So you say that the city’s been overrun with zombies and creatures from another universe, and there’s hardly anyone living in sight? I’m assuming that the chance of survival is slim to none, right? Sounds like a challenge.

1187: Episode 1, which for some reason I keep typing 1887 (probably a result of my subconscious wanting of a decent steampunk shooter),  is supposed to be a episodic shooter set in the same universe as Half-Life 2, although set in what I assume to be the Netherlands, due to the constant mention of Amsterdam.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of 1187. It’s pretty much a straight-forward Half-Life 2-esque  shooter. This is where it succeeds. Where it fails is where it actually tries to do things differently from HL2.

What 1187 manages to succeed at, it succeeds with flying colors. The level design is fantastic in most places, especially the sewers and the apartment building at the beginning. The only niggling issue with the level design (which could have easily been my own fault) was the one time when I got trapped underneath a door, at which point I was promptly electrocuted to death.  Other than that, it’s a pretty convincing representation of a small town. The levels aren’t obviously designed to make it easy for you to hide and take cover; a lot of the maps are wide-open streets and sewers that prevent you from finding a good hidey-hole. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly frustrating, especially during chapter seven. My word, chapter seven. I have never thrown up my hands that many times, due to me dying too much on chapter seven.

Which brings me to my next point: the AI. You have an AI partner, John, that follows you around and occasionally blasts monsters with a shotgun, which he “found in his butt”. Stay classy, John. In the dreaded hell-pit of chapter seven, you’re tasked with shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher found conveniently lying around. I ducked into a garage with John in tow, hoping to hide for a bit from the one thousand, one hundred and eighty seven soldiers wanting to kill me and only me. John then decided to glue himself to a wall and not move for anything until I had removed that helicopter from that plane of existence.

This includes when enemy soldiers poured into the garage, killing everything except John, who ignored and was ignored back. When I ventured out into the deadly streets, John remained in the garage with his back to the wall while I was turned into silent protagonist  confetti.

It would have been fine, seeing as John, though a step in the right direction for AI companions, was almost utterly useless in combat. He still shot the enemies, but I was ending up shooting them so much faster that at the end of the battles I had killed the vast majority of the enemies. It also would have been fine if I could have taken more damage, since John was nigh-invulnerable. I can see the reasoning behind this: instead of being a space marine or a suited lab technician I was merely some smuck off the street hoping to pave my way in a world gone mad. It still irked me that John, self-professed as “not handy in a fight” would be able to take several magazines in the face, both by enemies and myself without so much as shrugging.

It’s not bad, it’s just incredibly hard–but an artificial hardness. Zombies take up to four shotgun blasts in the face, while vortigaunts take up to six. Ammo is pretty scarce, so you have to juggle between running for your life and defending yourself, because melee is next to useless against vortigaunts and soldiers. But the problem is that it’s so heavily scripted that you often have to clear a room of its enemies before you can progress. You shoot everyone, John says something worldly and philosophical and the door can open to the next room. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a kind of monotony that is only slightly alleviated once you get out of the sewers.

Back to the graphics. The graphics themselves, stemming out of the level design is quite nice. The walls of the sewers look appropriately slimy, the guns are well designed enough and the plethora of custom models make the game seem unique. But here comes the nitpick train, and its stop is the first-person viewmodel animations. I’ve only occasionally had a game make me feel queasy after playing it, and the normal cause of nausea is motion blur. In 1187′s case, it’s the viewmodels. Running with a gun out is enough to make me feel sick, as the protagonist flails it around like he’s having a spasm attack. The knife attack animation is one of the prime culprits in this: hit something with it, and the entire screen gives a sickening lurch.

Also, the flashlight sometimes refuses to turn on, forcing me to flail around in near-pitch darkness every once in a while.

Now, some might interpret my nitpicking as evidence that I disliked 1187. I didn’t. It was fun; not a particularly polished experience but fun nonetheless. Aside from some rather baffling design decisions, the end product was fun. It’s decent at best, mediocre at its worst.

You can download 1187 Episode 1 in this corner of the internets. It’s rather hefty at 1.2GB, and you’ll need Episode 2 to play it.

A nice big feature for you! It’s been a while since we heard anything from modders Cracked Glass and their Source project Tension. Set in a sci-fi dystopia in a future of global warming and cities half underwater, the standout gameplay mechanic is the way players can fling themselves from building to building with a versatile grappling hook.

