Meanwhile, the story is told through repurposed dialogue, stringing together new conversations that flow surprisingly well. Echoes also learns from Half-Life 2’s level design, gunplay, and enemy placements to create an expansion that feels like the perfect interim romp. This mod offers yet another perspective on the Black Mesa Incident, but ties in plot elements from Half-Life 2 and even Marc Laidlaw’s supposed script for Episode 3. Echoes started off as an experiment with modding tools, but when someone spotted developer James Coburn working on the mod on a train and complimented it, James decided to upload his work to ModDB. It’s as if Valve contracted another set of developers to craft one more take on the Black Mesa Incident, but it’s all from one developer. Their works keep momentum going for the series, and are worth diving into while we wait for the Half-Life 3 release date to never materialise.įrom continuing the story of the original Half-Life to retelling the Black Mesa Incident from entirely new perspectives, here are four essential Half-Life single-player mods.Įchoes feels like an official Half-Life expansion. However, that nearly two-decade-long hiatus left a void that modders have worked tirelessly to fill.

Just a brief 16 years later and Valve did it again, revolutionising VR via Half-Life: Alyx. Valve did it again in 2004 with the sequel, which integrated realistic physics simulations into combat and platforming. There are no cutscenes or dialogue screens, so you’re always experiencing the story from Gordon Freeman’s perspective.

Floating armour icons are replaced with HEV Suits and charge stations, grounding them in the world of Black Mesa.

It boasts a (sort of) seamless world, wide-ranging interactivity, and manages to tell a captivating story in the process.

1998’s Half-Life embodied a lot of that, but it was also one of the first FPS games to bring puzzle-solving and narrative to the mix. At the time, the genre was mostly about picking up guns, mowing down bad guys, and getting the best score possible. The FPS genre blossomed into life like a bloodstained violet in the faint heat of spring when id Software released Wolfenstein 3D.

Half life mods