Last weekend was a good time to own a copy of Valve Software’s Half-Life 2, because two excellent mods were released within hours of each other Friday night; Minerva: Metastasis 2, the second release in a planned three-part series of single-player levels, and Empires, a first-person shooter and real-time strategy hybrid that has been likened to the Battlezone games of a few years ago or even Operation Flashpoint’s legendary “Capture the Island” mode. Both of them, even though they are radically different mods, are worth the download for everyone.

Metastasis 2 (www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/phosphenes.shtml)

For those that missed the first Metastasis, the levels are created using Valve’s stock Half-Life 2 textures, models, weapons, and enemies, but they do follow their own story independent of the regular Half-Life 2 story arc. The premise (without revealing too much) is that the player is dropped onto a remote island by the mysterious Minerva to see what the Combine are up to. The player fights his way through the beach defenses and ultimately down into a bunker in the middle of the island. At the end of the first episode he is about to go deeper into the bunker, and in this second installment, the player is fighting entirely underground against Combine soldiers and the environment.

This mod is probably more fun to me than the original Half-Life 2, because the levels are beautiful and chock-full with fun gameplay, but they also manage to make sense. For me, Levels in Half-Life 2 were pretty, fun, or logical. The places that were the most enjoyable to play (Ravenholm, for instance) didn’t make any sense at all to the story, and the levels that made the most sense (the urban levels) were dull and ugly. This mod manages to capture all three at once, and for that alone it’s worth the download.

The experience of playing Minerva for me was entertaining in its own way- not just because of just explosions, or just cool-looking levels, but the fact that I can be giggling like a little girl from having so much fun and the next moment look around at the level and catch myself with jaw agape. Later on in the second level, I found myself on a narrow glass walkway over a bottomless chasm, with pillars and other walkways extending far beneath me to the point where they melted away into a thin mist. I remember blazing away with an SMG in an ominous factory room with huge pistons, grinding gears, and sickly orange light flooding out of tanks filled with a strange liquid. Then there was the long fight down a walkway that snaked its way down a chasm, shooting Combine soldiers off the walkway and at the same time being distracted by how majestic and foreboding everything looked. The point is that these are some of the best maps I’ve ever played for any single-player game, not just Half-Life 2.

Empires (www.empiresmod.com)

Empires is a multiplayer team-based mod that originally was released for Battlefield 1942 but later switched to Battlefield Vietnam and, when that engine proved too weak, was moved to Source. The first release, beta 1.0, was made available for download last Friday to overwhelming demand that swamped download servers and gave me a share ratio of about 500% on the torrent of the installer I was seeding. It took several days for people to set up stable servers, but when the lag dropped below 150 Empires became one of the best mods for Half-Life 2.

Of course, that may be a dubious distinction. I can count the number of popular (released) Half-Life 2 mods on a single hand, and Empires no doubt benefited from this. In other words, it’s a lot easier to get people to play your game when there’s nothing else around. But to say that Empire’s success was only due to the fact that Source mods are few and far between would be to short-change it, because Empires would succeed even if the mod scene were flooded with well-made material.

On to the game!

Empires successfully integrates the research, resource-gathering, and unit-production aspects of real-time strategy by allowing one player per team to enter the “Command Vehicle” and gain an overhead view of the entire map. When he’s there, the player can build refineries to produce resources (there is only one resource in the game), armories to allow his comrades to re-supply with ammo and grenades when they run out (which happens a lot more often than normal), vehicle factories to create buggies, artillery, and tanks, and even walls and turrets to keep enemies at bay. He can also order his soldiers to move to a certain location or attack a certain object, leaving it up to the soldier to execute the order. Surprisingly, I’ve seen very few ‘lone wolf’- style players. Most of the time people do what they’re told and question the commander’s judgment later.

The commander can also upgrade his team’s vehicles and combat power by researching improvements to units following a branching tech tree. The commander can research bigger guns for the artillery, better armor for the tank, more effective missile or machine gun turrets, and faster and more powerful engines for the vehicles. A commander that knows how to work the tech tree (most people at this point are ignoring it, at least as far as I’ve seen) is a force to be reckoned with, especially when his upgraded artillery is shelling your base from halfway across the map.

The individual soldier than I mentioned earlier also has a lot of fun in Empires, because all the elements of a shooter like Battlefield 1942 or Tribes are here. There are four classes- Scout, Engineer, Rifleman and Grenadier, and they serve radically different roles. The scout is basically a sniper with the ability to request artillery strikes using binoculars, the engineer is the one that builds the buildings the commander plops down (and can place turrets and walls on his own), the rifleman is the standard machine gun-toting grunt, and the grenadier is equipped with a rocket launcher to defeat tanks and a mortar to shell buildings and other stuff that can’t be directly seen. And, of course, what would class-based gameplay be without different weapons? Engineers are stuck with mediocre submachine guns, rifleman have powerful rifles or full-fledged machine guns, scouts have the choice of a short-range submachine gun or a long-range rifle, and the grenadier’s only armament besides his mortar and rocket launcher is a weak pistol. And, if you grow bored of one version of a gun, there are most likely other slightly different weapons you can substitute in to spice things up. Every gun is perfect for a certain situation and with a little bit of experimenting it’s easy to find the gun that works best for your play style.

Also important to the infantryman’s game is the rank and squad systems. For every one of a player’s kills, buildings constructed, or squads formed, he gets points towards the next rank, where he can choose more powerful weaponry and gains increased stats. I’ve never been very high, but I know that high-level players are noticeably more deadly than the average newbie, if only because of their powerful weaponry.

The other important feature is the ability to form squads with other players. You can communicate with your squadmates easily, and they show up on the map differently so you can tell where they are. Also, the game awards you points for forming, joining, or staying in a squad, so if nothing else, it helps you get to the next rank.

The bottom line about Empires is that it combines RTS strategy and FPS action successfully and if you’re looking for a mod where teamplay isn’t just a buzzword but the only way to win, Empires is definitely for you.

Conclusion

Things are starting to pick up on the mod horizon- Insurgency went into beta testing a few weeks ago and it’s steaming full-speed ahead for a public release, Nuclear Dawn recently came out of left field with some exciting screens of team-based goodness on a post-apocalyptic Earth, Age of Chivalry is preparing for another monster media release and getting closer to public beta, and even the ancient Project Hull Breach is showing signs of life. I’m really looking forward to the next few months, because it seems that the dearth of Half-Life 2 mods is about to be corrected. Stay tuned, because I can’t help but to keep up with all this.