I managed to get a bit further into the mod. The big spaces have started to hurt it a bit. There's a lot of running from one door to another with little in between.

In the beginning ammo management was perfect, now it's starting to suffer from what I'll call "mod syndrome". Basically mod authors want to be more "badass", so they artificially increase the difficulty. Usually what you see is massive increase in life from enemies, and their damage output increased. This one spams enemies at you. There was a section where there were probably over a dozen vorts. In a different area, there were probably 20 houndeyes. Up to 5-7 soldiers at a time (and they can have an assassin with them too). There's an area where you need to clear a dozen ceiling turrets to escort a scientist.
The problem is, neither ammo nor health drop is increased at all to account for all the enemies. I've started to abuse quick saves to save up what little resources I can.

Had a quick look at skill.cfg, and the mod also increased enemy health & damage. I HATE modders that do this. When you've played this game for a massive time, like I did, you learn by heart how many shotgun shots it takes to kill certain enemies. You learn to rely on that info. And then a modder comes along and messes with that, and now suddenly you don't understand why enemies refuse to die when they were supposed to. It's frustrating as hell.

So basically, normal difficulty isn't normal difficulty, it's half way between normal and hard. Combine that with the extra spawn rate, and this mod is at least equivalent with hard HL difficulty. Problem is, brand new maps and enemy placements means it's a bit of a pain.

So after killing more soldiers than I can count, and frankly getting sick of them, I find one of those nuclear warheads, like in Opposing Force. Upon approaching it to disarm, it goes off, but instead of dying, I get teleported to Xen. Only now, I come across some ancient ruins...