Half-Life: Expanded Arsenal (Final Release) Aug 26 2019 Half-Life: Expanded Arsenal Full Version Well, now this is the final version of the mod, I will not say what new enemies and weapons are there, you yourself will learn everything. Released: December 2018 Download: Mod DB A recent and popular release, if Update is just a cleaned-up version, MMod is Half-Life 2 taken down to the garage for a full oil change, engine tune, and maybe a decal kit.
Half-Life 2 turns 12 this year, and thanks to its powerful, if a bit creaky Source engine it remains as popular with the modding community as ever. Over the years we've seen all manner of excellent mods emerge, adding co-op or competitive multiplayer, shiny graphical updates, new story content, and even full conversions that bear little or no resemblance to the original game.
It's the latter two we're going to focus on today, as we round up the best single-player Half-Life 2 mods. We've chosen mods that stand up as separate adventures, sometimes set in worlds far removed from Combine Earth.
This is the story of a man named Stanley. Dead game show hosts. Or rather, it's the story of the story: a deviously clever, reactive adventure that second-guesses your every move. As Stanley—or, perhaps more accurately, as the player controlling Stanley—you're free to follow or ignore the various instructions the wonderful narrator bellows over you, resulting in a tangled, branching story that rewards your curiosity, imagination, and defiance. The original Source mod was later expanded into a full game, one our Phil thought extremely highly of in our review.
Download:ModDB, Steam.
Adam Foster's Minerva comes close to the quality of Valve's own Half-Life 2 Episodes—in fact, Valve was so impressed Foster joined the company. It's a sizeable story, about the length of an official chapter, with considered level design and a high level of polish. You begin the game strapped to the underside of a helicopter, before being dropped on a mysterious island with a sinister secret.
Download: Steam.
Gordon Freeman ends the Half-Life series as a crowbar-wielding superhero, a figure of legend in the Half-Life universe. Two-part mod The Citizen provides a new angle on the world, casting you as an ordinary oppressed citizen of City 17. Obviously, said ordinary man soon acquires a gun and starts killing people, but you might snap too if you called that dystopia home.
Download: ModDB.
This lengthy, ambitious mod swings from horror to all-out action. Occasional cutscenes tell the story of a subway technician suffering from leukaemia, but Get a Life's unlucky hero Alex also has to contend with the mod's new limb damage system, which causes effects like dizziness and limping, depending on where he's hit by enemies.
Download:ModDB.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to step into the sneakers of Gordon Freeman and set off to repair a Resistance listening post. This impressive Episode Two mod begins with Gordon rowing to a distant coastline: a coastline that reminds you just how pretty the venerable Source engine can look in the right hands. The right hands in this instance are a couple of established game devs, and their experience shines through pretty much every crevice of this slick, well-paced adventure.
Download:ModDB.
Thanks to its then-revolutionary ragdoll physics, a lot of time in Half-Life 2 was spent throwing chairs at NPCs, or flinging teacups with the gravity gun. In that spirit, Research and Development does away with offensive weapons altogether, leaving just a couple of secondary tools to let you manipulate gravity or order Antlions about. Puzzles are the order of the day here, and it's surprising just how easily Half-Life 2's toolset translates to this new focus.
Download:ModDB.
Where there are modding tools, horror mods are sure to follow. You don't need to have played the original—in fact, it's included as a prologue, giving you the chance to explore both a haunted house and a spooky hospital. The horror on offer here is mainly of the jump scare variety, so if you were hoping for the psychological horror of Silent Hill, move on to the next item in the list. Nightmare House 2 is basically FEAR—it even features its own creepy ghost girl—but more FEAR is hardly a bad thing.
Download:ModDB.
The impressive Alchemilla drops you in the world of Silent Hill, endless fog, Dark World and all. Not only have the developers nailed the grimy aesthetic of Team Silent's classic series, they've matched its colour palette, borrowed its sound effects, and recreated its lonely atmosphere. It's such an uncanny representation that it may take you a while to notice there are no enemies traipsing around, but then those games were hardly known for their satisfying combat.
