Half-Life 2 News

Half-Life 2 RTX mod brings ray tracing and DLSS to another Valve classic

Nvidia are making an early start on their Gamescom announcements, which include the reveal of Half-Life 2 RTX. This incoming mod for the seminal 2004 FPS will, in the style of Portal with RTX, rejig the original game with modern technical goodies like ray tracing, updated environmental details, and Nvidia Reflex support. DLSS will also be on hand to absorb the inevitably mahoosive performance hit from bouncing all those rays around, and that includes DLSS 3, provided you have a compatible graphics card.

It’s being developed by a collective of experienced HL2 modders, Orbifold Studios, without direct input from Valve. No release date yet, as Half-Life 2 RTX – or to use its full name, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project – is still in the early stages. There is a teaser trailer, though.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are already pretty frightening. In the original Valve classic, it's the subaquatic ichthyosaur that seriously brings the scares, with that buggy movement and the way it glitches into the camera. Half-Life 2 meanwhile could easily feature among the best horror games of the last 20 years. The fast zombies. The black headcrabs. That part in HL2 Episode Two where you're crawling through the Antlion nest. Yeesh. But now the adventures of Gordon Freeman have gotten even more terrifying, with a new Half-Life horror experience where you play as a Combine researcher, exploring the ruins of Black Mesa.

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Half-Life 2 mod lets you finally experience the game as it was meant to be played: in Lego form

Great news, friends, dedicated modders have finally restored Half-Life 2 to Valve's original vision. Freed from the fetters of 2004-era hardware, we can at last experience the genre-defining FPS classic as the good Lord intended: with every character replaced by a profoundly unlicensed Lego substitute...
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Half-Life 2 mod turns the PC classic into the greatest Lego video game never made

In the almost 20 years since Half-Life 2 refined what first-person shooters could be, it’s been modded into just about every form you can imagine. From complete virtual reality conversions and real-time strategy games to fan-made remasters impressive enough to earn a thumb-up from Valve, there seems to be no limit to what Half-Life has been, is and could be.

Half-Life 2 is one of the all-time defining FPS games. Released in 2004, and launching the Valve renaissance that also birthed Portal and Left 4 Dead, the legacy of HL2 is just as strong today, thanks to fan remasters, VR projects, and myriad Half-Life mods. But this one might just take the Black Mesa transit system ticket - Lego Half-Life 2 turns every character in the iconic shooter, from Gordon Freeman to Alyx Vance and the G-Man, into tiny, blocky Lego figurines. If you're tired of waiting for Half-Life 3, and want to imagine an alternate universe where, alongside Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Half-Life also got the Lego tie-in treatment, you should head over to Steam right now.