Half-Life News

A new, Valve-less Half-Life campaign is out now and puts a completely fresh perspective on the original FPS

Rumors of Half-Life 3 swirl once more. Could this finally be the time when Valve unleashes a new chapter in its iconic series, hailed among the best FPS games ever to this day? The good news is that there is a new Half-Life story that you can play right now, although this one doesn't come from the Steam developer. Instead, the Half-Life: Insecure campaign is a fan-made project that puts a unique perspective on Gordon Freeman's original outing, and it's finally finished and available to download right now.

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Renegade graphics warlock makes Half-Life look like Half-Life 2, then runs it on an ancient laptop, raising a middle finger to poorly optimised PC games

We're in another grim period for poorly optimised PC games, with the last couple of years bringing us a string of power-hungry virtual slideshows such as 2023's Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and, more recently, Borderlands 4. Corpos like Randy Pitchford think we should stop moaning and fork out for a better PC, as playing the best-looking games simply demands a rig capable of lighting a small town...
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Whatever happened to They Hunger: Lost Souls, the sequel to one of Half-Life's best mods?

If you followed the Half-Life modding scene at the turn of the Millennium, you undoubtedly encountered They Hunger. Developed by Black Widow Games and released as a PC Gamer exclusive on demo discs in 2000, They Hunger took the tech and design tenets of Half-Life and transposed them to an all-new zombie horror adventure. Delivering a near-professional grade experience, it's one of the best singleplayer Half-Life mods ever made, a thrilling and often deeply weird survival horror game created at a time when zombies were still relatively novel...
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Ambitious, unofficial Half-Life expansion wraps up a 24-year-old cliffhanger

You think of Half-Life, and you immediately think Valve. It's a series synonymous with Steam and PC gaming as a whole, but it has ventured onto other platforms, too. No, I'm not talking about Alyx (which is still a Steam-only game, despite the fact that you can play it on non-Valve headsets), this is Half-Life: Decay. This DLC for the original game was designed by Randy Pitchford and developed by Gearbox Software for the PlayStation 2 back in 2001. If you ever wanted to learn the fate of Drs. Colette Green and Gina Cross, you'll finally be able to, thanks to a new set of mods.

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Here's a mod that puts Halo's multiplayer into Half-Life, which to me feels like putting tea in your coffee

"What if we recreated this game in that engine?" is a classic modding conceit, up there with "What if Stalker was even more miserable?" and "What if this character had no clothes on?". In fact, I'm surprised it's taken 25 years for someone to stick Halo's multiplayer into Half-Life. It's the sort of harebrained scheme I would have eagerly read about on Planet Half-Life back in 2006...
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