It’s hard to even comprehend how much PC gaming has changed in the past 20 years. But it was the classic FPS Half-Life 2 that convinced people to install this weird military-green launcher app named Steam and take the plunge on digital distribution. Not only was it a fantastic game, it built on Valve’s established track record of mod support, providing creators with the tools to create their own levels, campaigns and total conversions, even if the studio's own plans could be a bit of an inscrutable black box.
Smash-cut to two decades later. We’re still waiting for an official reveal of Half-Life 3, but at least we’ve had plenty to chew on in the meantime. While never quite as explosively popular to remix as Doom (largely due to much more demanding mod tools), Half-Life 2 has maintained an active community of creators, mappers and modders since day one. Some went on to create fully standalone games like No More Room In Hell, or G String, Black Mesa or Infra, but plenty more kept hammering away at free goodies for us all to gorge on.
After installing many, many Half-Life 2 mods, here are my choice picks from recent years to get you up to speed with Gordon and pals.
How to install Half-Life 2 mods
Despite a steady drip-feed of small updates over the years, it wasn’t until this 20th anniversary weekend that Valve finally made it easier to install Half-Life 2 mods. The game now has integrated Steam Workshop support, but at the time of writing, only a handful of items are available there, so to access some of the best mods you’re going to have to shuffle some files around for yourself. Not a huge hassle, but it could be easier. You will, of course, need to own Half-Life 2, along with its expansions.
To install stuff not on the Steam Workshop, you should follow each mod’s individual installation instructions, but the most common first step is to have either the Source SDK Base 2013 Singleplayer or the Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer packages installed on Steam, from the Tools section of your Steam library. If you own Half-Life 2, both of these should be accessible. You should also right-click on either/both, go into Properties/Betas and select the ‘upcoming’ branch for Singleplayer, and ‘prerelease’ branch for Multiplayer. This’ll ensure that you’re using the very latest build, which most mods require.
Once you’ve got that downloaded and updated, all you need to do is drop any unzipped mod folders into your Steam\steamapps\sourcemods directory (usually starting with C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\).
If all’s in working order, close and re-launch Steam to have the mods pop up in Steam itself as part of your library. If they don’t, double-check to make sure everything has been unzipped to the right place.
Fortunately you won't need to go through these steps for some of my picks. As while Valve haven’t made mod distribution especially easy for Half-Life 2 until just recently, it has approved a large assortment of fan-made adventures and more polished mods to be released directly on the Steam storefront. Here’s some easy-to-install must-plays:
The best Half-Life 2 mods on Steam Workshop
Half-Life 2: Update by Filip Victor
Available: Direct on Steam
No longer quite as essential, but still an important community favorite, released around HL2’s 10 year anniversary. Until the impressive Half-Life 2 RTX drops, this subtle community-produced remaster is worth using. For the most part this is Half-Life 2 just as you remember, albeit with slightly better lighting and effects, and a lot of old outstanding bugs (many spawned by Valve themselves while updating the engine) crowbarred into submission. It’s Half-Life 2 as nostalgia tells you it was, not as it actually was.
While this mod does only cover the original Half-Life 2 and neither of its expansions, it’s a polished and smart enough production to be worth installing. Especially if you turn on the optional Community Commentary mode, featuring anecdotes, insights and reminiscing from an assortment of avid Half-Life 2 fans, YouTubers and streamers. While that might sound like torture to some (and admittedly not quite as impressive as Valve’s own commentary), they’ve got some fun insights, and if you’d still rather not hear it, it’s entirely optional.
In a similar vein, those lucky enough to own a pair of high-tech goggles should check out Half-Life 2 VR (including Episode 1 & Episode 2) to experience the classic campaign from a fresh new perspective.
Entropy : Zero 2 by Breadmen
Available: Direct on Steam
Still one of the biggest and best. Sequel to the solid but slightly rough-hewn Entropy : Zero, this campaign puts you in the alien jackboots of ‘Bad Cop’, who is a bit of an arsehole even by Combine police standards. But evil alien governments being what they are, he’s marked as expendable before long, sending him on a shockingly well-written adventure through the bowels of an old Aperture Labs (yes, from Portal) research facility, where he teams up with Wilson, a sapient gun turret, for some buddy-action comedy hijinks.
It’s just top notch Half-Life, and explores new and interesting sides to the setting without feeling too much like overwrought fanfic. And there’s still plenty more Entropy : Zero on the horizon, too. There’s two expansions in the works, one continuing Bad Cop’s story following EZ2’s good ending, and one prequel campaign putting you in the shoes of a Combine assassin shortly after the alien takeover. On top of that, the third-party expansion Entropy : Zero - Uprising is still chugging along, with its first chapter available now. And to top it all off? Entropy Zero 2 has its own Steam Workshop page, packed with community-made maps and mods.
Swelter by SDE Development Team
Available: Direct on Steam
Another excellent singleplayer campaign. Experience a day in the life of a regular Resistance grunt, sent on a diplomatic mission to Combine-held Central Asia (most likely former Kazakhstan) in this sunny, chaotic little campaign. It’s a full self-contained three-act adventure. Only a few hours long, but never a dull moment as you bounce between setpiece after setpiece, gunfight after gunfight, and some gorgeously detailed environments. Day turns to night turns to dawn as your mission progresses, keeping the atmosphere fresh as you travel across the country.
