14 DAY TRIAL // Half-Life 2 is still one of the best games ever created, and it looks great even more than a decade later. Someone wanted to see how the game would fare with today’s technology and recreated a few parts of City 17 in the Unreal 4 engine.
Remaking a game with another engine takes a lot of work because none of the assets that you see in the screenshots exists, and they need to be created from scratch. That means talent and a lot of work.
As you can see from the screenshots, this is only a small part of City 17, the part that can be explored at the beginning of Half-Life 2. It’s not much, and it’s not meant to be a full game, but it sends our imagination flying to the “What if” land.
Yes, you can play it
The first thing that comes to gamers' mind when they see this image is simple: I wish I could play this. Notice how I used term screenshots. These are not rendered, they are generated from Unreal engine, and that means that you can actually play it, or, at least, wonder through it.
A Reddit user posted the images on Reddit, and he also linked to the project. You can take this project and import it into the Unreal engine, which is free for personal use. It will take some work, and it’s not actual gameplay, but it’s still more than just some images. There is also a compiled version available.
The City 17 Stairwell and Attic project is the work of an artist named Liam Tart, who is a Senior 3D Environment Artist from the UK. He’s now working on an announced project for The Creative Assembly, and he was also part of the team for Natural Selection 2. The stuff with Half-Life 2 is just something that he did in his own time to improve his skills.
You can download the project from the artist’s website, and you can download the Unreal Engine as well.
