Half-Life fans can now enjoy a brand new mod called Element 64, and it should be well worth your time.
If you’re a PC gamer, shall I say particularly one of a certain age, then you’ve likely been exposed to quite a lot of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods in your time.
The GoldSrc and Source engines are just extremely moddable, which allows for things like custom campaigns and big total conversion mods to thrive on PC. And that’s why we love it.
Now you can add yet another big mod to that list with Half-Life: Element 64, a new fan-made campaign which takes you back to 1998 and offers a new perspective on the Black Mesa Incident.
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Half-Life: Element 64 essentially retells the story of the original 1998 game but revitalises it as a Quake-style boomer shooter.
All of the familiar parts of Half-Life’s intro are cut out here. There’s no long train ride, no drawn-out conversations with scientists, and no Resonance Cascade. Instead, it’s just you, a few guns, and lots of enemies to kill.
Think of it as more of a hypothetical scenario. A “What if id Software made Half-Life in 1995?” kind of situation. All of the story is told off-screen in a wall of text, and the game becomes more a series of short levels in which you need to deal as much damage to enemies as possible.
Even as someone who loves Half-Life and believes it’s flawless, including the combat, I think this mod is a nice alternate take on the original game, and one that I’m happy to recommend for fans of old-school shooters.
Each of the levels available in Half-Life: Element 64 are based on their counterparts in the original game, with the levels tweaked in a way to remove any puzzles or narrative segments, allowing you to explore the levels in a breezier way.
It also appears to be taking content not just from the original Half-Life, but also its two official expansions, Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Opposing Force.
Half-Life: Element 64 is available now as a free demo, with the full release coming at some point in the future.
As a mod that uses official assets created by Valve, it’s very unlikely that developer Dark Vector will charge anything for it. So, keep an eye out for the free full version when it drops in the future.
At the very least, it should be enough to tide us over until Half-Life 3 is announced.
Hopefully, that’ll happen any day now.