Nuclear Winter is a single player mission for Half-Life Opposing Force. It comprises 29 new maps plus a ton of new scripted scenes, models, artwork, character voices, sound effects and music. Nuclear Winter was recently re released with Steam support. Opposing Force is no longer required.
In the early 21st century the U.S. fight several anti-terrorist campaigns in the Middle East. Bickering in the world community over the morality of these campaigns eventually leads to the withdrawal of China and Russia from the U.N. Even NATO is divided and it soon becomes obvious that America’s only real support comes from Great Britain.
In 2009 the league of Arab nations invade and occupy Israel. The U.S. and Britain come to Israel’s defence but it is a struggle that will eventually be lost. China and Russia are supplying arms and troops to the invaders. Tactical nukes are used in the offensive marking the first time nuclear arms have been used in war since WW2. Six months later, India falls to Pakistan. The world is in a state of shock.
In 2010 Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and the entire Middle East form the Eastern Alliance. They quickly expand into most of Europe, Asia and Africa. Since they possess a large nuclear arsenal plus most of the world’s oil supply, no countries, including the U.S. are in a position to oppose them. A cold war sets in that would last for 7 years.
It is suspected that the Alliance, headed by Russia is working on cloaking technology. It is rumoured that they have discovered a way to bend light, making it possible to render things invisible, such as troops, weapons and even missiles. Despite their best efforts, U.S. scientists are unable to crack this technology. This would prove extremely detrimental.
In January 2017 the Eastern Alliance launch an attack of cloaked nuclear missiles upon major cities and industry in North America. The U.S. is helpless as all but 2 of its retaliatory missiles are shot down. What’s left of the free world watches in horror as Eastern troops invade American shores in an attempt to occupy the country. Even though most of the command structure has been wiped out, the Americans aren’t just going to roll over. A fierce fight ensues that would last for months. This is where you come in. Corporal Adrian Shepherd, a soldier with grit and determination.
- Title: Nuclear Winter
- File Name: hl1-sp-nuclear-winter.7z
- Original File Name: nw_install_v2.exe
- Size : 66.1Mb
- Author: Loki
- Date Released: 13 April 2005
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Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
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5,773Overall
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0Today
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2Last 7 days
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327365 days
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 5 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 2 Hours, 15 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 20 Mins by Wibble
Longest: 3 Hours, 50 Mins by Hec
Total Time Played: 11 Hours, 15 Mins
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Really interesting mod .
This was originally an Opposing Force mod.
Apparently, the latest version no longer requires OF. One of my favorites – download it – NOW
Author’s Homepage
Nuclear Winter is a single player mission for Half-Life Opposing Force. It comprises 29 new maps plus a ton of new scripted scenes, models, artwork, character voices, sound effects and music. Nuclear Winter was recently re released with Steam support. Opposing Force is no longer required.
Good: New story; Uses OpFor content; Challenging
Bad: Uses OpFor content
Rating: 5/5
Review:
Nuclear Winter is a mod for Half-Life, and a great one at that. However, I will say this first; you must have Opposing Force to play it, as it takes models and code from it, and adapts it to HL. That all being said, this mod rocks. I can remember playing it a while ago, before I set up the site, and it rocked then too. Here’s the deal: You, Cpl. Adrian Shepard and your colleagues must fight off the invading pseudo-Chinese/Arab soldiers. They are all over, in the cliffs, in the city, the zoo, just about everywhere! All being said, the invading force is really just the assassins from OpFor, but they still look good anyway. In Nuclear Winter, you will fight in a real urban setting, as well as other places, but the city battles are well laid out, much like Poke646, which not many mods have been able to pull off very well.
As for the negatives, I can’t really think of any, other than you must have OpFor installed to play Nuclear Winter. So, overall, Nuclear Winter is definitely worth the download, and you all should go get it. This mod would get an Excellence Award, but I felt that the need to have Opposing Force hurt it in the end. But don’t let that discourage you!
