Half-Life 2 is now playable in PC VR headsets with a free mod.

If you own Half-Life 2 on Steam you can easily add the free community-made mod here. The entire game is adapted for VR (Episodes 1 and 2 aren’t supported yet) and there’s some useful options like seated support, a 3rd person vehicle camera, and an adjustable vignette to reduce the view while moving.

Those particularly sensitive to discomfort in VR should note there is “currently” no teleport movement option in the mod. The game supports tracked controllers and should support all SteamVR headsets, with Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality listed on Steam. We also tried the mod on Quest 2 via a wired Link.

The mod is available as a public beta test “but not all features are complete, and you may experience bugs.” The mod team released a roadmap stating that a separate build of the mod is needed for supporting Episodes 1 and 2 and while there are major issues to resolve still, they wrote “the majority of the episodes already works very well in VR, and after the initial public beta launch we will strive to get the episodes fully supported as soon as possible.”

“Grab and throw objects with your hands, physically climb ladders and play catch with Dog as if you were really there,” the mods tease. “Fight the Combine in the streets of City 17 while manually reloading your guns. And even when you have the gravity gun, will you dare go to Ravenholm?!”

Half-Life 2 is $9.99 at the time of this writing.

Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton is a journalist based in Arkansas and managing editor at UploadVR. He's covered VR full-time since 2015 as well as Oculus VR since 2012. He is interested in the people creating VR and AR hardware and software, their motivations, and how that work affects the people who spend significant time in simulations. If you have information to pass along you can send him a direct message on Twitter, Facebook or via email.