Two artists/developers are currently working on a fan remake of the classic Half-Life 2 game in Unreal Engine 5. According to the team, Project Freeman will be using Unreal Engine 5, and aims to modernize the look and feel of this classic FPS.
Project Freeman aims to feature completely reworked maps and characters, motion capture animations along with facial expressions and completely new particle systems and visual effects.
Now while on paper this sounds great, I’m almost certain that this project will never see the light of day. The reason I’m saying this is because the team has already launched a Patreon campaign for it. And, needless to say, I suggest staying away from this crowd-funding campaign.
Not only that, but the team wants to release it on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. What this ultimately means is that this project may not be free. Also, and since we’re talking about a team of two people, this will be a huge project. Realistically, and even if they don’t receive a C&D letter, they won’t be able to ever finish it.
But anyway, the reason I’m sharing this video is because this early Unreal Engine 5 footage looks cool. So even though Project Freeman may never come out, its teaser trailer can at least give us a glimpse at what a modern remake of Half-Life 2 could look like.
From what we can see, the team has recreated some maps from City17. That, or it exported the maps from Half-Life Alyx and then imported them in Unreal Engine 5. It also populated these environments with some NPCs and Combine from HL2. From what we can tell, these characters are similar to those of the original game.
In conclusion, it looks cool. However, you should not get your hopes up for a UE5 remake. That won’t happen. Still, there is a remaster project of Half-Life 2 in active development. Half-Life 2 Remastered will be a free mod and has Valve’s approval.
As a bonus, here is another fan remake project of Half-Life 2 in Unreal Engine 5 that looks great!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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