Of course, you don't have to kill the scientists and the Barneys, and you can shoot most of your fellow squad-mates as they appear. For the first half of the game there's little attempt to distinguish itself, beyond the novelty of being one those Marines you'd previously spent so much of your efforts trying to kill. Which makes it quite odd that Opposing Force is at its weakest when it's trying to be the most like Half-Life. And it's almost never a shooting gallery, but instead consistently reimagining the potential for walking from one end of a room to the other. The story happens around you, rather than because of you. The load points, as appears to now be Valve's persistent and insane tradition, are dumped randomly in the middle of corridors. So you've got continuous and contiguous events, uninterrupted by cut-scenes or betwixt mission debriefings. It's testament to the developers that they made a game at all rather than hiding in a cupboard, let alone that they produced what proved to be a great shooter.Ĭertain core rules of Half-Life are understood and obeyed. They were being asked to expand on Half-Life - a game that completely redefined the first-person shooter, and to some extents gaming at large - just a year after it first appeared. Imagine the task a fresh young Randy Pitchford and his team had in front of them.

Oh, and of course you're one of the Marines. But also joining in this time (quite how Gordon missed them is unclear) are the members of Race X, another crop of aliens who are not the friend of human nor Xen. It was the same story - the same invasion of the Black Mesa facility by the US Marines, Black Ops special forces, and of course the super-cross aliens of Xen. A tiny baby Gearbox, a decade ago in 1999, worked on its alternative perspective of Valve's seminal shooter. It's even strangerer to think they weren't made by Valve. It's strange to remember that Half-Life deviated off into two semi-sequel expansions before it reached Half-Life 2. Has there ever been a central character for a game who sounds more like a geography supply teacher? Which is why we should celebrate the hero at the centre of Opposing Force. Even Half-Life's Gordon only keeps the nerd up for his first name, the surname sinking into the cliché of Freeman.

Pick up a random shooter and you're bound to find yourself in control of someone called something like Dirk Death, or Rick Giantballs. There are definitely too many corny names for heroes in videogames.

Half Life opposing Force by gearbox