10 Years In The Making, This Total Conversion Based On Half-life Is...

Diffusion is a fantastically fun shooter, albeit with one big caveat.

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There was a specific moment while playing Diffusion where it shifted from being merely a highly capable Half-Life mod to one of the most remarkable conversions of Valve's classic FPS I've ever played. It's a moment reminiscent of Xen's reveal in Crowbar Collective's remake of Black Mesa, a sense of wonder imbued in equal parts by the sci-fi vista placed before you and the fact you know that it's running on the technical equivalent of a restored 1930s sedan.

Then, several hours later, Diffusion did it again, at which point I began to understand why it took ten years to make.

Diffusion is a total conversion project for Half-Life that's built in Xash3D, an open-source engine fully compatible with Half-Life's underlying GoldSrc tech. While Xash has similar fundamentals to GoldSrc, it isn't bound by the same constraints as Valve's tech, natively supporting features like HD textures and dynamic lighting. It also lets users build games that run from their own launcher, which apart from anything else makes Diffusion incredibly easy to download and get playing.

The premise is typically daft Half-Life mod fare. You play as James Smith, a veteran SWAT officer on a road-trip holiday through the Utah desert when his car breaks down just outside an old processing factory. Said factory turns out to be a front for an underground research facility, which comes under attack by a hostile military force just as Smith saunters over to ask if he can use the phone.

Fleeing into the facility, Smith stumbles upon a prototype battlesuit that lets him regenerate health, dash like the Doom Slayer in his Eternal era, and fry nearby enemies with an electrical AOE attack. But stealing the suit also puts Smith at the centre of a vast, dimension-hopping conflict. Still, it could be worse, he could have gone to Center Parcs.

As you can probably glean from the summary, storytelling is not Diffusion's forte, and the ensuing narrative is tropey and clumsily told. But Diffusion doesn't exist to spin a memorable yarn. This is mainly an ode to late '90s-era level design, wh

Source: PC Gamer