The early footage promised the Bionic Commando remake done right, and when we pointed out to Cracked Glass we were very excited about what they were doing, they offered to do an interview with us if we wanted. It’s taken a little longer than everyone expected – the team having hit a bit of a rough spot – but from the sounds of this they’re ready to forge ahead once again. Fingers crossed.

UserCreated: Could you tell us exactly who your team members are?

Alex Soustek, Cracked Glass: Well the team just recently went through a little re-structuring. All the same we have myself, the coder and project lead; then we have a close friend of mine Spencer who is doing the music for the game as well as story composition, and for the longest time Cooper had the entire burden of graphics on his shoulders, but since he recently went away to school he’ll be contributing significantly less. Of course our latest team member Mikkel helps with that by taking the reins of the graphics of our world.

I work primarily on gameplay mechanics and backbone functionality of the game. Spencer works primarily with his MIDI and sits there perfecting an ambience that fits the theme. Cooper now does minor modeling work, but is is responsible for every graphic you see in the early footage. Mikkel goes pretty much insane with models – literally, the rate and quality this guy puts out work is nuts. He has been working for a few weeks now and has about 6 different models prepared with a ton of different skins.

UC: Have Cracked Glass worked on any other significant modding projects before, either individually or as part of a team?

AS: Haha, Cooper and I attempted a modding project like this a few years before and quite simply crashed and burned. Far too ambitious for a first project, and we simply were not up to it yet. Spencer has never worked on a mod before although Mikkel has been known to be pretty active in the modding community lending a hand to quite a few mods/games. So I guess that makes him the most experienced with modding.

UC: Your ModDB page makes it seem as if Tension’s narrative is significant to you, but how significant? Did the mod start as a story idea or a gameplay idea? Did you change the story at any point because of the gameplay, or vice versa?

AS: It actually started eerily close to ‘You know what would be cool? Grappling hooks’. I’m pretty sure the exact sentence was “Dude, how badass would it be if you could swing around a city on grappling hooks?”. So I would definitely have to say the game spawned from a gameplay mechanic – and there have definitely been changes to the story based on gameplay. For instance, water kills you – okay, how do we work that into a story so it’s believable, and other things like that. But as far as gameplay changing for story I’m pretty sure the answer would have to be not yet.

UC: Do you think of Tension as more of a fun experiment or are you trying to do something better than the competition?

AS: The answer would have to be both. It definitely started as an experiment and is still a lot of fun (trust me, development would not continue if it wasn’t) but we found out that we hold ourselves to a very high quality standard and plan to keep that up. Just because we aren’t part of a large company (or paid for that matter) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard. Bionic Commando was almost a nail in our coffin – when we heard about it our hearts dropped. We were like “Oh well, it’s been done. Back to the drawing board”. But upon researching it we realized it was too scripted and not focused on grappling nearly enough, and basically came to the conclusion we could do it better – and if it ended up we couldn’t, where was the harm in trying?

UC: Do you see Tension as more of an open-world game, a linear, scripted adventure, or a mix of both?

AS: Definitely a mix of both, because if it was just a free roam world we’d lose the opportunity to put a lot of design and unique locations in – because quite frankly why would we put that sort of design effort into a part of a level where there’s a chance that the player won’t even experience it? I would say the levels will be sort of an “hourglass” design. Starting free roaming, find your own path and eventually slimming down to a single path which houses a cool combo or puzzle and then widens back out again.

UC: Both open-world and linear games have their pitfalls. Have you thought about how to avoid these problems at all?

AS: The plan is to have a linear story path (e.g. not multiple missions to choose from at once) but different ways to complete each mission. Hope that makes sense. Haha, as far as Bionic Commando goes we can’t really have a boundless world – although by just extending level boundaries I think a new level of roaming will be found by the player.

UC: The Source engine is still a popular choice for modders. Were there any particular reasons you picked it? Have its technical limitations affected anything you wanted to do?

AS: The main reason we picked it had to be because of how well we knew it, on top of its flexibility. It was great for rapid prototyping of gameplay due to the large amount of example code provided. Now the levels – if you were to ask me if they were limited, my answer would have to be a capslocked and resounding OH MY WORD YES! I have never experienced as many issues with level creation as I have seen in Hammer; we have had more bizarre errors and crashes of vrad.exe than I can even count. But we just keep on working at it, although how professional games are developed with this is beyond me.

