Since we’re never going to get an official new Half-Life game (sad as it is to say so), fans are going to keep coming up with their own takes on Valve’s revolutionary first-person series. There’s even a group of fans who are trying to remake the first Half-Life using the stunning Unreal Engine 4.
Titled Project Lambda, this remake is seeking to retain everything that made the original game great while upgrading the graphics to something that can hold its own today.
Based on what the team has accomplished thus far, we can’t help but be impressed by how great Half-Life looks when it’s given a facelift. Truth be told, Half-Life still looks great when you compare it to other games of its era (at least in terms of the level design and certain ideas), which certainly gives the Project Lambda team plenty to work with. Still, we’re not going to belittle the incredible effort that goes into a remake like this. The Project Lambda team are essentially creating a new Half-Life game from scratch.
That’s also why you shouldn’t expect to play it anytime soon. Currently, the team have only managed to remake the first chapter of the original Half-Life. In other words, it doesn’t let you do anything more exciting than watching Gordon Freeman commute to his first day of work. Needless to say, the more action-heavy segments that happen after that are going to be much more difficult to recreate.
Whether or not they will be able to do it though isn’t really the question. There’s clearly a lot of talent behind this project. The real question is how long remaking the rest of this game will take. Don’t forget that the Black Mesa remake took almost a decade to finish, and that game isn’t nearly as technologically ambitious.
Still, we’re rooting for Project Lambda if for no other reason than the fact we’ll never get another Half-Life game from Valve (sorry…again).