MOD CORNER – Poke646: Vendetta (Half-Life) (2006)

WARNING: This review contains mild spoilers for Poke646, please play the first mod first.

NOTE: This is a review of the Anniversary Edition of this mod.

After the unanimous praise the first Poke464 mod from magazines, websites, and players, the creators decided to return 5 years later to develop and release a sequel. Poke646: Vendetta puts you once again in the shoes of Damien Reeves, now driven by revenge for all of the suffering he had to go through in the original mod and goes after the people who put him in this situation.

This time around, instead of getting messages from Dr. Fuller or reading notes, this time around you’ll be getting all of your information from laptops laying around each area from the Poke646 team members. This way makes it easier to know where to collect 4-digit codes, goals, and plot points from. I guess enough people complained about the first mods that it was changed with this one.

Graphically, this mod is a step up over the last mod. It really seems to push what the engine was capable of at the time. While it’s great to see that the team behind the last mod managed to learn a couple of things, not only is Vendetta shorter than the first mod, it reuses several models and even the odd location from the first mod. It does do enough with these reused locations that it doesn’t bring the mod down in anyway and they’re incredibly brief. Two levels from another well known Valve IP also makes a brief cameo.

Most of the signature weapons return, such as the Pipe, the Pipebomb, the CW-LW Bow Rifle, and the Double Barreled Shotgun. Unfortunately, the two nailguns down return, but instead we get a brand new gun, the PAR-21 Assult Rifle. It’s pretty much the standard Assault Rifle you see in every game, with a high rate of fire and secondary fire that shoots grenades. Yeah, it looks nice, but it doesn’t quite have the personality of a makeshift nailgun weapon does.

Poke646: Vendetta is a step up over the first mod in a lot of ways and is a worthy sequel, even if it’s only half the length of the first one, and just like the first one, this also got an “Anniversary Edition” update to run on the modern version of Half-Life. If you liked the first mod, this is definitely worth checking out.