Half-Life
BANGER · Shooter · 1998
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 12h
- Value
- $0.83/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Named Game of the Year by over 50 publications, Valve's debut title blends action and adventure with award-winning technology to create a frighteningly realistic world where players must think to survive. Also includes an exciting multiplayer mode that allows you to play against friends and enemies around the world.
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 2017 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. 56 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 80 percent off, roughly 12 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 12 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is better reviewed than 98 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Half-Life 2 ($9.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Half-Life: Source ($9.99, scores 25).
The math says it holds its tier up to $17.06, and you are being asked for $9.99.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 7 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written September 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 94 percent of the 13,225 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
It came out 28 years ago and 634 were still playing it at the last check.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 12 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
2 players here own this. Their libraries average 65 BANG. See the leaderboard →
Players
634 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
I am disappointed to say the least. It's not a bad game or anything, but with the amount of critical acclaim this game has garnered, I really expected more from it, which makes we wonder if I would have liked it more if I hadn't heard a thing about this game. Starting off with the positives, this game has a distinct art style and premise that'll make it memorable even for someone like me who didn't enjoy the game...
As someone playing Half-Life for the first time in 2026, I came away disappointed. The first quarter of the game genuinely impressed me. The atmosphere, environmental storytelling, and seamless presentation made me understand why this game was so beloved. For a while, I honestly thought I was playing a future 9 or even 10 out of 10 for me. Unfortunately, that's where my enjoyment peaked. As the chapters became...
That this game was revolutionary is one of the biggest low IQ psyops in gaming history. It fluked it's way to popularity. Nothing remarkable even for it's time.
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
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Half-Life scores 95/100 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/70/half-lifeThe 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.