UC: Can you say anything about the look you’re working on for the game?

AS: Well, the hard part about doing this is not emulating Mirror’s Edge, as it really did have an eye-popping scheme that would be immediately recognizable. Although I think as far as our scheme goes it will use a lot of contrast – not between bland and vibrant, but more like run down/high tech, sort of juxtaposing the grimy with the polished.

UC: What are your plans for long-term replay value?

AS: Originally we talked about both separate courses (released as some sort of DLC as and when we finish them) and the single play maps re-packaged. The single player mode may have a post-level screen scoring you on completeness, and we also plan on implementing collectibles (which are still changing too much to release any details) and hopefully some nice achievements (fastest fall, longest swing, etc.).

UC: An awful lot of promising mods never get off the ground, let alone reach any kind of finished state. You don’t have a release date on ModDB. How do you think the work is going? Do you just believe ‘It’s done when it’s done’, or do you have internal targets you’re trying to meet?

AS: Occasionally we set internal deadlines, and I expect to be doing that a lot more now my workload has gone down so much. But as a whole progress usually comes in bursts, and because of this we are definitely operating under “It’s done when it’s done”. To be quite honest, now it’s on to the graphics and design of the world, because the gameplay is very solid and refined. With the tweaks we get from our beta feedback the gameplay may be close to requiring use of the F-Word (“Final” that is, although it is “f$%#ing awesome” as well).

UC: Thanks for your time, and best of luck with getting Tension finished.

AS: Thank you so much for the support!

You can find the ModDB page for Tension here.

Somehow, this came and went without a post on it, but I believe being three days late on a release is early enough. Maybe the Internet won’t hate me for being late on this. Anyway, DrGonzo said that this looks like an interesting “zombie mod”. Hmm. Personally, I think that anything with zombies in it could be classified as survival horror, which is apparently what this mod is going for.

It seems like most of these so-called “survival horror” games happen to involve zombies in it at some point or another. But from the screenshots, Nightmare House 2 seems to be delightfully monster-less. This means that I can hope that it’s merely a survival horror game that happens to involve zombies in it at some point or another.

Anyway, Nightmare House 2 seems to be a continuation of the Nightmare House story, except this time you wake up in a hospital with a vague memory of the girl from FEAR from the first game. She’ll probably show up later in the game.

Initial impressions seem to be overall positive, so it should be worth a download. I’m downloading it right now, but I probably won’t play it a whole lot. Let’s just say that horror games aren’t exactly my forté, and because of that I’ve only gotten through the first chapter of Dead Space.

If you have a more manly disposition than I do, you can download the mod at its ModDB page.

Everyone still wants to do the parkour, apparently. Or some kind of stylised, colourful urban obstacle course. We’ve had grappling hook racer Tension – no news from them in a while, I must try and follow that up – and now City Freerun, from modder Dosycool. Yes, it’s Mirror’s Edge in Source, there’s no getting away from that, but it looks like it could be a good attempt, and it’s coming along slowly but steadily so far.

The mod is set inside a simulator, apparently, with the surroundings becoming steadily more fully realised as the levels progress, something which does get it a bit closer to having its own identity. Knockoff or not, though, Dosycool has the aesthetic down pretty well. The visuals are hardly as crisp as DICE’s game, but they gain something from being simpler, looking weirdly like a Lego playset or the city as blank canvas in DeBlob.

To be honest, I almost like this more – I always felt Mirror’s Edge’s look was somewhat over-rated, with a lot of it seemingly just random splashes of primary colour all over the place. City Freerun – it’s a working title, don’t worry – is pretty rough around the edges in places but actually more polished in others.

It’s hard to get a handle on how this might play, given the video so far is mostly just running around, but consider me very interested.

You can find the ModDB page for City Freerun here.

Finally! Okay, let’s try this ‘posting about mods’ lark again – how about starting off small? Say with a nice little bit of mapping? Sometimes it can feel a bit self-serving writing something up that merely says ‘Hey, look at this guy! He can… build things! In Hammer! That look great!’ but hey, there’s enough rubbish around that good level design still stands out a mile. Take Biohazard. No, go on, take it. You’ll thank me.

