Half-Life 2 VR (Mod)

It’s been 18 years since Half-Life 2 released. It was the first game I ever purchased on Steam. I believe I bought it as part of a ‘Silver’ bundle deal. This was in the days when Steam was all green and rather basic compared to the platform as it exists today.

I wrote a review back in 2014 (including the two Episodes) in which I said ‘Half-Life 2 is a fantastic game, one of the best of its genre. It’s tightly paced, brilliantly designed, exciting and engaging to play.’ And now, another 8 years later I’m playing it again – but in VR.

Yes, it’s a VR mod for Half-Life 2 and it’s pretty damn fantastic. I’m genuinely surprised at how good this mod is and that’s why I wanted to cover it on my blog. First of all, Half-Life 2, despite its age, still holds up pretty well from a visual point of view, even in VR. It’s sharp and it’s clean and the character models / animations are still better than some games released today.

It’s quite remarkable how well Half-Life 2 translates into VR. A big part of that is thanks to the updates the mod team have made but, ignoring those, purely from a design perspective in terms of level layouts and scale, HL2 feels surprisingly comfortable within VR. Even the vehicle sections work well although these are, admittedly, the most awkward part of the VR experience, especially if you’re prone to VR related nausea.

It’s important to note that – at the time of writing – this mod isn’t finished and there’s further improvements planned, but even in its current state, this mod is a real blast to play. And what’s really impressive is the range of VR comfort options and gameplay updates that make HL2 feel like an actual VR game.

In fact, I’d say this (free) mod does a better job of converting HL2 to play well in VR, than some (paid) VR conversions – I’m looking at you, Skyrim VR you absolute disgrace. And it’s certainly better than some of the VR ‘support’ I’ve seen for some titles, where it feels like practically no effort was put in to make the VR mode comfortable and enjoyable to play – most recently, Project Wingman.

The weapons have all been converted to work as you’d expect in a VR game. You manually reload, and you can even use (some) weapons either one handed – if you like to spray and pray – or two handed for more stability. Melee with the crowbar works remarkably well too. I’d recommend setting the difficulty to easy because there are sections where the game throws a lot of enemies at you and you’re never going to be as fast in VR as you are with a mouse.

The way they’ve added the UI elements of health and energy onto your glove is neat, as is the weapon selection UI which works a lot like it did in Half-Life: Alyx. Oh, and you can now flip people off in HL2 the way you’ve always wanted to because they also added finger tracking.

The game itself is still great to play with a diverse selection of levels, enemies, weapons, puzzles and action. And now you get to experience it like you’re really there, which isn’t something I ever imagined when HL2 released all those years ago. If you’ve got a VR set then this is a must play.