Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Older and more spiteful readers may immediately be thinking “but Meer already wrote about the RTS mod for Half-Life 2 months ago. Let’s burn his house down and tell his mum that he’s rubbish.” It’s true. I did. But! Stow those Molotovs, for I thought it well worth checking back in with HL2 Wars, what with the last version I squinted at being little more than a proof of concept.

Its development’s been ongoing, and now, three of four iterations down the line, it’s really starting to come together. V0.5 was released a couple of weeks back, and saw a shift to The Orange Box evolution of the Source engine – making for ultra-pretty. It’s still very early days for the mod, but if you’re any sort of Half-Life 2ophile, you really should go look-see.
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Really, saying Gordon Freeman toppled the Combine is like saying Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr won the war in the Pacific. Tibbets had the Enola Gay and the first Atomic bomb – Freeman had the HEV suit and the Gravity Gun. Of course he was going to win – but you can’t discount the guys who fought hard to get him to the right place at the right time.

Half-Life 2 Wars pays tribute to all those brave men and women who held off the Combine long enough for Freeman to break into Citadel 17 and randomly chuck some energy orbs at the walls. Or tribute to all those brave, er, mentally-enslaved Combine Soldiers who butchered half of humanity at the behest of a sinister alien power, depending on who you play as. Read the rest of this entry »