Nothing to do with Resident Evil – this is an action-oriented map pack, it seems, sounding a little like Slums 2 with its terse description, [sic]: ‘You won’t find here much logic puzzles or a good story. My main goal’s to make movie-like battle scenes on pretty nice maps with a slightly stylized colors and awsum HDR’.

Not really anything wrong with someone saying that if he can deliver, and from the look of these early screens, it seems modder Dabu[PL] might just be able to.

Like Slums, it’s still very much a Half-Life 2 mod in that all manner of recognisable assets are immediately present and correct – but where Slums had a dark, grimy, Silent Hill aesthetic going on, Dabu seems to be going for cold and clean with ever so slightly blown-out lighting, a sort of vaguely sixties futurist look (check those two big white buildings, for example). Very impressive stuff, and this is definitely going in my bookmarks. (There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?)

The ModDB page for Biohazard can be found here.

Now isn’t this charming? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people attempt to imply that arcade racers with shooting basically got made because someone wanted ‘Mario Kart, only with weapons’, and Supercars II is… well, Mario Kart with weapons, basically. In Half-Life 2.

Okay, let’s have the correct description this time, now it’s been pointed out I should be registered legally blind. It’s a remake of a game which originally appeared on the Commodore Amiga some years back, a top down racer in the grand tradition of Super Sprint – see, I do know what I’m talking about, honest – where you drove your fancy ve-hickle contraptions round and round a track and shot repeatedly at each other.

It’s… I really don’t mean this to sound patronising, so sorry if it comes across this way! But the way it’s cheerfully slapped together any old how genuinely feels like part of its charm, from the Mode 7 graphics to the Outrun-esque splash screen to the lack of any collisions to the way the weapons are literally Half-Life 2 rocket launchers bolted onto the (totally incongruous) car bodies (much like the original box art way back in the day).

It’s been going a while, and the latest improvements involve a comprehensive overhaul of the scoring system, which supposedly frees up lots more resources for better performance overall. You can take a look at the current trailer, like so:

and dream of someone sticking that fat little plumber in there, so you can treat him to the business end of a heat-seeking missile. This is how we do it outside the Mushroom Kingdom! Snarl.

The ModDB page for Supercars II can be found here.

Ooo. Ooooo. It’s only a quickie, but… I couldn’t pass this one up. I mean, it’s artistic and stuff. Tail has just popped up on ModDB, advertised as ‘a short, surreal adventure game’ focusing on moral choices and curious events, and looking like something Tale of Tales (note to self: stop saying tail/tale so much) might dream up over an evening’s drunken brainstorming.

There’s nothing there apart from the idea and a couple of early screens, so no telling whether this will get off the ground, but it’s the kind of thing I’d dearly love to see more of. Nice, strong art design and colour palette, and a genuinely otherworldly tone games simply don’t employ often enough. Hopefully short isn’t that short, but then again, the less modder kfhammond has to do, the better the chances are this gets finished. I am cautiously optimistic.

The ModDB page for Tail is here.

Facepalm! I should really start checking more places than just ModDB and a couple of forums. I mean, I do, but… seems one of the projects I had my eye on has all manner of updates on its own website, and I missed them, because I am a lazy, lazy man. That stops now! Ivan’s Secrets is a singleplayer Source engine mod which I think we can file under ‘I do hope this gets finished’, given I’ve just seen a lot more evidence that would mean fun times.

The plot revolves around the player travelling to a remote location on the trail of a MacGuffin, and discovering general spooky goings-on, but this is far more S.T.A.L.K.E.R. than lazy Aliens knockoff. It’s largely set in a real place, a tiny island in the Aral Sea called Kantubek which was apparently somewhere the former USSR used to test chemical weapons (anthrax, mostly). Long since abandoned, as if that wasn’t eerie enough, in Ivan’s Secrets the Aral Sea has dried up so the ghost town sits in the middle of an empty desert.

The team appear to be ambling along on a fairly casual basis, which to be blunt is yet another reason to worry this will never see the light of day. But they’ve certainly turned out a lot of work, and those screens! They’re a little rough around the edges, but it’s still hugely atmospheric stuff GSC or 4A Games could be proud to have been responsible for. The comparison shots between in-game and real life locations are also very impressive.

