The long-awaited Half-Life 2 VR mod will be released in September after five years of hard work and a period of “development hell”. The Source VR Mod Team created it. This VR version of Half-Life 2 is similar to Half-Life: Alyx. You can go toe-to-toe in VR with the masked police officers of an alien state, just like you would be there. Motion sickness sufferers, you have my best wishes for your patience with the long vehicle sections.
A trailer has the inherent disadvantage of only showing the best cuts. However, it is surprisingly beautiful for a project that was “almost abandoned” at one point. If I had known better, I would have thought I saw a VR version of the Valve classic. It may be all smoke and mirrors. The modders claim the “overwhelmingly positive feedback inspired them” they received in private testing to make the VR-based version of the Valve classic playable.
Anyone with Half-Life 2 installed and a SteamVR-compatible headset can play the mod free. It has been tested on the Valve Index headsets, Oculus Quest, HTC Vive and Pimax VR headsets by its creators. However, it should work on any SteamVR-compatible device. The creators are still waiting on approval from Valve before it can be released on Steam. If you want to enjoy the game as soon as possible, you may need to install a standalone version.
You can’t run this thing with a headset alone. To play it, you will need to connect to a computer. Although the Oculus Quest2 is theoretically powerful enough to run this mod, there is no legal way to make it work.
According to the creators, this project is not “ever truly completed”. This beta is still open to all. However, they have plans to bring Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 to VR. After HL2 VR is released and the initial bugs have been fixed, they will “slowly shift our attention to episodes” and bring them to you with a set of goggles. I think having two hands may make it harder to solve the main challenge in the second episode, which is ferrying Gnomechompski between the different ends of the game. But I guess I don’t consider myself a skilled VR modder.
