A person in an HEV suit, implied to be Freeman, ambushes and kills Shephard's squad members and severely wounds him.

The group decides to flee to California to seek refuge on the Pacific Ocean, per Cue's belief that the Combine lack naval capabilities.

In Nevada, the trio links up with another Rangers unit led by Lieutenant Harvey (Jonathan Benlolo) and escapes with them to the Pacific Northwest.

Coming across a port, Shephard finds the container ship Avalon Vale and its captain, Roosevelt (Oliver Colton).

Three years later, in a Combine-administered Earth, Shephard travels to City 9 in Alaska and discovers a Combine factory operated with child slaves.

After negotiating with the factory's administrator, Boris (Vincent Fallow), Shephard rescues the children and brings them back to his outpost to train as soldiers.

Discovering that Adam has attempted to seize control over his army, Shephard confronts and kills him before directing the ship to set sail for a stranded research vessel named the Borealis.

[2] Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of The Escapist was similarly negative towards the game in his Zero Punctuation review, criticising its plot, voice acting, graphics, level design, and the poor implementation of several of its core mechanics, describing it as "truly, madly, ovarian cyst-ingly bad on every imaginable level, in ways that only bad fan games can be.