Definitely keeping an eye on this one. Note to the ModDB kiddies plotting endless variations on psychotic assassins set loose in a world gone mad; this is how you do creepy, not buckets of gore everywhere without context or emotional weight. Fingers crossed, as I seem to say so often.

You can find the ModDB page for Ivan’s Secrets here.

Or you can visit their website – with a few more screens and more recent progress updates – here.

And after I was very rude about the number of mods there are featuring psychotic assassins set loose in a world gone mad only two posts ago, here’s Perfection, which features a… mentally disturbed hitman roaming free in London town (which is fairly mad at the best of times). God, I’m a hypocrite. Before I leap off the nearest tall building in shame, let me take the time to explain this is a mod from developers N104, a group of students at Staffordshire university, who’ve decided to expand what was originally a piece of coursework into a full-blown project. Scouting locations, spying on your targets from afar, figuring out the best way to make the kill, trying to ignore the voices in your head; it’s all here. Well, perhaps not that last bit.

It looks remarkably polished, with the Source engine coaxed into producing a startlingly detailed recreation of the Big Smoke, at least as far as general details go. No question this team have a fair amount of talent, though I do still have some misgivings. It has to be said this is looking uncomfortably like Hitman meets The Getaway with a sprinkling of psychosis thrown in for no real reason, which is all very well, but still a tad… derivative? On top of that, while some of the details are fantastic, there aren’t that many of them. Obviously these are works in progress, but it’s not making for a particularly convincing living city. Source can do an awful lot, but it’s got some definite limitations.

Still, urban grime rather than Hitman’s flashy international jet-setting does have its attractions, and again, this is a very professional looking piece of work, even relatively early on. I hope they flesh out the concept so it’s a little more than ‘He’s an assassin! And he’s a nutter!‘ but it’s definitely one to watch either way.

You can find Perfection’s page on ModDB here.

So, Slums 2, then. Grimdark mod is grimdark, basically. It’s been around for a little while, but the extended version was recently released. It’s a collection of linked singleplayer Half-Life 2 maps put together by just two guys, modders Diolator and IceFox, it’s inspired by Silent Hill, Condemned and F.E.A.R., and it promises to be ‘highly detailed, dark and scary. Nothing innovative in gameplay, but still good regular shooter. Try it and see yourself!’ So I did.

I thought I’d go with a fairly cut and dried intro since this is largely back-to-basics modding, really. No narrative or over-riding theme beyond an aura of dread; dim (very dim) lighting, fog, blood everywhere and boo-scares. Diolator and IceFox seem to have cranked up the difficulty, even on default settings – I may have been imagining it but everything seemed to hit much, much harder. There’s no crosshair, and no iron sights aiming, so you’re frantically sweeping everywhere room by room – and yes, forget to reload before a firefight and you’re done for. It’s largely shotguns at dawn, with some pistol and SMG ammo thrown in every now and then, the odd grenade and a few magnum rounds – though without aiming this gun is essentially a last resort at best.

It’s Combine troops and regular zombies for the most part, with the odd surprise thrown in. You move through underground sewer levels, up through crumbling apartment blocks, out into the streets, back below ground again and so on. The transitions are pretty well done – there’s pretty much no explanation of what you’re doing or any signposting beyond a couple of messages along the lines of ‘You throw the switch, and a door opens in the distance’, but each of the nine maps flows relatively naturally into the next.

So does it work? Is it a good regular shooter, dark and scary? Well… sometimes. It’s a good map pack, for a fair bit of the running time. There aren’t more than a few new textures and the music is pilfered from Quake 3 and Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines, but the lighting, the colour balance and the sound design (such as it is) do manage to create a fairly intimidating atmosphere. There are moments when Slums 2 is terrific. You’re still aware you’re playing a map pack, sure, but the visceral nature of the combat along with the unrelenting urban decay has you whimpering quietly inside, thinking ‘I wanna go hooome!‘.

But it has problems. Worst are some nasty, nasty difficulty spikes around the fourth and fifth maps; too many modders basically seem to believe if they can walk Valve’s game on Hard, then why bother making levels they don’t find taxing? Diolator and IceFox don’t so much fall into this trap as leap in head first; in particular I respectfully suggest black headcrab zombie plus a room full of poison gas plus a boarded-up exit plus double helpings of fast headcrabs is going a little too far, to say nothing of trying to dodge the sniper in the next level when the first charming setpiece meant I had no bullets left and only a sliver of health.

