If this wasn't a shitty fanfic put into a mod, I dunno what is.
The game itself
Royal Rudius claims the game is 14 hours long, but in reality, it's about 3 hours long, including cutscenes, which take up almost an hour. The game is just long enough so you can't get a refund from Steam. Most of the time however, you are just fighting endless hordes of NPCs, walking around barren maps with no directions on where to go, or just causing the game to glitch out, either intentionally or accidentally.
Speaking of glitches...
List of bugs that have happened in-game
- Cutscenes repeat or skip all together [PATCHED]
- Loading times take up to 5 minutes [PATCHED]
- Dev textures were left in the game [PATCHED]
- Missing textures everywhere [PATCHED]
- Saving the game would corrupt the save file [MOSTLY PATCHED?]
- Some sound files won't load in, resulting in static noises [MOSTLY PATCHED?]
- Most level scripts won't load up, making the map unbeatable
- You would often get stuck in certain places
- You can get out of bounds without the use of noclip
- Some NPCs, specifically the metro-cop, carried ERROR signs
- The game will just crash for no reason
- NODE GRAPH OUT OF DATE. REBUILDING...
This whole game is a bug
Videos
Highlights from a VNN stream. This was when it was initially released. Previous Video | Next Video |
See also
- Steam
- Half-Life
- Half-Life 2
- School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 - The mod we should of gotten
- Modding - Something the team doesn't understand
- The Room - Often compared to this masterpiece
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