While you wait for Half-Life 3, your skin will weather and crumble and you’ll become so aware of how much time you’ve wasted praying for a sequel to a shooting game that you’ll suffer an existential crisis and move to the Himalayas to spend your days building windfarms out of sheep skeletons. Before that happens, you might get to play Prospekt [official site], a fan-made Half-Life 2 campaign which picks up the abandoned story of Half-Life: Opposing Force protagonist Adrian Shepherd – and has been given Valve’s blessing to be sold on Steam next month.



Prospekt consists of 13 levels starring the aforementioned scary-Marine-turned-Freeman-sympathiser as he suddenly finds himself in City-17, right in the middle of Freeman’s rebellion against the Combine. Specifically, just as Freeman storms Nova Prospekt; Shepherd is sent there by the Vortigaunts to help turn the tide in the rogue physicist’s favour.

Perhaps even more ambitiously, there’s going to be a Xen level. Not even well-judged Half-Life 1 fan remake Black Mesa has yet dared revisit the alien world of bouncy-falling insta-death, so this is going to be, as far as I know, our most lavish return to the most widely-loathed aspect of the HL games. (I quite liked it, though).

Apparently there’s going to be both a graphical and AI boost over Half-Life 2 vanilla, in addition to the new levels themselves.

Prospekt has been in development for around two years, and is the work of one Richard Seabrook. At one point he even sent a build of the campaign to Gabe Newell in a custom-made Half-Life briefcase, and though it did not lead to the job he hoped for, he did find the project approved on Greenlight within 72 hours of listing it. Come February 11, the game – approximately the length of Half-Life 2: Episode One – will be for sale on Steam for £7.50/$10, having received Valve’s blessing for the use of IP and assets.

If you want to know more about how Prospekt came to be, have a read with of PC GamesN’s interview with Seabrook here.

You can pre-order it here, but as always should wait for reviews and feedback. I’ve not played it yet so don’t look to me, but I’m almost certainly gonna, out of curiosity if nothing else.