There seemed to be some problems with the AI’s pathfinding, too, where several times they can clearly be seen standing around doing nothing until you’re right on top of them. And the open areas caused the odd graphical hiccup – I’ll happily admit I don’t have a very well optimised PC, but it’s a quad core that can handle most Source games with no issues at all, so I have to wonder whether Slums’ maps have been tweaked as much as they could be.

Still, it was entertaining enough to keep me struggling through to the end. Slums 2 doesn’t convince me these two should be snapped up by a developer just yet, but when a door swings open within earshot, running footsteps draw closer, the music kicks in and Combine flood the room their mod still has enough emotional punch to be hugely gratifying. Monolith have talked about how their aim with Condemned was to repeatedly almost kill off the player, to keep them hanging on by a thread, and for all its faults Slums 2 does exert that kind of compulsion, the feeling you’re not dead just yet, that if you can keep going a little longer you’ll have come out on top.

It’s far from perfect, but if you want to root around for some quick and dirty, satisfyingly brutal gunplay in a gloomy, netherworld City 17, then by all means head over to ModDB and give Slums 2 Extended a shot.

Slums 2 Extended’s page on ModDB can be found here.

The team behind Tales of the Galactopticon: The Search for the Argemitis Galacticus, a name where I had to switch tabs about five times to make sure I was geting the name right, has just released a rather meaty news update with videos, pictures and music, oh my! It contains a rather healthy amount of space aliens wielding space Glocks shooting the Space Mafia in their space faces. In Galactopticon (there is no way I’m going to keep writing the entire title over and over again) you play an alien pirate–nay, a space pirate–searching for some lost mysterious space artifact. In space.

The mod itself seems to be your fairly average run-n-gun Half-Life 2 fare, though it shows some promise with its RPG-style conversations and relatively odd modelling style. Also, I’m getting a large Hitchhiker’s Guide vibe (disregarding the fact that there is a Hitchhiker’s Guide quote on the Moddb page) that should give the mod about eight hundred bonus points, because we know that space games would be unfortunate without being ultra-serious or comedic. The Galactopticon team seems like they’re focusing more on the latter.

You can find more information on Galactopticon on their Moddb Page.

The word “space” was used in this article 8 times. I have done better than expected.

Anyone interested in modding any PC game should be more than familiar with the frustration that comes with seeing so many projects shoot for the moon and get ultimately nowhere. Sometimes it feels as if any half-decent Half-Life 2 map that turns up is cause for yelling ‘Valve need to hire this guy!’. Michael Anderson’s Outpost 16 didn’t tempt Valve to pick him up, but apparently iD liked what they saw enough to offer him a job – were the Texans over-reacting?

Outpost 16 definitely feels like a rarity as Half-Life 2 mods go solely by virtue of being complete, or at least playable. The fact it’s an ambitious, polished single-player level on top of that invites us armchair critics to go easy on it, and raises the nagging suspicion this is something, well, just okay getting a free ride. Worry not; though it’s not quite as professional as it could be, and suffers from a few obvious flaws, it’s still an entertaining fifteen or twenty minutes which does suggest iD were wise to snap up designer Michael Anderson not long after it was released.

It starts off nice and simple – no elaborate fanfiction here, just Gordon Freeman and Alyx sent to take out the titular Combine stronghold, with some backup on the way. Yes, Alyx Vance – and inside thirty seconds Anderson’s hit us with his strongest hook. She talks. No, it’s not original voice actress Merle Dandridge… though it really, really sounds like her. All credit to Yasmin Joyner, who puts a great deal of life into a fairly average script.

Average as in quick, Gordon; run, Gordon; over there, Gordon; oh shit, Gordon – though while the level never really gets any more complicated than ‘Shoot those guys. Over there. You know the ones’, to be fair to Anderson, he’s perfectly forthcoming about how Outpost 16 was intended as a calling card from the start. The focus is first and foremost on the action, with the level meant to serve as the best bits of what was originally going to be a much longer campaign.

This does mean it’s a mixed bag, however. Anderson’s got undeniable talent – he interned at Infinity Ward before they imploded post-Modern Warfare 2 – but his level’s fairly obviously rushed. It is just attack, attack, attack, by and large, and there are just three main sections. The opening cutscene is impressive, with a good sense of scale watching the action in another bombed-out cityscape from on high, but the subsequent flight down the side of the building as the Combine let rip is too reliant on narrow ledges taken at speed, and the effects are noticeably low-poly.

