Half-Life: Blue Shift
BANGER · Shooter · 2001
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 3.1h
- Value
- $1.61/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Made by Gearbox Software and originally released in 2001 as an add-on to Half-Life, Blue Shift is a return to the Black Mesa Research Facility in which you play as Barney Calhoun, the security guard sidekick who helped Gordon out of so many sticky situations.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.49. That was June 2019. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 53 in the 14 years tracked, about 13 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 13 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 4 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 72 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Half-Life: Opposing Force ($4.99, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Half-Life: Source ($9.99, scores 25).
71 from critics against 93 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
8 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2023 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 84 percent of the 2,674 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 14 percent of everything written about it.
Players
35 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Yo Calhoun, isn't your shift ended yet? Yes Dr. Rosenberg, but it is a blue shift today. I will have to wait for the opposing force finish the decaying progress until I can go to my home and have an episode or two of my favorite show.
While Blue Shift doesn't really expand upon the gameplay found in Half-Life's base game, it is more Half-Life goodness. The plot while pretty basic is a nice enough set up to give you a reason to see things from a new perspective. Playing as Barney, the security officer you see in the first part of the original game, you get to get a feel for what is was like for a lot of grunts in Black Mesa during the whole...
While being shorter compared to its predecessors it is still amazing, good ending, loved the xen chapter, introduced a companion system. Overall an amazing game. Definetly worth playing
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Half-Life: Blue Shift scores 87/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/130/half-life-blue-shiftThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 3, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.