Download: Alchemilla mod.
Until now everything we've featured has been strictly first-person, but Water bucks that trend. In fact, it bucks a lot of trends, given that it's a third-person puzzley adventure starring a mermaid. Yes, a mermaid. While you're (initially at least) limited to a fantasy city's waterways, this smart mod soon finds ways to get you exploring land too, using a number of innovative systems. The developers of Water went on to make From Earth, another, similarly inventive Source mod.
Download:ModDB.
Well, we couldn't ignore Black Mesa, could we? For the unaware, this recreates the original Half-Life in its sequel's shinier engine, and it's been in development since dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Much more than a simple port, Black Mesa updates Valve's game with fancier assets, new voice acting, a reworked campaign and more. The team have also excised Half-Life's much-maligned Xen section, albeit only temporarily until it's been remade to be, somehow, good. While the older mod is free, you'll find the newer version on Early Access, accompanied by a price tag.
Download:Official site.
Platforms: | PC, PlayStation 2, Linux |
Publisher: | Sierra Entertainment |
Developer: | Valve |
Genres: | 3D Shooter / First Person Shooter |
Release Date: | November 8, 1998 |
Game Modes: | Singleplayer / Multiplayer |
Blow the dust off that crowbar and get your hazard suit polished…
Half-Life is here, and it’s still one of the best first-person action experiences ever. This is the sort of game that elicits endless, near quasi-religious praise from people that were around when it was hot, equating Valve’s defining first-person masterpiece to such revolutionary games as Quake, Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. Shall we dispense the formalities and get to it?
Let’s first honestly ask – why exactly is Half-Life great, and why is it so frequently touted as possibly the best PC game ever made? The important word here is ‘immersion’; and the means of achieving it are realism and plot. The game world in Half-Life is alive, breathing with purpose. Every scene you play through, every level you visit is part of a greater whole, and every location is, more or less, logically grounded in reality.
All your fellow scientists have been offed.
The game’s hallmark tram ride through the secret science facility perfectly illustrates this. Half-Life unconventionally lets you start the game by experiencing a normal day’s work inside a top-secret underground research facility in Arizona. More so, you get to enjoy this experience through the eyes of your protagonist, a top research scientist on the government’s payroll, adding tremendously the sense of actually being there. it makes the game world feel eerily believable, only to wildly distort it later.
The story continually unfolds in Half-Life. You play the role of one Gordon Freeman, theoretical physicist working on behalf of the military in an underground research complex called Black Mesa. It’s a routine a day until a botched experiment (which you partake in) rips the space-time continuum and destroys parts of the complex, simultaneously opening a gateway to an alien world.
It’s the ‘ripping an inter-dimensional gateway‘ part that poses the greatest threat, as aliens continually flood into the sealed super-structure, with little resistance from your fellow scientists or poorly armed security personnel. Equipped with a special hazard suit, your only chance of survival is making it to the top, continually dodging collapsing floors, creepy aliens, automated turrets and military operatives sent in to blow up the place and wipe out all of the evidence – including you.
The inter-dimensional aliens motif could have been a menacingly derivative plot device, but Half-Life breathes new life into the concept with its stylish, story-driven execution. A fantastic marriage between action and narrative is immediately apparent, flawlessly integrating important story twists into gameplay and delivering a more cinematic feel like no other game has done before. To this end, Half-Life lets you witness key moments of the story on-site and within full control, giving the player a sense of ‘there’ by not yanking the camera away for an ingame cutscenes.
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Plus the game world at large is pretty unpredictable, which adds greatly to the tension. You could walk into a room and an alien might come crashing through a window, or a giant piece of debris will fall just a few feet of you, or that pipe could burst and shower you with scolding steam. Scripted events like these are all over the place and give the environment and the story a dynamic, authentic feel. The AI helps complement this feeling considerably – people are infused with genuine panic and confusion within the first few minutes of the disaster, scientists plead for help, a dying security guard tries to reach for a first-aid kit, a gigantic alien stomps on the ground, causing a section of the wall near you to collapse and reveal a flaming gas pipe. The world is brimming with danger, and you must always be on your toes.