The parliament building – which is both the final section and the big design showpiece – is eyecatching, but a little shoddy. The custom textures impress, but the fine detail’s not quite there. The firefight that follows is fun, but largely spray and pray with none of, say, Minerva’s furious, intensely tactical combat.

But it is compelling stuff all the same. That speech, some well-chosen music tracks (particularly for the final boss fight) and a good sense of pacing help Outpost 16 build on its creator’s promising technical chops. It could have done with some more work, but when Anderson openly admits you’re getting the map as is it’s hard to fault him too much. Congratulations are very much due; short but sweet, and on the strength of Outpost 16 iD have just made a fairly smart investment.

The ModDB entry where you can download Outpost 16 is here.

Yasmin Joyner’s web page (she’s an artist and animator by trade) is here.

Mr. Anderson’s web page with his portfolio is here. Check it out. Even though iD got to him first.

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.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 mod Zombie Escape emerged somewhat out of nowhere last Thursday. A series of vignettes involving tales of zombie escapeage, it’s not exactly been the most hype-laden release in recent modding history. Any good, though? Read on to find out…

No, it’s not great, really. I mean that in the nicest possible way, though. Zombie Escape is never particularly enjoyable, but you can almost see the purpose it’s serving: a project through which its creator has been learning the ropes of development. It’s the sort of thing I imagine ‘koto000′ will look back on in several years’ time and cringe, but my goodness, everyone has to start somewhere.

So it’s basic, and makes some very basic mistakes. The premise is thus: a series of maps, infested with various types of zombies, from which you must escape. Therein lies the first problem, though, as it’s rarely apparent what it is exactly you’re supposed to be doing. You kind of follow the cues that lead you to the next section, but with no indication of a wider context, and no larger goals to aim for. Curiously, it perhaps reminds me most of an escape the room game, in that you’re only ever fighting towards the most immediate objective: minor progress. Each segment of each map stands in isolation.

There’s some reasonable custom content. An axe, for example, is your first weapon of small-scale destruction. It feels rubbery, though, and fails to squelch and split zombie flesh in the way it should. Ranged weapons exist. But there’s no HUD and, bizarrely, not even a crosshair, so actually trying to fight successfully is a nightmare. There’s never any indication of your health, and aiming accurately is pretty much impossible.

Indeed, it all feels like change for change’s sake – another thing that leads me to think this may be best considered as a learning-the-ropes project. Half-Life 2′s own crowbar would have felt much more effective than the new axe. There’s a reason HL2′s interface was the way it was. Zombie Escape even repurposes content from Portal at one point, setting one section in a sort of makeshift Apeture complex with various art assets from that magnificent puzzle-em-up. In a mod for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, I’m not sure that’s even strictly allowed. It is effectively giving away bits of Portal for free. Edit: it’s fine, apparently.

Levels are entirely linear and give no impression of a wider world beyond their walls. Um, except when you can see out of the game world and into the void at one point. And that’s kind of the overall impression Zombie Escape gives off: that of a singular entity which exists only because of its own construction, yet that construction is too shaky even to hold together properly.

At the same time, I can totally see how the idea of several individual, seemingly unlinked levels could work as the basis for a really interesting single-player mod. You could weave soem sort of story through it that gradually started to link together as each section was completed. You could use it as the basis for exploring themes in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a more conventional, fluid narrative. Maybe koto000 will return with something better in the future. I hope so. In a very real way, this reminds me of a lot of my own early experiments with the Source engine. To be honest, my mapping skills probably haven’t improved a whole load since then…

For now, though, it’s difficult to recommend, and never really holds together.

Download from ModDB. Place the mod folder in your …/steamapps/SourceMods/ folder, reboot Steam, and away you go.

HL2:Ep2 mod Overheid has unveiled a handful of new screenshots. I’ve been vaguely tracking this mod for a while, and while I wasn’t too impressed by what I saw to begin with, each new batch of images has become increasingly pretty.

It’s another City 17 mod, this time following a new recruit in his struggle against the Combine. A pre-release demo was released last month, which I only just noticed and which I’m about to download now. I am useless.