Source Mods You Should Care About: Dystopia

One of the things I can never get over about the FPS scene is how many of them feel almost exactly the same. “Real” weapons; locales that I can look at in Google Earth and titles which easily confuse me. But when I first heard about the modding scene for Half-life 2 and the source engine, I was ecstatic. The possibilities seemed endless, and I was hoping for some really original ideas from the basic FPS engine.

Dystopia was one of the first mods that I played, and to this day remains one of my favorites. Not only is the aesthetic refreshing in a world full of military drab and space marines, but the mechanics are some of the most original I’ve seen for a modification of an existing title.

The game boils down to a team-based, objective driven war between the “Punks” and the “Corps”, which represent the two basic factions of dystopian fiction: the rebels and the oppressive corporations. There are two “sides” of each map: Meatspace and Cyberspace. The former contains all of your typical multiplayer FPS trappings: Guns blazing, grenades exploding, and katanas clanging.

Cyberspace on the other hand is a completely different monster. You control an avatar, and glide around to different access points and hack them to affect objectives and map features (like turrets or doors) in Meatspace. The scenery varies by map (as it does in Meatspace, but much more… cyber-y), and in a lot of the levels you can be fighting people from great distances or while darting through very tight corridors.

These two separate styles of play make for a very exciting, fast-paced experience. On one objective the Punks might need to break into a shed to destroy a firewall in Meatspace, and then on the next objective they have to fall back and hack open the huge cargo doors to get into the data center to destroy it. Sure, most people stick to one role as they play — I personally favor decking (the term that describes using Cyberspace and hacking), and when I don’t need to, I stealth around with the katana and usually die fairly quickly — but it takes some communication and a great amount of co-ordination to get all of the things mentioned above to fall together to capture or defend an objective. A door can get hacked and will be opened, but if the whole team is on the other side of the map, there’s a good chance it’ll get closed again before they all get there.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the game does have a fairly unique set of weapons. Inaddition to your basic sci-fi weapon fare such as sniper rifles, target-locking pistols, rocket/grenade launchers and shot guns, there are also a few unconventional weapons, including the katana as the game’s main melee weapon for Light and Medium players. Heavies have a fist that is deadly, but is very, very slow to attack and there’s the Tesla Rifle, whose primary attack shoots bolts of electricity in front of the user, while the secondary fire sends out a pulsing ball of electricity. There’s also a Bolt Gun which shoots electrically charged metal spikes at opponents; but if you miss, you can discharge them for a smaller, but irritating, amount of damage. Instead of regular grenades, the Heavies have spider-mines, which are similar to bombchus in Zelda, except they have legs and are more sinister if you’re completely out of ammo.

The game also has a leaderboard of sorts, and for getting the most kills with a specific weapon or being the best with a certain implant you get a little badge by your name, as well as an overall ranking of your performance. On the scoreboard in-game, your global ranking is also shown, making it easier to decide when to call a balance teams vote when the teams are uneven (a quick average of the ranks in your head does the trick.)

Aside from the comments on the gameplay that I’ve mentioned, the overall aesthetic of the game is very cyberpunk-y and rather cool. As soon as you boot the game up, you’re greeted by the source-style menu screen, and some techno music starts playing. After you’ve found a game, the team select menus are very much like the ones that you’ll find in the Cyberspace portion of the game. The maps are gorgeous, as you can see from the screenshots I’ve put in the article. You can also check out some of the others here (or, you know, play the game.)

Unique weapons, stellar mapping, and very dynamic and fast-paced gameplay. What more could you ask for in a freely available game? I highly recommend at least trying this game out for anyone interested in first-person shooters, Dystopia fiction, and competitive multiplayer games. You just might find your new “jam”, as I have.