Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Review (evo-x)
One of the best arena-like FPS ever built, even though this game was pretty much a second thought for Valve.
I've played this for quite some time, ever since I was a kid (12 y/o in 2007) in my first account. It had a heated competitive scene, especially in South American/North American/European regions, however, it never got the hype like other shooters had (CS, COD4, and others). Still, it was really fun and fast paced, as expected for an arena-like game, and still is. Given how Half-Life 2 was revolutionary in every aspect in gaming overall, in 2004, due to its Source engine with unique physics mechanics, and graphics, you get what I'm saying when it involved the multiplayer part of it. Unfortunately, it struggled and never succeeded in hitting mainstream.
Some of the outstanding issues that we have in Valve games are related to its anti-cheating software (VAC), which was really aggro back in the days, however, it doesn't stand a chance against most modern cheating mechanisms we encounter nowadays. The solution, like in old Counter-Strike servers, was to enforce players to use third-party anti-cheating software if they ever wanted to join their servers. In particular, I've never seen this being a thing in HL2DM.
Specifically for this game, the community was really tight, and, let's say, borderline competitive. The learning curve required to be a decent player was and still is very steep, and the bar was really high if you wanted to go toe-to-toe against some of the "pro"* players. Due to its nature for being a very competitive game, casual players quickly shunned it. Where in Counter-Strike, anyone could quickly hop in, learn tactics that professionals use, aim train for a while, and get decent. In HL2DM, it's wasn't that simple:
- Aiming in arena games has some differences in comparison to static shooters like CS or Valorant that make it hard to master due to moving targets, and it includes yourself, so it's an unstable platform;
- Learning movement mechanics has its learning curve too. As in arena games, "bunny hopping" is a MUST for any decent player due to optimizing sprint energy, and you get the upper hand by fetching resources like suit energy, ammo, and guns in general;
- Default maps, apart from dm_lockdown , are not considered good for competition, so it relied on custom maps such as aim_arena, caverns, biohazard, lostvillage, lostarena, tigrik, and others for competition.
Over the years, the game started to decline, even Valve hasn't updated it in a while. We still have some active servers, standing an everlasting battle of time, but truth be told, it's a dead game. But I still recommend it in spite of everything else, because I think it's worthwhile to even go into those surviving servers, and give it a go against some players. Not only that, but I think that it's still a good game.
* I mean "pro" because the game never got into a point of having sponsors for pro players (not that I know, correct me in the comments), so it was very unlikely to make a living of this game.