Prep for Half-Life: Alyx by playing every Half-Life game for free

What’s your favorite?

Intrigued by Half-Life: Alyx but you’re without a single Half-Life game under your belt? Or, seasoned Freeman looking to brush up before Alyx launc🍰hes in👍 two months? Valve has your back either way.

For the next couple of months, every . (You have to click through on each individual game to see the “Play for free!” prompt.) That’s Half-Life, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Source (a remaster of the original), Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (a small tech showcase from 2005 that sampled HDR lighting on the Source engine), Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. All that’s missing is the co-op focused Half-Life: Decay which is only on PlayStation 2.

For my money (which happens to be zero dollars and zero cents in this case), the Gearbox-developed Half-Life: Opposing Force is my favorite game on this list. It’s an expansion to the original where you don’t play as Freeman, but rather as a Marine who’s infiltrating Black Mesa. I have no idea if that opinion holds up; it’s just what I recall from more than a decade ago. It seems like a good time to revisit Opposing Force to see if nostalgia and quality align like ✨I remember.

[Steam]