Half-Life: Opposing Force
BANGER · Shooter · 1999
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 5.2h
- Value
- $0.96/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Return to the Black Mesa Research Facility as one of the military specialists assigned to eliminate Gordon Freeman. Experience an entirely new episode of single player action. Meet fierce alien opponents, and experiment with new weaponry. Named 'Game of the Year' by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
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
The lowest price on record is $0.49, set in June 2019. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 52 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 2 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 72 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Half-Life ($9.99, scores 95) beats it on value, while it beats Half-Life: Blue Shift ($4.99, scores 87).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $7.50. It costs $4.99.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 4 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written September 2023 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 89 percent of the 2,573 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
Players
74 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
Opposing Force is without a doubt one of the strangest and most unique entries into the Half-Life canon in how different its goals as a game are. Unlike the Valve-produced HL games, Opposing Force isn't trying to be revolutionary or showcase any new crazy technology or push the medium of FPS to uncharted territory. Instead, it's focused on the expected: being a standard expansion pack providing us with more...
This game is good but I ♥♥♥ hate it. The hard mode was miserable asf. It's fun but balance is atrocious. Play on normal and it's a good game np.
As far as I know, this is the only Gearbox Half Life campaign without something proving its canonicity in the newer games. Blue Shift and the PS2 co-op mode has "infinite harmonic reflux" which is seen at the start of HL2 but Opposing Force wasn't so lucky. Dissapointing to see a great game go neglected.
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
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Half-Life: Opposing Force scores 93/100 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/50/half-life-opposing-forceThe 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.