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Finally Half-Life co-op with Synergy Mod

I’ve been keeping an eye on this mod, Synergy, for a while now as it promises Half-Life 2 co-operative play and finally got a chance to test it out last night. I feel that CoOp play is something that has been missing in FPS game since the early days of Doom and Quake so I’m very happy to finally experience the fun that is the Half-Life series with someone special.

A few months ago when I first looked at the project it looked a bit too confusing and, well, beta to setup but with 1.1 I’ve got to say it feels nearly stable. I’m sure in a few more versions it’ll have that polished feel. Setup is as simple as clicking next, next finish on a simple installer and the only prereqs are that you have HL2, HL2DM, and Source SDK Base installed and opened at least once to initialize. Once installed Synergy adds itself to Steam as a 3rd party mod ready to launch.



At first I thought I would need to run a separate listen server to get a local game going but running a “quick play” campaign does essentially that. The other players on the LAN simply launch the game and either click through on the local games list or run CONNECT <IP ADDRESS/NETBIOS NAME> in the console. The former didn’t quite work for us but interestingly enough Internet players were able to connect even though I hadn’t setup any crazy port forwarding or anything. Weird when networking works without much thought eh?

It would have been awesome to play HL2 co-op between Missouri and Virginia before Shannon moved in, but now that she’s here the experience is far more enjoyable. Shannon (@snubs / snubsie.com) and I played through the first quarter of Half-Life 2 last night using the mod and it was a blast. Mubix even joined us towards the end to help kick some Combine butt.

Synergy handles multiple Gordan Freemans pretty well all things considered too. I’m not exactly sure how the NPCs choose which person in your party to keep eye contact with while interacting but its basically like everyone gets to be the main character. The only bug I’ve seen to look out for is that NPCs will sometimes walk over players, causing them to become immobile.

The best part has to be the strategy that it adds to what was a single player game. I only wish the difficulty was a little harder as I saw in the first helicopter battle, 3v1 isn’t exactly what Valve intended.

Regardless if you’re a Half-Life freak like me you’ll have to check this out. I’d love to run a HL2 campaign with the Hak5 fans sometime, that would rock. Hit me up if you’re interested and keep on fraggin’!