Half-Life mod features playable Spyro The Dragon instead of Gordon Freeman

Fans of Spyro The Dragon and Half-Life will have to wait a little longer until 2024, the year of the dragon. Then a modification of the original Half-Life should be released in which protagonist Gordon Freeman is replaced by the well-known purple dragon.

It concerns the mod Half-Life: Year of the Dragon by Magic Nipples. This mod maker has posted a new trailer on his YouTube channel, showing the progress. The video shows Spyro running, jumping and flying through the levels of the original Half-Life. You can also see how Spyro outwits several headcrabs with his Charge-ability and dodge the projectiles of static guns.

In the mod, the genre and gameplay seem to have changed; there is no longer a first-person perspective or the handling of firearms. Instead, Spyro is controlled from a third-person perspective and must fight his way through the Black Mesa research facility as if it were a 3D platformer. The creator says that the original game only has a very basic third-person mode, so it took a lot of programming and hacks to make it work.

The original demo is from 2018 and a new version should be available on January 21st. The full mod should be released before the end of 2024, according to the creator. He says that Half-Life: Year of the Dragon will not contain the entire Half-Life campaign, because that would take too much time and he does not consider everything of the campaign as well. The campaign in the mod will consist of a kind of hub with a world like that used in the Spyro games. Players can choose from roughly ten chapters. They will come from the original Half-Life, but also from the expansions.