The drawback with game of the 12 months lists, in case your ft are suitably submerged within the PC Gaming swamp, is that they do not have a tendency to spotlight something you will not have already heard about. That’s much less true for ModDB’s Mod of the Year Awards, which might shine a light-weight on experiences which will have slipped beneath your radar.
This 12 months’s publicly voted for crop (as with most 12 months’s crops) was heavy on mods for old-school shooters, although largely not too old-school for me to skip them. Second place was received by spectacular S.T.A.L.Okay.E.R. Call Of Pripyat overhaul Anomaly, whereas first place went to Half-Life 2 mod Entropy: Zero 2. Check ’em out under, together with the runner ups.
I will not checklist all ten winners, so I’ll as a substitute depart you to peruse ModDB’s full list, which features a mod full of Half-Life 2’s reduce content material and a CS:GO mod that makes it extra like CS basic. Let’s hone in on the highest two.
Dominic Tarason praised S.T.A.L.Okay.E.R. Anomaly to excessive heaven manner again in 2019, however it’s earned its place on 2022’s checklist because of substantial and ongoing updates. It’s an enormous and massively detailed overhaul, combining environments from all three present S.T.A.L.Okay.E.R games into the irradiated wasteland of your desires. Dominic known as it the subsequent neatest thing to a sequel, so it’d nicely tide you over till the precise sequel hopefully arrives someday later this 12 months. You can obtain Anomaly here.
Entropy: Zero 2, in the meantime, is an overhaul mod for Half: Life 2, jazzing up the fight with new results, enemies, weapons and enemy AI whereas dispatching you on a customized marketing campaign as a mix officer. Being the dangerous man additionally means you get to boss round “a small military of Combine synths and troopers”, in a marketing campaign the creators describe as “a story pushed expertise with a fully-voiced and choreographed solid”. You can obtain it straight from Steam.
Mods! Here’s to a different 12 months of ’em.