Featured Image Credit: The Phoenix Project Software SVG
Topics: Half Life, Valve, Steam, Free Games, Mods
Topics: Half Life, Valve, Steam, Free Games, Mods
The Half-Life series has been out in the cold for a while now and so we're having to return to the older releases to get our fix of Valve's brilliant series.
Deciding whether you enjoy the first or second game more is very much dealer's choice at this point, with both doing a sterling job of representing everything that the series is about and leaving fans desperate for a third mainline release that's seemingly never going to arrive.
The rumours about a potential third game have definitely grown louder in recent months we still have not received any tangible evidence from the developer that it's even working on the thing, let alone that it's going to arrive in our hands anytime soon.
As such, you might be on the lookout for a way to get some Half-Life goodness into your veins and Steam is currently giving away two new releases which actually started life as mods for the original release.
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As first reported by ComicBook, Half-Life Legacy and Half-Life Arena are both now available to download for free as standalone versions, and both have gone down a treat with existing fans.
As the name may suggest, Half-Life Arena is a significant revamp of the Deathmatch mode of the first game from developer Dark Vector. It turns the multiplayer mode into a smaller scale version, but is considerably more intense with additional maps, new weapons, bot support, and quality-of-life features that draw inspiration from the head-to-head mode of the PS2 version of the game.
Half-Life Legacy is perhaps even more exciting than that, with developer The Phoenix Project Software SVG providing what they describe as the “ultimate restoration” of the first game, with full compatibility with the HL25 engine.
That includes a ton of bug fixes and other cool changes, including the addition of Steam Achievements, as well as the removal of the bunnyhop speed-cap, HD HUD scaling, dynamic lighting and even an autojump option.
It makes the whole game a lot more playable in 2026 and it’s going down an absolute treat with fans, as the game currently sits on a 90% approval rating at the time of writing.
As mentioned earlier, both are available to download right now at absolutely no cost to the user, and you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting them to run, given their recent release and the aims of the developers.
Outside of that, we’ll just have to hope that Valve has a big treat waiting for us in 2026, though I’m aware that hope is increasingly unlikely with each passing year.