Steam drops massive free download for long-awaited remake

It took 20 years to get to this point, but the remake of your dreams is finally here; the demo for Half-Life 2 RTX is finally available on Steam.

Alright, I’m sure you have lots of questions so I’m gonna run through the obvious ones fast.

Firstly, did Valve make this? No.

This is a free “DLC” for Half-Life 2 from the developer and publisher Orbifold Studios, who describe themselves as “a collective of developers who love Half-Life, formed by the teams behind Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux.”

However, the team has stated that Valve did offer their input during Half-Life 2 RTX’s development. They may have not directly worked on it but they did, assumedly, give some advice.

Ok so, what is Half-Life 2 RTX exactly? It’s basically Half-Life 2 with a modern coat of paint. Think of it like a really, really upmarket HD texture mod that adds “full ray tracing, remastered assets, and DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation”.

The “DLC” (still not sure if that’s the right phrase, but that’s what the devs are calling it) was produced in collaboration with NVIDIA and is free to download on Steam for anyone who owns Half-Life 2.

Sounds great, so, why does it currently have a “Mixed” rating on Steam, with only 59% of the reviews being positive?

Well, some of the reviewers are mad that it appears to be “a marketing vehicle for NVIDIA's own hardware”, but others are just criticising it for performance-related issues.

“I cannot in good conscience recommend this,” writes user New Order.

“It's a good idea to try and revamp HL2's graphics (not like it needs to anyway) but not with this substandard optimization, it feels like it was only made for you to go buy the latest greatest Nvidia GPU.”

“The amount of graphical glitches, ghosting, noise and artifacts is insane,” writes another user.

“Especially combined with the terrible increase in input latency using frame gen, it makes it unplayable. I have tried all DLSS models, all the different settings. This is pure AI slop and this is what gaming has become in 2025.”

Still, it is free so, if you own Half-Life 2 anyway, the only thing that’s really stopping you from forming your own opinion on this one is the 50 GB download size.

Here’s hoping some patches to fix these issues are in the works regardless.