I also have this mod, and it dose have it’s challenges, moments and yes some funny stuff. The draw back is that some of the models don’t fit there roles (otis and barney as cops when there not in cop uniforms)
I don’t know when this author came up with the name for his mod, cause Nuclear Winter was a Duke 3D addon published in 1997 by WizardWorks! I have a copy in my collection. Maybe it dosen’t matter anymore???
Played the OpFor Version some time ago. It was ok. However,i had more fun playing Loki`s Xeno Project`s.
I’m not sure it ever did. IF he released something for Duke, then maybe. I really need to think about adding Duke to PP. It’s such a big job I’m scared of how many levels I’ll need to add!
This mod (I say it for the new models) have a story with no relation with Half Life. And when you visit the zoo.. you’ll see it ^^.
It’s funny to play, with good maps and sequences. And certainly a good Challenge (black ops are the most enemies, and Fassns are there too).
One of the best Op. For. adventure, one of the two “must play” in this. 4/5
This is one of the best mods for HL. So it doesn’t require Opposing Force anymore? Even better.
just finished what a great mod. wish more opposing force mods existed. expecially with them mean xen alien types.
Great mod, one of my favourites. Starts off a bit average but once you make it to the city if becomes superb. Later your given a proper mission and a helicoper ride like the one from predator, very funny.
sorry runthinkshootlive
This mod sucked it wasn’t fun and the voice acting was awful
PS I did enjoy the xeno project
If I were you I wouldn’t waste your time on this mod, it’s horrible, believe me.
This mod is far from horrible its great id say
very good/quality game/nice balance/hard in places.
Don’t understand some of the negative posts above, this is a top quality mod and the only problem a have with it, is whether to give it a 4 or a max 5 ranking, go play and enjoy.
this one is worth a play
I hate the mod becouse of the voice acting. Every character sounds rely stupid, dorky and anoying. It doesn’t seem to get to any of you but it rely anoys me. I played through the mod and I do think it could of bean better if the voice acting wasn’t so bad.
Yea really, it really sucks how this mod maker can take the time to make such a mod. And then have the nerve to GIVE it to us! That’s disgusting! I only wish I too had something to bitch about!-( This mod rocks!)
Loved it. It has alot of fighting and some puzzle work to figure out. It did freeze up a few times but no big problem. Well worth the dl.
Works now forgot how much I loved this mod.
After the quintessential The Xeno Project and its sequel, Loki releases another well done mod, this time using the content from Opposing Force, which turns out to be a breath of fresh air.
However, the mod suffers from the same shortcomings than the second opus of The Xeno Project. The voice acting is utterly atrocious, and this is almost an euphemism. I might as well mention that not only are the constant references to Xena anything but humorous, but they are also quite bothersome.
The storyline is quite weak, but this shouldn’t stop anyone from enjoying the quality level design or the well balanced combat. If you enjoyed Loki’s previous work, I don’t see any reason of not trying this one.
First the good: It’s an Opposing Force mod, and makes occasional use of all the major bits of OpFor: Ropes, many new weapons, nightvision, the torch engineer and both new security guard models earn their pay as well.
Now, the rest. There’s some good mapping in here, and lots of the simply functional (traffic lights may be big, but are they THAT big?) I appreciated that the game directs you to a city and from there you go on to a third act – a disappointing one, unfortunately. It was amazing to hear the special operations ninjas called “gooks.” Huh? The game tries to hold out against the inevitable zombie / alien bomb, unsuccessfully, and I felt things started to slip back downhill when you catch sight of the (spoiler!) zoo.
There’s an amusing ongoing joke related to one of the images that found its way into Half-Life’s image WADs – you’ll have to play the game to see and hear it…oh, what the hell, it’s the Xena references.
