
Research and Development is a puzzle-centric mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two featuring an unarmed player but plenty of violent mayhem.
The player has NO weapons and there is no shooting at all. However that doesn’t mean you can’t kill things, but 95% of the mod is about solving the puzzles that are presented to you in a very natural way.
- Title: Research and Development
- File Name: hl2-ep2-sp-research-and-development.rar
- Size : 66.27Mb
- Author: Marcello Bortolino
- Date Released: 17 July 2009
Linking directly to the PlanetPhillip Direct Download will not work, please link to this page. Thank you.
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- Copy the Research and Development folder into your SourceMods folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Research and Development should now be listed in your Games tab.

Please Note: Panoramic images only are available in full screen mode. You can either open one by clicking the image link above or by saving it to your computer and then opening it locally.
How to use: Once the image is open and your cursor is on the image, press and hold your left mouse button and move around the image. Use your mouse wheel to scroll in and out of the panoramic image.
Click on the thumbnails below to open the video. These videos were created by KernCore
WARNING: The videos contain spoilers.
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Yes, It’s like a visual walkthrough.
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 800 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots may contain spoilers.
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12 August 2009 at 6:44 pm
Marcello Bortolino didn’t make it.
Matt Bortolino did. And he did an awesome job of it too.
12 August 2009 at 6:54 pm
I recieved an email about the mod from Marcello Bortolino but signed Matt.
16 August 2009 at 4:55 am
Shame. Walkthroughs.
Not needed and, hopefully, no self-respecting gamer will use them.
I didn’t and, happily, lots of others played and completed before they even were posted.
To those who have not yet played, don’t use the walkthroughs – they will destroy your enjoyment and the whole ‘raison d’etre’ of this wonderful game.
You are supposed to work them out for yourself. That is the reason for the game. That is why you will enjoy it.
21 August 2009 at 6:23 pm
All I can say is fantastic!!! C’mon Jasper lighten up. I had to use the walkthrough on occasion and it never downgraded my thorough enjoyement of this masterpiece. On the contrary it lessened the frustration level. My congrats to those who did not use it though. I guess I have a long way to go to obtain your puzzle solving abilities.
24 August 2009 at 6:52 pm
The rar file is in my sourcemods folder but doesnt show on steam. wtf?
24 August 2009 at 7:11 pm
And I dont know ho to extract it: im seeing if I can download extraction software.
24 August 2009 at 7:22 pm
OK its fine now its working.
24 August 2009 at 7:29 pm
Why cant you edit your comment!??? Its still not working even the extracted folder is in SourceMods folder inside steamapps.
25 August 2009 at 8:21 pm
This mod starts off quite well and is very enjoyable, but at some point it starts catching some kind of gross hollywood-esque virus of unintelligence and crass overstatement. Then it just becomes silly, pretty much like all hollywood crap.
26 August 2009 at 12:56 am
Nice mod
27 August 2009 at 12:38 pm
This mod is almost pure brilliance. It takes you out of the normal mindset of violence after violence and says” Here, solve this puzzle.” You never g et a gun through the whole thing and the only thing close is the Gravity Gun. The puzzles rang from ” get the antlion through the maze” to ” how do I get the light to the end of this series of mirror like objects?” The game tries not to make you repeat puzzles and the only backtracking is for your own mistakes.
All in all the game was fun, had brilliant level design, neat theme, and worked well in practice.
Now don’t stand around reading these reviews, get to it! Download this brilliant mod and try it out now.
31 August 2009 at 2:17 pm
A lot of good stuff has already been written about this mod, and I agree. The environments are full and well-developed. The diagrams for how to build Mr Whirly or the nitro-booster made me go “Awesome!” The puzzles definitely break new ground in what can be done with the HL2 universe. There were many moments of “Cool!”
That being said, the mod could benefit from more extensive playtesting — there were times when I got stuck longer than was enjoyable, stuck not in “how to I do that” but “what am I supposed to do next?” I can’t blame the author in general for being obscure… there are usually plenty of arrows around to clue you in.
But a couple of places were obscure for me. Like, in the courtyard area with the rotating crane boom and the swinging walks. It would be helpful to know which thing to do first. Otherwise there are too many other possibilities to puzzle over at once. Also, the metal beam that’s key to a later step… I assumed it was immovable, since most of the other stuff lying around was; and when I tried to move it while standing on the ground, it seemed immovable. To re-try every possibly loose object after changing my own location seems tedious.Anyway, these are things that playtesting will reveal.
