Resistance and Liberation is a high realism WW2 mod for Half Life 2. Play as either the Wehrmacht or U.S army and fight for control of strategic points on a huge and brilliantly detailed area.

First of all, the community for the game is brilliant. No kids fucking about all the time, and mostly good people people who also have a laugh while playing.

The mod focuses on teamwork to a whole new level. Kill counters and individual scores are done away with, and replaced by an entire team score only. This is to discourage the type of gameplay that titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield promote (individual, selfish playing that only rewards personal achievement rather than actually helping your team to victory). The best part? It works. I’ve played around 50 or so rounds now, and almost everyone worked together. Fireteam leaders were setting up a base of fire, flanking maneuvers, storming buildings and just generally communicating. Of course there were the occasional match where everyone just fucked around and put on very over the top German accents and played about, but it was all good fun.

The thing I’m enjoying the most is the 3D voice broadcasting. On many games the voicechat is broadcast to the entire team, yet RnL takes a different approach, and generates a 3D model of your speach, so it’s as if your character is talking/shouting in-game, adding to the realism even further(players across the map can’t hear you, but the guy stood a few meters away can hear you just fine).

This leads to some hilarious situations. Today I was playing a few rounds, and ended up trapping a German rifleman in the top floor of a barn. After firing a few shots from my M1 Garand up through the floor hoping to hit him, I ended up shouting at him to surrender in very broken German, while he hurled down insults at me in an awful fake German accent. This ended up going on for about 5 minutes until I finally gave up and chucked a grenade through the hatch into the room, which was obviously follwed by a very loud bang and a stahlhelm rolling out of the hatch a few seconds later.

Gameplay is fun and fast paced, plus the supression effects are terrifying. It’s the kind of game that I was hoping Red Orchestra 2 would be. Sadly, RO2 was a major disappointment to me. I can’t place my finger on it, but it just wasn’t the game that I wanted it to be after putting well over 200 hours into the original Red Orchestra. That’s where Resistance and Liberation steps in. Considering this is a FREE mod, and is only at the early Beta stages now, thing are looking very promising.

All you need is any game that uses the source engine, and you can play it. If you don’t want to cough up the £6.99 for Half Life 2, I suspect the game will still run if you download Team Fortress 2 for free on steam, as that also uses the source engine.

Realistic enough for all the history buffs, but also fun and relatively fast paced for those who just like a good, team based shooter.

Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtVSmLkaNBg for 17 minutes of (not very serious) in-game footage for the general idea of how fun this game can be with a few friends.

Visit the official website for more information, and a download link. http://www.resistanceandliberation.com/