There’s two rail sections in the game – one a tram (blagh) as in the Half-Life intro; the other’s a user-controlled cart (ungh!) like On A Rail from Half-Life. Neither is especially amazing or wonderful, and the first tram section is followed by a pitch-black section that requires use of nightvision goggles, and as there’s tons of zombies, headcrabs, and barnacles about, you’re constantly ducking and swinging away with the knife to survive but not really feeling that it’s a fair fight. Surprisingly, the tracks won’t hurt you.
I didn’t like the mod’s interspersing OpFor’s Osprey Ride chatter with new stuff – we’ve all played OpFor, and I still don’t get that “so far this all looks familiar” punchline. That said, the new lines blended into this conversation weren’t as obvious as they might have.
There’s two endings for this game in a (I guess) clever use of the mission failure screen text. I didn’t really care for it, but it was there anyway.
In closing: I like city sequences, and the rooftop scene is pretty decent. Any game that tries to pull off a good cityscape while having Otis and plenty of guitar riffs can’t be all that bad. Even so, the game is really only for HL1 style map maniacs.
near the beginning when you have just blown up two tanks, how do you get the engineer to fuse the door open for you coz I push him towards the door and he doesnt do anything 🙁
I’ll see if I can help when I get back tonight.No time at the moment.I don’t recall it being difficult.Perhaps its something your over looking.
After blowing up the 2 tanks and killing all the enemies go back and use the use key to get him to follow you.Once back at the door just go stand by it and cuts it open.Make sure your using the engineer and not the medic.
I am in y9. The tank is blown but there is a force field at the tunnel. How do I pass through it? Th soldier with the rope is with me but he does not do anything. Help Please . Also, in y7 after blowing the pipe and getting to the ladder (to y8) the electrified water gets me every time. There is a built-in y8 map in the Load Map section which I used but is there a non-cheat
way to get from y7 to y8?. Finally is there a walkthrough?
Thank you
is there a walkthrough?i kept dying on the last part where had to kill gman…
There was a walkthrough on Loki’s page, which can still be seen at the Internet Archive.
Quite an underrated mod in my opinion.
I had played through this on co-op when I was beta testing Zhouy’s NW co-op mod for Opposing Force a few years ago, and although I must have played it at least 10 times I never got around to playing it in single player until now. It is certainly worth a play through both SP and co-op so I would recommend both of them. This was also made by the guy that did “The Xeno Project”, another classic in mods and it does show how skilled he was/is.
This mod starts off pretty easy but becomes harder and harder until things get very tough towards the end. I thought the difficulty was near perfect and was easy enough to complete but hard enough to keep me interested. The gameplay was near enough all combat, with the occasional puzzle here and there, and was based around fighting the black ops with a few Xen Aliens towards the end of the game. There was some new textures in this game and I enjoyed them, although they were dull they certainly captured the setting well and were nice to look at anyway. There was also a story which was well done but I feel it could have been excecuted better with probably a little bit more information. There are also two endings to choose from at the end, a good one and a bad one.
Certainly worth a play.
An Opposing Force-style mod (“OF” is NOT required) with an interesting story (see readme.txt) about the world has changed and some countries unite, planning to invade the US with cloaked nuclear devices..
Obviously, your mission to prevent them from doin that so take your squad and give ’em hell!
Pro’s:
-New textures, prefabs, sounds, music etc.
-Squad helps during firefights or opening doors
-Sometimes good leveldesign and layout but mostly it’s not, unfortunately
-Good puzzles
-Some nice scripted sequences
-Story is quite good
-Many weapons
-Quite long (or medium) playtime
Con’s:
-Hard difficulty
-Long walkways
-Some boring-looking or just bad textures, maps, lighting
-Balancing
-Bugs (getting stuck or being unable to move after quickloading)
-Mean placed enemies or turrets, spawns, scripts
Nuclear Winter comes to us from Mr. White, whose previous ventures include The Xeno Project and The Xeno Project 2, both for Half-Life. While Nuclear Winter is by far the largest Opposing Force pack to date and is generally fun to play, it fails to live up to the quality of those earlier packs. Perhaps some of my disappointment stems from the fact that I expected this to be a superb release, based on my thorough enjoyment of the author’s previous HL releases. In any case this remains a fun, but not outstanding, Opposing Force pack.
