Half-Life: Source
Skip · Shooter · 2004
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 11.1h
- Value
- $0.90/hr
- Reviews
- 69% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 61% over the last 30 days against 69% all-time.
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Winner of over 50 Game of the Year awards, Half-Life set new standards for action games when it was released in 1998. Half-Life: Source is a digitally remastered version of the critically acclaimed and best selling PC game, enhanced via Source technology to include physics simulation, enhanced effects, and more.
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
June 2018 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 26 in the 13 years tracked, about 13 weeks apart.
It is less well reviewed than 73 percent of its genre. Half-Life ($9.99, scores 95) outscores it, and so does Half-Life 2 ($9.99, scores 97). Both sit among its closest neighbours.
Players rate it 69 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 61 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 3 of the 399 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 55 percent of the 3,882 reviews written there were positive, against 69 percent overall, and those are 27 percent of everything written about it.
Players
27 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
You can't buy this game directly. You either have to get a bundle with Deathmatch or buy another pack which contains it, such as the Valve Complete Pack. And for good reason too: the game is a buggy mess which I could only get through with mods. Your money is better spent on Half-Life (which got an anniversary update) or Black Mesa (a retelling of the story which was built specifically to run on Source). The only...
I played this back when it was a lot less buggy (as evidenced by my absurd hour count) Don't bother, Valve has broken the game with updates it didn't need and they don't give enough of a ♥♥♥♥ to fix it.
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: critic score (Metacritic), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Half-Life: Source scores 25/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/280/half-life-sourceThe 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 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.