A new trailer shows off an impressive total conversion for Valve’s first-person classic Half-Life 2 that transforms the acclaimed shooter into a Resident Evil-style survival horror game complete with inventory management and static cameras. Valve’s acclaimed game has proven to be a popular title with modders over the years, with one creator recently even designing a mod that turns Half-Life 2 into a Doom 2016-style shooter.
Originally released for PC in 2004, Half-Life 2 was the long-awaited follow-up to Valve’s groundbreaking 1998 shooter Half-Life. Built using Valve’s powerful new Source engine, which allowed for drastically larger levels than the original title and featured some of the most realistic facial animation available in games at the time, Half-Life 2 was a hit with gamers and critics and helped turn Valve’s fledgling online storefront, Steam, into the juggernaut it is today. The game was followed by two episodic sequels that continued the story of Half-Life 2, with a planned Half-Life 2: Episode 3 failing to make it out of development and leaving players without a resolution to the story.
Abandoning the dystopian trapping of City 17 and protagonist Gordon Freeman, an intriguing new mod for Half-Life 2 turns the shooter into a 90s-style survival horror game. The release trailer for the total conversion mod, titled Lost and Damned, shows off numerous gameplay features that will be instantly familiar to fans of classic survival horror games. From static cameras that force players to explore the environment from a third-person perspective to an inventory management screen that would look right at home in the first Resident Evil game, the impressive mod by creator SellFace looks to recreate all the trappings of early survival horror games. Click here to see the mod on ModDB.
Developed over the course of five months, Lost and Damned is now available to download for free on ModDB. With Valve itself rarely releasing games these days, this unique mod could give gamers a good reason to re-install their copy of Half-Life 2. SellFace isn’t the only modder to use the Source engine to give Half-Life 2 a decidedly more horror-themed facelift, though. Another talented modder, disappointed after learning of a Half-Life horror spin-off that never saw the light of day, recently released a Half-Life 2 mod based on Arkane Studios’ canceled Ravenholm game.
While fans of theoretical-physicist-turned-action-hero Gordan Freeman may never see the silent protagonist’s storyline get the conclusion they’ve been hoping for, at least talented gamers are still finding new ways to breathe new life into Half-Life 2 by creating unique mods for the title. And even if players won’t get to step into the shoes of the series’ bespectacled hero in this mod, at least they’ll still get the catharsis of bashing headcrabs with a crowbar.
Half-Life 2 launched in 2004 and is available on PC, Mac OS X, Linux, PS3, Xbox, and Xbox 360.