One thing I was certainly impressed by was the installation process. Valve and Gearbox never made it terribly easy to release modifications for Op4, at least not in the way that they are easy for HL. But Nuclear Winter’s installer program takes the hassle out of a manual installation for the users. There is one fault, though – while the installer copies all of the necessary Opposing Force files to NW’s directory, it fails to copy the config.cfg (which holds all of your key binds) from your gearbox directory. A new config.cfg will be created as soon as you start a new NW game, but it will not contain any customized Op4 bindings you have. Most importantly, you will probably lose access to weapon slots 6 & 7, because they were never used in HL. The easiest thing to do is to manually copy config.cfg from your gearbox folder to the newly created lm_nw folder before you start playing NW.
A fairly thorough story is provided, if you care for that sort of thing. The Cliff’s Notes version: you are a soldier determined to repel the foreign troops that have invaded American soil. And although the story makes reference to the “Eastern Alliance” having cloaking technology, you encounter no cloaked enemies in the game (besides the normal cloaking of the female assassins, if you play on difficult). The maps themselves take place in a variety of locations, such as the classic Southwest U.S. military base, a subway system, a city, and finally a nuclear facility. There isn’t a lot of in-depth story development, but overall you are given a good sense of the tasks you must complete (including a pretty neat briefing and surprise attack in a skyscraper).
When I said in the introduction that I found Nuclear Winter disappointing, that was not intended to mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I did. It’s a fairly fun pack to play, but far from being a classic. In general I found the maps and locations bland and rather devoid of detail. There were some poor texture choices that I felt really detracted from the believability of the locations. The lighting in many of the maps is somewhat dull; some of the locations visited really lend themselves to dramatic lighting which was not taken advantage of. There are also a number of sections that are in near (or complete) darkness. The opening maps were very dark, making combat with the Black Ops assassins difficult, and there is a section later on that is completely dark. This isn’t that big of a complaint, but it can be frustrating with only Op4’s night vision and no flashlight available.
But where NW really failed in my opinion was in the gameplay. First, let me say that I felt the pacing and flow of the game was well done – there are no boring sections, and there are a fair amount of sequences mixed in with the combat. Opposing Force offers a lot of new content in terms of new monsters and weapons, which this pack really didn’t take advantage of. The vast majority of your opponents are Black Ops, which are quality opponents from Op4. The aliens, both from Xen and Race X, make only a brief appearance later in the pack, and there is a very limited amount of combat with them with the exception of headcrabs and zombies (which have some custom models). Furthermore, the only Op4 weapons you obtain besides the melee weapons are the heavy machine gun and the sniper rifle. Kind of a mild bummer that in a pack of this size you don’t get to play with the fun Op4 weapons, such as the displacer or spore launcher.
That leads me into my main criticism of the gameplay: the combat. It’s too easy. Most, if not all, of the most challenging combat comes in the first handful of maps. There, you face male and female Black Ops assassins and a couple of tanks. But what makes this section challenging is that you don’t have the sniper rifle yet (although the overall dimness of the first few maps may add a bit to the toughness). Once you’ve obtained the sniper rifle, Nuclear Winter becomes a piece of cake. Add to that a nearly full load of contact grenades for the grenade launcher and the crossbow which you obtain later, and you end up with an overpowered arsenal. Even on difficult level, the sniper rifle is 1 shot, 1 kill (as your buddy grunts obnoxiously and frequently point out, besides the fact that they are, indeed, “natural born alien killers”). And I found that I never ran completely out of ammo for it. If you are even a mildly cautious player that likes to snipe, NW becomes terribly easy. In addition, you get occasional help in the form of friendly grunts, and a few security guards in one section. This all adds up to a mod that is not especially challenging in my opinion. The balance is better on difficult, but even there most sections are a breeze. However, there are some memorable battles, especially the ones with Apaches.
