I was 12 when I found out there was more Half-Life I’d yet to play as a child. At that point, I’d been waiting five years for a conclusion to Episode 2’s cliffhanger. Little did I know I’d still be waiting 11 years later for any sort of actual closure.
The prospect of another game to try out with a completely fresh perspective was the most excited I’d ever been about a ‘new’ game, unearthing more of Black Mesa while seeing the fallout through a perspective I’d always been curious about. Outside of mods, that hadn’t been possible, so to stumble upon an entire game was like being pulled out of the Citadel wreckage by Dog to see a friendly face when I thought all was lost.
Now, the community is inviting so many more to live that experience, diving into a spin-off that got far less fanfare than the original to break the all-time player peak of 620.
Gearbox, best known these days for Borderlands, actually got its start with Half-Life. It developed the PS2 port of the original, as well as spin-offs Opposing Force and Blue Shift, the latter of which introduced fan-favourite character Barney Calhoun. They’re not as well-loved as the mainline games, but that’s true of most spin-offs—they’re still good Half-Life. Opposing Force puts you into the shoes of a military grunt called Adrian Shephard as part of the HECU’s operation of ‘silencing’ all witnesses while fending off the interdimensional alien invasion.
It’s one part Full Metal Jacket, one part The Thing, and bizarrely, one part Little Shop of Horrors. Trust me, you’ll see if you try it. You start in a rigorous boot camp being belittled by a sergeant, a far cry from the holographic monotone instructor of the HEV training course. After that, you’re sent to Black Mesa in the midst of the attack, watching from above as alien UFOs blow the surface to hell. But you’re not blindly following orders like the gung-ho macho men that Gordon Freeman meets. Rather than massacring every scientist you come across, you need their help to get through the facility to thwart a second alien invasion.
It’s a breezy game that you can bash out in a day if you’ve got the time. On average, it takes five-to-six hours to beat, but if you’ve played the original Half-Life, you’ll no doubt get through it even faster than that. What’s more, it’s only £3.99 on Steam, so you’re hardly breaking the bank. If you choose to buy it and get stuck in, the Half-Life community will be right there with you on August 13 at 3 pm BST, even diving into the multiplayer mode after. That'll be less lonely than the abandoned, flickering corridors of an underground labyrinth under siege.
Opposing Force is an important part of gaming history. Both it and Blue Shift iterated on Half-Life to expand its world and tell new stories, further pushing the envelope for FPS games, showing that they don’t all have to be mindless dungeon-delving shooters with no plot beyond demons wanting to kill you, as fun as that might be. But going further than its nurturing of the seed Half-Life planted in the FPS soil, it gave life to Gearbox, leading to the also-iconic Duke Nukem and Borderlands games, the latter being one of the most well-known shooters of today. It’s even getting a movie.
If you love FPS games, love Borderlands, or love Half-Life, Opposing Force is an integral part of piecing together that legacy to truly understand the full picture of the genre’s history. It might be sillier than Half-Life with evil plant monsters and donut-hoarding security guards, but I wouldn’t want anything less from the brains behind Claptrap.