Sven Coop

Pros: Possibly the best mod ever made. When I first played it, I got such a charge from the bare, even badly-designed levels. Running alongside my human friends down the sparse corridors of "tunnel" while circle-strafing some zombies, and blasting headcrabs off the ground. Back then, my incredibly shitty modem made gameplay almost impossible, but every ounce of play that I was able to wring out of the experience was like sweet sweet honey milk, pouring thickly over my scraggly, bearded face.

Later, after about 50 Sven binges where I would wait the 10 minutes to update the server list just to get a new list of temporary Sven servers, I was able to get a cable modem and also start playing Who songs in the CD drive while blazing away. Now, the days of "horde" and "xenomorphic" are long over. There's one sven server out there and it plays about 10 of the 100+ Sven maps out there. But that's fine by me.

I currently play and enjoy Sven Coop more than Counter Strike or TFC combined. For some reason, I enjoy piling on some computerized baddies more than I do kicking other human's asses. Same goes for Starcraft, I always just play vs some comps. So Sven Coop is very special to me.

Of course, one of the biggest questions most people who know games ask is "why do I need a mod to play co-op in Half Life?" Good question. The real answer is that you don't. You can easily play co-op Half Life without SvenCoop. However, the whole point of SvenCoop is to modify the game engine. The latest version of SvenCoop actually benifits cooperative play for regular Half Life. There's been new things added to make sorting through all the singleplayer maps a lot easier, including a really cool starting map that lets you select which chapter of the game you will start from. That's awesome.

SvenCoop's main attraction is the large host of original user created co-op maps. It beats having to struggle through the regular singleplayer maps. The original SvenCoop maps are really what makes the mod shine.

Cons: I hate you.

Review by:
Josh Cable

Back