Despite the above criticisms, there are a lot of neat touches in this pack, starting with the impressive sequences. The pack is introduced via some well-done sequences and cutscenes, and sprinkled throughout are attacks from the air very much like the one you may recall from The Xeno Project. The author has done a ton of custom voice acting for this pack, which on the whole is done pretty well, there are some nifty guitar riffs here and there, and Xena jokes are plentiful.
I do stick to my original claim: Nuclear Winter is fun to play. There are significant shortcomings that really prevent it from being a “must-have,” but in general it is worth the download.
Notes
This review was originally published Thursday, 25th July, 2002 by Unquenque.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four website, which is now offline. The full review is republished here by permission and more details can be found on the About page.
First off thanks to the author for the work to provide some entertainment free of charge! This is often overlooked even on the crappy mods….
Good mod, but past it’s prime w/ better ones available now. Some of the stuff in the games was contrived as needing the barrel to blow up the iron grate, but the Gargantuans were in-killable.
Manually
Easy
3 Hours, 20 Minutes
who do not have the op mods will work? so with HL1
Good OF mission. Not perfect, but interesting enough. And some things there are really fun.
This was a classic mod! I don’t know how I hadn’t found it and play it sooner, also I think it’s kind of surprising Phillip Marlow also haven’t played this mod yet!! so Phillip if you get to read this, please try this one and comment it, because it’d be so interesting to see what you think about it.
Well, overall I liked the concept, it feels like a total conversion mod, without getting out of the OpF and HL environments, the story is clear and neat and is pretty cool to see how it evolves from the beginning to the end of the mod.
Combat is nice and very strategic, which is a thing I love in this kind of mods. Also the OpF weapons are perfect to do clever combat to the end, actually weapons are my favorite thing in OpF, and here is pretty well applied to the mod.
Also the puzzles were clever and all of them pretty good, though I know that some inexperienced gamer could found them kind of hard, but nevertheless they are perfectly beatable.
The cutscenes were pretty nice too, and voice acting though it had his mediocre parts and some kind of cool ones it was well applied too.
The whole maps were medium to big size but always got me exploring and battling so that’s also another detail I liked.
I know this mod it had some buggy glitches, like sometimes faulty triggers or so but that’s rather a common problem in many HL mods, so it didn’t bother me at all, besides all of them could be solved via noclip.
Oh also I almost forget to mention that it also had some pretty cool humor scenes, it was funny to see how the guys who developed it were kind of obsessed with Princess Xena 🙂 a nice reminisce of mid and late 90’s pop culture.
And at last that final escape added a perfect ending to the mod and always got me pretty well entertained as action didn’t was down a bit, so yep I can say this is a very good mod every real HL-OpF pure gamer must play!
Manually
Medium
3 Hours, 50 Minutes
Fix map pls
Wow i love this mod!
It has some tough combats but not impossible.
It’s well designed (mostly the city and the city zoo)
It has grey sky with xen wind noise which i love.
Clever puzzles as well.
Highly recommend!
Manually
Hard
1 Hour, 45 Minutes
Good
Manually
Medium
2 Hours
I know there’s a lot of people who really like this mod but personally I thought it was garbage.
Nuclear Winter is mod set in the futuristic world of 2017 where nuclear WW3 has started, its an interesting premise for a Half-Life mod but I just thought the mapping wasn’t good even for 2006. There are a lot of big open areas and ridiculously unfun moments, for example
Trapping you outside with a chopper.
Running through an identical looking sewer maze with headcrabs hidden under the water.
Running through a pitch black subway tunnel where you can just dodge all the enemies.
Running through a street with a million Black Ops snipers firing through windows and you can only do this with trial and error.
Putting you up against tanks that you barely have enough rockets and grenades to destroy.
I did not enjoy this mod and absolutely would not recommend it.
Manually
Medium
20 Minutes