The mod was announced long before Half-Life 2 was actually released – the early announcement can be blamed on Valve and company, who consistently misled the public about the state Half-Life 2 and its release date, only pushing it back after a full build was stolen outright from Valve offices and revealed to be a tremendous pile of non-functional garbage.  So, all of those early adopter modders, including the dormant Hull Breach, were left in the lurch.

Nevertheless, Half-Life 2 was eventually released, and the SDK shortly thereafter, and since that time the Insurgency team has had coders and artists working nonstop.  The first public beta was released a couple of weeks ago, and I had a chance to sit down and see what all of this development has been about.

The mod is set in Iraq, despite earlier indications that a second theater of combat – Yugoslavia during the nineties – would also be featured.  There are several game types and two sides: the U.S.M.C. and Iraqi insurgents.  There are classes for each side, as well: squad leaders, demolitions soldiers, support, riflemen, and marksmen.  Each side has distinctive weaponry; the rebel classic AK47 and the 40-year staple of the U.S. armed forces, the M16, are both in-game along with a smattering of other weaponry, such as the M14 designated marksman rifle for the Marines, an Enfield for the insurgents, and the FN FAL, which is basically the weapon to have as an insurgent.

The towering irony of all of this is that the mod has been in development for four years, and it’s still topical.  We’re doing the same things in Iraq that we were doing four years ago.  A commentary on U.S. foreign policy or developers who take way too long?  You decide!

Anyway, there are several capture points on each map and a certain number of reinforcements for each side, depending on gametype.  On some maps, the U.S.M.C. has a limited amount of reinforcement “waves” at their disposal to take several capture points, and the insurgents are granted unlimited respawns.  On other maps, the situation is reversed, and on still others, both sides have unlimited respawns.  Sometimes, objectives must be captured linearly, and both sides initially possess equal amounts of objectives at opposite ends of a map; other times objectives can be captured in any order.  Sometimes one team must capture all of the objectives from another team who already has them, and so on ad nauseam.  If you’ve never played a class-based first-person shooter with capture points (i.e. you’ve been under a rock for the past decade), then Insurgency is going to be an amazing experience for you, but for those of you with a frame of reference, imagine Day of Defeat or Battlefield 2 in Iraq.

Also of note is the commander/squad system, which mimics Battlefield 2 in that it gives one player on each side theoretical control over his soldiers and divides players into squads which can be commanded as a unit and led tactically by a squad leader.  The commander can set waypoints, assign targets for his troops, and call in those waves of reinforcement I talked about earlier.  The squad leader can do very little besides issue voice commands and maybe yell at people over alltalk. 

Insurgency is notable for the strength of its art direction. The developers have made it a point of pride that not a single stock HL2 texture, prop model, or sound is used anywhere in the mod, and most of the replacements they chose are very able indeed.  Crates, pallets, sand-colored walls, sand-colored blacktop, sand-colored stone, sand-colored insurgent uniforms, sand-colored USMC uniforms, and sand-colored derelict cars on the side of the road all look convincingly sandy.

Now for the hatchet job.  Perhaps you’ve been anticipating this because my tone throughout this piece has been a bit hostile.  I’m not a passive-aggressive jerk so I’m going to explain myself here.

The Insurgency team has effectively missed the entire point with this mod.  There is not so much as a single original idea anywhere in the two gigabytes of sand textures this thing dumped on my hard drive. It steals everything about its realistic gunplay from Day of Defeat and Red Orchestra, the commander/squad system from Battlefield 2, the concept of objective-based gameplay from just about every multiplayer shooter of the past millennium, and its sense of map design from Counter-Strike.  Far more effort was devoted to replacing HL2 stock models and textures than making anything in the way of new or unique features, or, Allah forbid, coming up with an entirely new gameplay idea. Why even have the institution of mod development if all we’re going to do with it is produce a digest of older, better mods and commercial games?

Thankfully, mods like Insurgency are exceptions to the rule.  Most modders do not abdicate their duty to do things that couldn’t be done in a commercial product, which to my mind is the entire point of allowing people to mod your game.  The tremendous opportunity presented to modders is that they are being given an engine and art assets completely for free, and they have no budgetary constraints or marketing concerns at all.  They are free, as time will allow, to develop something unique and interesting and novel that couldn’t ever reach store shelves from a conventional game development studio.  If modders just steal features and ignore everything they’ve been given, then they’ve missed the point completely.  Mission accomplished. 

Zombie Master

Zombie Master is  a straight-up zombie survival game in which a team of human players work to complete an objective on a map and another human player, the eponymous master himself, spawns zombies, sets traps, and does everything in his power to stop them.  The zombie master isn’t actually a character physically on the map, as his view is of the entire map at once, overhead.  From this perspective, he can spawn zombies at predetermined spawn points throughout the map and set off traps for unsuspecting players.  He can also do things like knock around props with a magical explosion or destroy windows and doors, allowing his minions to reach areas they couldn’t have before.

The interesting dimension to this mod is the real sense of teamwork it requires.  There isn’t some sort of vague notion that “oh, hey, if we got together things might be easier” – it is absolutely impossible to survive on your own.  Ammunition is scarce, weapons are even worse, and the sheer amount of enemies and the chokepoints built into the map requires an entire squad of people working more or less in concert to even come close to winning.

And what is “winning?”  It varies wildly from map to map.  Some maps are based around a linear structure of chokepoints that allows little room for maneuver and lots of opportunities for zombies to pop out of nowhere and wreak havoc.  The zombie master wins once everybody is dead, and the players win when they’ve reached the “end” of the map.  Other maps are based around the classic “standoff against the horde” template from Dawn of the Dead and pretty much every other zombie movie in existence.  In these maps, a band of humans holes up in a gas station or isolated house in the country and holds off the zombies from weapons and ammo scrounged from around the house and pile up sofa cushions and refrigerators to keep the undead at bay.

The gameplay is absolutely delicious.  The sense of camaraderie and tension that the game generates isn’t manufactured by scripted sequences or stupid gimps of the player-characters; instead, it springs naturally from the maps and the options available to the zombie master.  When you have to actively scrounge for ammo and you run the risk of coming across a band of marauding undead wherever you go, you move in groups and move quickly, and you never stay too long in one place.  When you have to hole up, you drag furniture and crates and anything else you can find from all over the place and stack the props up in great piles in front of every window and door.  It’s not hyperbole to say it’s like living a zombie movie, which, apocalyptic consequences and hordes of lethal shamblers aside, is kind of the dream of every nerd and social outcast the world over.  I guess the sensation of holing up in your house and taking potshots at the outside world resonates with the demographic that spends a lot of time playing games and on the internet.  Who knew?

My nonsense rationalizations aside, this is a fantastic mod and anyone who squealed like a little girl at any point during Dawn of the Dead or any other Romero movie should get on this mod post-haste.