Half-Life trilogy is free-to-play until March

Half-Life is one of the best games in gaming history. And now you can play it for free.

Deals don’t come sweeter than that.

Developers Valve are creating a new Half-Life game in virtual reality, dubbed Alyx. It comes out in March, but before that Valve really wants everyone to familiarize themselves with the original games.

Everything from Half-Life 2 to Team Fortress Classic, as well as Opposing Force and Blue Shift are now totally free to play over the next few months.

Half-Life and its sequel Half-Life 2 are credited with being some of the best games in the history of gaming. But Valve isn’t just giving the game away for the sake of it.

When Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, followed by sequels Episode One and Episode Two, the company was eagerly pushing its Steam platform (a games marketplace come social network). In order to play Half-Life 2, you needed to download steam, and as every gamer worth his joystick wanted to play it Valve clocked up a great many users almost overnight.

Half-Life: Alyx is being used in a similar way, and is no doubt being used by Valve as an easy way to get many people involved in virtual reality gaming.

While the game works with a handful of virtual reality headsets (like HTC’s Vive and Occulus Rift) it works particularly well with Valve’s own Index System (go figure), which launched in the summer of 2019.

The new game follows the same characters in the Half-Life saga, switching you Alyx the supporting character from Half-Life 2. Still, you can expect the same characters and elements (including the gravity gun) in the new game.