Counter-strike 2 Modders Surprise Drop An Excellent Halo 3...

FOV 90: Project Misriah is a glimpse at the offbeat Source 2 shooters we should have by now, if not for Valve.

Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I'll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.

Project Misriah: Halo Ports, a collection of Counter-Strike 2 custom maps that recreate classic Halo 3 multiplayer in Valve's freshly rebooted FPS, is so good that it's frustrating.

Released yesterday on the CS2 workshop by mappers Froddoyo, Lydran, and ORB-NRG, Project Misriah is a lot more than a map pack containing faithful recreations of Homefront, High Ground, and Ghost Town. The mod also recreates the mechanics of Halo 3 as closely as possible within Valve's toolset, replacing most of the base game's arsenal with Halo guns spanning the series, tweaking ballistics so you're actually accurate while moving (a wild concept), lowering gravity, raising the time-to-kill, and even adding original sound effects and Jeff Steitzer's iconic announcer lines.

It's delightful, evocative of the source material, and legitimately fun. I played some CTF and Slayer with bots on Ghost Town (the former works by turning the hostage into a flag) and marveled at how effortlessly Halo's old school thinking about map design, power weapons, and verticality translates to 2025.

As one of the last remaining FPS series uninterested in modern design conventions like aim-down-sights, mantling, and custom classes, CS2 is the perfect place to simulate classic Halo. You can even leverage CS2's economy to play round-based CTF with pistol rounds and extremely lethal sniper buys.

I'm also impressed by how well Valve's latest iteration of Source holds up to the modifications, which is where my frustration comes in. Here I am enjoying a Source 2 FPS with slick movement, accessible shooting, and casual arena modes—and I have to play a Halo CS2 mod to find that?

Source was once a malleable workhorse of an engine that powered a generation of popular PC shooters.

Source was once a malleable workhorse of an engine that powered a generation of popular PC shooters appealing to every corner of FPS fandom—Team Fortress 2, Garry's Mod, CS: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Insurgency, Fistful of Frags, Left 4 Dead—most of which began as or had roots in mods.

We're now two years past Source 2's big re-debut, and it's still just "the Counter-Strike 2 and Deadlock engine.

Source: PC Gamer