As well as the usual horrors of Combine occupation, the formerly Soviet state is full of sun-bleached structures emblazoned with fading red stars, as well as local art and architecture. It’s nice to see another culture and part of the world through the lens of Half-Life 2’s sci-fi war for survival. But also you probably won’t have long to appreciate the sights because there’s a whole lot of shooting to be done using an assortment of HL2 staples and a stack of cold war hand-me-downs. Can’t go wrong with an AK at least!
Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3 by Team Jabroni
Available: Direct on Steam
A rare multiplayer pick, but a fantastic time if you bring the right people to the party. Jabroni Brawl: Episode 3 is an anarchic, enormous collection of competitive multiplayer maps and modes, and spiritual successor to the deeply chaotic Jaykin’ Bacon: Source. The tagline ‘For idiots, by idiots’ isn’t messing around. Over 130 maps and 150 player models (many borrowed from other games) and 80 weapons (including a dubstep cannon, an AK with an axe-bayonet and the classic Rocket Crowbar) spice up 14 game modes including ‘Sneaks vs Mallcops’ and ‘The Shidden’. On a server with game modes set to shuffle and all the maps in rotation, you won’t be bored.
Sadly, despite Jabroni Brawl being actively supported and still getting regular updates with new maps, modes and features, there’s not many people playing it. And those that do frequent the game’s public servers tend to be a raucous and abrasive lot. Our advice is to BYOB (Bring Your Own Buddies) and convince your favorite gaming Discord community to install it, set up a password-locked server of your own and jump in with a bunch of people you know.
Half-Life 2 mods from the border worlds (not Steam)
Half-Life 2: MMod by Gunship_Mark_II
Available: On ModDB
If HL2 Update was giving the game an oil change, a wash and a wax, then MMod blesses Half-Life 2 with a full engine tune-up, a flashy new spoiler and a fresh decal kit. Sequel to a similarly impressive overhaul for Half-Life 1, MMod aims to tune up Half-Life 2’s core gunplay and visual effects, with more particles, dynamic lighting, much slicker weapon animations and some minor balance tweaks. No massive or sweeping changes to gameplay, but a subtle shift towards modernity, buffing out some of the worst scuff marks that HL2 has picked up over the years. It’s a neat way to replay Half-Life 2 and its expansions.
It’s impressive enough in action, with the now-bassy SMG spitting out smoking brass and the shotgun putting the fear of Gord into the Combine, but where MMod shines brightest is in its portability. The Addons page on ModDB for it contains a vast library of compatibility patches, letting you apply MMod’s enhancements to dozens upon dozens of other campaigns, maps and mods. Some of these patches are for older, slightly less polished versions of MMod, but it’s still a fantastic excuse to dive into the Half-Life extended universe, including some of the RTSL campaigns below!
Run. Think. Shoot. Live.
Available: On the RTSL Site
Not a single mod recommendation, but rather a community, and one at the heart of Half-Life 2 modding to this day. While big projects like Entropy : Zero 2 are the tips of the iceberg, this is where you’ll find the deepest, purest and coolest ice. RTSL organizes, hosts and distributes a constant, steady drip feed of interesting Half-Life collaboration projects, usually built around themes, challenges or restrictions for their community of mappers and modders, like a Doom-inspired all-action level pack or a set of high-verticality maps where backtracking is part of the fun. I'm hoping to see some of these uploaded to the Steam Workshop soon!
It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Maybe not the most professional and polished productions, but endlessly varied flavors and textures to experience. With around 1600 hosted projects, you’ll have a nearly endless supply of HL2 to dive into here, but for starters, check out the recent TWHL Tower: Source. The latest in a series of Exquisite Corpse collaborations, a creative community patchwork campaign built around a simple concept: The player is storming a Combine-held tower, starting on the bottom floor. Each staircase introduces a new mapper, and often a completely different brand of gameplay. Expect claustrophobic, densely packed encounters and some very creative levels (of wildly varying quality—be warned) as you ascend, including (among other things) a System Shock 2-themed escape room.
SourceWorld (Demo) by Bronco Development
Available: On ModDB
Last, but by no means least is one of HL2’s most mechanically ambitious mods to date, turning the game into a fully procedurally generated dungeon crawl. Set long after the Combine have been driven from Earth, you’re an unfortunate agent trying to pay off a massive debt by running smash-and-grab raids on parallel dimensions. It’s classic Half-Life 2 combat, but with escalating stakes. There’s even a little bit of Hades in here, with a story that unfolds over the course of multiple runs, with more equipment and even a persistent character skill tree giving you long-term progression options.
The combat has been re-tuned somewhat to make even overly familiar threats menacing again. Don’t go underestimating the zombies, as they’re faster and more aggressive than you remember. Even if the current version of the mod is just the demo (featuring a limited range of map tile-sets and story events in the lab), it’s an astounding technological feat, and hints at Half-Life 2 still having some real life in it as a modding platform even as we hurtle into the very futuristic-sounding year of 2025. Here’s hoping for a bit more verticality in the maps come the final release, though.
While Half-Life 2’s modding scene may not be buzzing with energy, it’s still producing some interesting and surprising projects. With SourceWorld pushing the engine to its limits (it was REALLY not built for procedural generation and I dare not peek at the nightmare spaghetti-code underpinning it all), perhaps this is the beginning of a grand resurgence, combined with the launch of Workshop support and expanded map size limit.
Will we meet back here in another decade? Probably not, unless the editors lock me in the PC Gamer basement. But the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference.
