Unmissable Mods Month: Research and Development

In the humble beginning you’ll find yourself taking on individual combine soldiers, manipulating the alien Antlions to devour your enemies. By the end you’ll be taking on helicopter gunships, fending off bullets with panels of bulletproof glass, blowing up towers to forge new paths, microwaving explosive materials to open up new areas and building a brilliantly shoddy escape vehicle to carve your way through a headcrab zombie infestation. Research & Development really is an unmissable mod.

It’s well made, smart and endlessly varied, but its great strength lies in giving us a new take on a familiar world. Research and Development takes your weapon away and forces you to wage war with your wits alone. Setting off without a sidearm leaves you feeling naked and vulnerable, but ultimately makes those moments of victory even more satisfying. When you can’t just shoot them in the head to win, the Combine become a much more formidable foe and the environments really start to matter when you’re not just scanning for the next piece of cover.

Sure, at times it’s comically contrived. Precariously suspended cargo crates, dangling live wires, explosive barrels and carefully laid out obstacle courses make for solutions that are occasionally a little too obvious, but this does nothing to lessen the pleasure of setting off an explosive chain reaction to rid a room of enemies. In fact, the most obvious set pieces provide the most memorable moments. The room in which you have to transport an imprisoned mutated headcrab zombie to the next area and unleash it in your foes is one such highlight, the other is my favourite moment, the wonderfully unnecessary room of light puzzles to charge a gravity gun.

This mod does more with Havoc physics than Valve have ever done, squeezing as much puzzling potential as it can from the Source engine, giving us a satisfying and tactile brain-teaser where there once was a shooter. It remains faithful to the Half Life universe but tweaks it to give us an original experience as polished and well designed as any mod you’d care to mention. If you’re looking for more traditional violence then Minerva: Metastasis will serve you well, but for something a bit different, Research and Development provides an unmissable alternative thrill.

Why is it on our list?

Not only one of the best Source mods out there, but one of the best single player mods available.

Get it from

ModDB

Easy to install?

Dead simple. Unzip it, run the installer and make sure it goes into the sourcemods folder. Restart Steam and it’ll appear on your My Games list. You’ll need Episode 2 to run it.