Gamertell

Half Life 2 mod DIPRIP is car combat with your mouse and keyboard. Let’s break that down for a second: It’s a Half-Life 2 mod, so it should have all the rendering and physics power of the Freeman adventure, and it’s on mouse and keyboard, so it should have all the pinpoint accuracy and diverse weapon sets that PC shooting embodies.

Those benefits are in there somewhere, but you have to work a bit to enjoy them. You’re laying the pedal on pretty thick most of the time, so whatever benefits you might have gotten from mouse seems a wash at first. And it’s not just that the cars feel a lot like the unresponsive set in the Half Life 2 games, but there’s a lag that stalls your input from your car’s reaction that feels like a half a second. It makes for some pretty frustrating driving, especially when the combat areas get a little tight.

And that’s a shame because the cluttered urban map in this game is a real stunner. Driving into shops and knocking over a bunch of racks has that great nihilistic feeling all good car combat games need. All of the maps look great in the game, and it’s fun to drive around and scope things out. It really shows off how the Half Life 2 engine, now nearing its fourth year in circulation, stands the test of time. It also shows how dedicated to detail the mod team is.

But that’s not what the game’s really about. It’s about blowing cars up. Right now, there’s three cars and four guns. The different cars have varying degrees of handling, shields and speed, but there just didn’t feel like that much of a difference between the rigs I picked. Where the play got interesting is what you brought to battle between the machine gun, minigun, mortar and missiles. When you first pop into a map, it’s just like the old days: The first thing you do is go looking for your favorite weapon.

A few rounds, I took some high ground and fired mortar onto multi-car pileups below. But often you’ll wanna tail someone, hit them with a few missiles, and, when they finally think they know what’s going on, circle around them with a ton of minigun fire. Most of that wouldn’t have been as easy without a mouse to control the turret separately from the WASD of the car. But, then, when steering without analog input, a lot of the fun of driving gets lost to frustration or meticulous tapping.

It’s a promising proposition with a few technical holdups. DIPRIP is probably worth an afternoon. It’s free, anyway.

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