Your trip to the surface is wrought with danger after the incident and every corner of the now-mangled innards of the research complex will have you face a different threat. The aliens, far from being cliched, are all skillfully designed. The iconic headcrab is a creature that tries to latch unto its victim’s face and take control of its movements like some terrible parasite, effectively turning the unlucky host into a helpless zombie. Houndeyes are three-legged dog-like monsters who hunt in packs, charging up and delivering sonic blasts that numb you. The Ichthyosaur is an appalling underwater dweller with a huge, gaping mouth, made all the more terrifying by the fact that most of your guns don’t work underwater.
Yet easily the most imposing and terrifying alien monster is the Gargantua, an enormous and determined behemoth that’s exclusive to Half-Life and none of its sequels. The Garg encounters offer some of the best moments in action gaming – near impossible to kill using conventional weapons, you must escape their grasp by hiding in tunnels and plotting a means of killing them using the environment itself. One encounter will have you lead the creature between two electric coils to destroy it, a dash made all the more terrifying by the Garg just about matching your own running speed.
You’ll also fight a host of human opponents as well, including marines sent in to kill the science teams, incredibly agile CIA operatives and attack choppers that will literally blow you away with a volley of rockets. A lot of work has been put into both human and alien AI, and soldiers can be seen working as teams, constantly attempting to flank or flush you out with grenades.
The first part of the game is spent trying to survive through what’s left of Black Mesa, and the levels themselves constitute an endless array of creative design. As you make your way through the facility, you’ll eventually come across simple puzzles, most of the switch flipping variety. At one point you have to make your way down a gigantic, circular blast chamber with a three-headed ‘Tentacle’ spreading from the center. Then you’re using a controllable freight locomotive to travel between storage facilities, surrounded by electrified rails and angry soldiers. Some of the best and toughest levels are found towards the end, when you finally break the surface and are immediately met by roaring machinegun fire, tanks, APC’s and attack choppers all trying to stop you. The ending levels will actually have you teleport into the alien world itself for a final, exhausting battle. Levels are ingeniously and logically stitched together in bite-sized portion, allowing for quick load times between sections and a greater sense of fluidity.
Visually, the game is still an interesting treat – bleak hallways and storage facilities inside the old research complex feel cold and desolate, while sunny outdoor areas seen throughout the later part of the game look warm, almost inviting. The range of visual effects is greater than anything done in the original Quake 2 engine it’s based upon. Valve licensed the engine from id Software but had modified it to a point where about 70% of the code is brand new. The final result is stimulating, but still lacking the visual mastery of some other high-end shooters from the same period… most notably Unreal.
On the brighter side you’ll have several cool effects to compensate, including a revolutionary skeletal animation system that gives characters lifelike movements. And of course there’s the decal system that allows blood, bullets and charred holes from explosives to be sprayed all over the walls in a realistic fashion. So while the graphics might not be top-of-the-line, they are most certainly adequate enough for this blockbuster.
Concluding, Half-Life is a remarkably fun and memorable journey into one of action gaming’s most defining pivot points. The amount of mods and third-party customization tools available for the game is staggering, and I need not mention the visual upgrades released over the years to enhance the game in every aspect. But it’s just as enjoyable without the added high-res flourishing.
Perhaps most refreshing is the general air of mystery – with this game, the series is still at an incipient phase where most of the story isn’t fleshed out yet, leaving much of what is happening here up to the player’s imagination. In other words, there are no Combine, no giant robot dogs and no gun-totting pastors to derail you from the action and sleek sci-fi motifs. The game radiates with cool all by itself, and any true action gaming fan should play it!
System Requirements: Pentium 133 Mhz, 24 MB RAM, SVGA, Win 95/98/NT
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