Half-Life: Every Game Ranked Worst To Best

6. Half-Life: Opposing Force

Half life
Valve

After Half-Life revolutionised the FPS genre in 1998, thoughts began to turn to expansions. Gearbox Software were chosen by Valve to produce them as they focused on future projects.

Aiming to preserve the integrity of Half-Life while providing new experiences, Gearbox rose to the challenge and released Half-Life: Opposing Force in 1999. The game follows US marine Adrian Shepherd, his unit tasked with eliminating and covering all trace of the Black Mesa disaster. He soon finds himself combating a deadly alien race they are very unprepared for.

It's a brilliant expansion, one that both delivers heaps of new content and runs alongside the original game. On top of that, it offers a genuinely different kind of experience; with Shepherd being a fully equipped soldier, Opposing Force goes all out with new weapons, enemies and level designs that always keep players guessing.

Whether it was using a barnacle to grapple up to higher areas or mowing down aliens in a claustrophobic set of tunnels, the game was certainly more action-focused than the original title.

As it counts down towards Black Mesa's inevitable destruction, Opposing Force marks itself as one of the best expansion packs for any video game, despite its dated

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A tough but fair writer and critic broadly covering games, movies and just about every type of entertainment media. Spent a good part of the last seven years blogging and more recently, making amateur videos under "The Cainage Critique". You can follow my work on my website https://robc25.wixsite.com/thecainagecritique and my YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCftJ6WcozDaECFfjvORDk3w