15 Essential Half-Life 2 Mods You MUST Play
Try these brilliant mods and breathe new life into an aging classic.
Since its release in 2006, Half-Life 2 has been consistently voted as one of the greatest games of all time, as Valve's ambitious world-building, storytelling nous and expertly paced action has wowed gamers all over the world.
The powerful and versatile Source engine plays an important part in the success of Half-Life 2. It's capable of producing stunning vistas, detailed character models and animations, jaw-dropping reflections and incorporates a revolutionary and incredibly realistic physics model.
Much like its iconic predecessor, Half-Life 2 inspired countless players and developers to create their own modifications and conversions using Valve's freely available, open-source development tools. Some of these mods have even become fully realised retail games.
Even after more than a decade, the pursuit of modding Half-Life 2 has lost little of its momentum. New mods and updates are still released regularly and there are now well over a thousand mods available for download.
To help you decide which ones to play, here are 15 of the very best Half-Life 2 mods available today.
15. Black Mesa
After finishing Half-Life 2, Valve updated some of their older titles with the shiny new Source engine. One such project, Half-Life: Source, was little more than a spit and polish job, leaving fans underwhelmed.
Inspired by Valve's lacklustre release, the Crowbar Collective was formed by a group of fans. Their mission? To build Black Mesa, a fully modernised version of Half-Life, using the Source engine.
Black Mesa is an incredibly ambitious mod project. It's a complete rebuild of the classic original with fantastic visuals, updated dialogue and a pounding soundtrack. After a tonne of hard work and significant delays, it was finally released in 2012 (albeit without Xen).
The team's effort didn't go unnoticed either and they were ultimately rewarded by Valve greenlighting a full retail release, available for purchase on Steam. With the missing Xen chapters now available, there's never been a better time to give Black Mesa a try.