I also fell victim to the getting out-of-and-back-into-Mr-Whirly bug, even though I downloaded the version that was supposed to fix it. (Maybe I should have restarted Steam?) Thankfully I was able to use the console command workaround.
As I think someone else commented, there were a number of places where plausibility took a back seat to puzzle mechanics. E.g. barrels being unmovable for no apparent reason. But I know this can be a hard tension to resolve well, and I would rather enjoy a good puzzle than have it ruined or cut in order to stay plausible. However the solutions need to be physically plausible, otherwise the player has to just guess!
The above spills plenty of ink on what could be improved, but it bears repeating that I’m very impressed with this mod. The author is really inventive and obviously enjoyed playing around with new ideas, like the magnetic ladder. He also takes existing ideas and stretches them in fun new directions… like fighting off the gunship and helicopter with dropmines and those electric ball thingies. Even more rare is that the inventiveness is accompanied by artistry and care in developing environments.
I say, Valve hire him, put him in charge of a small team, give him guidance from someone with industry experience, and see how he can be empowered to produce great new, interesting stuff.
16 September 2009 at 4:58 am
Just added the Nitrous, but I use LMB to go forward,,
I have changed it to Left CTL but still no boost,,,
17 October 2009 at 7:53 pm
For me, this is the best mod ever made. It’s cleverly done, with a superb environment, gorgeous level details and it’s entertaining all the time. I have to admit that I needed the walkthrough one or two times, but that didn’t ruin the fun for me.
The only thing I didn’t like was the, well, let’s call it “boss fight” right at the end. And the vehicle was a pain to move around. Aside from that – no crititcs.
Solving just puzzles and purely using your brain to advance – AND the phyisics engine but without the use of a single weapon at all, is fantastic. I wish there would be more mods like that. Awesome. I had a lot of fun and I’ve even played some puzzles a third or even a fourth time (right the first time I worked myself through the mod) just because it was so much fun. This is my personal favorite.
20 October 2009 at 5:15 am
What console command?? I still can’t get out of mister whirly without him running off. I read all the replies, did I miss one?
Thanks for helping
14 November 2009 at 7:48 pm
One of the best mod’s I’ve ever played!
15 November 2009 at 6:24 am
I have a serious bug going on. Whenever I try to get out of the vehicle, I just stand up inside the thing and it keeps running. When I jump out of it I can’t move and spins around and cuts me in half. I can’t even noclip to get out of the way. What is this bullshit and how do I fix it?
17 November 2009 at 6:16 am
Genius. Brilliant. Masterpiece.
07 December 2009 at 8:44 pm
Not even Valve can make puzzles as well as this. It starts out good, then it gets better and after that it gets even better. Fantastic visuals, fantastic game play,fantastic everything!
Drop everything and play it now. There is research to be done!
08 December 2009 at 3:55 am
Will I have given this a good go, but in the end my dislike of puzzle oriented mods got the better. No doubt that this is a very clever and extremely well crafted mod, which I had hoped from the start was going to be a fine balanced between action and puzzle solving, unfortunately for me it soon reduces to puzzle solving only, and after the first two sections as shown via the walk through, I begin to loss interest with just puzzle solving.
It’s the shear continues puzzle solving effort that does not hold my attention and I just long for some mayhem, actions and typical Half Life adventure, some of the puzzles are far too complex for me and without help I would not got as far as I did. So I can’t say I enjoyed this mod such that I could not highly recommend it and for me it’s only a maybe.
08 December 2009 at 9:35 am
It’s a shame you didn’t like it, but I can easily see that if puzzles aren’t your thing then it’s definitely not the mod for you.
09 December 2009 at 12:15 am
Pure genius! It stands alongside the Mona Lisa as a great piece of art!
Mr. Bortolino I salute you. It has been an honor to play it. I hope you have more genius brewing!
10 December 2009 at 9:58 am
That game was a blast, simply.
So much thanks modders for making such thing. I loved it from the beggining to the very end.
9/10, -1 just for the little problems in car handling (personal opinion)
07 January 2010 at 5:51 am
Finally got the gravity gun, think the effort caused permanent brain damage, now on the rail track and making progress.
07 January 2010 at 12:21 pm
Come on man, it can’t be that bad ^^,
07 January 2010 at 6:47 pm
It’s very linear in some places, the rail track ride for instance; this sequence would have been far better had there been stop/start controls, so much opportunity to get off and deal with situations, an opportunity missed I think, and if like me you get off anyway to have a look around all the sets are only skin deep. I do understand that it was designed that way and working out what pipe to hit, activating the rail levels and evading incoming was fun and well done, but had this been HL in the real sense of things then for sure the gameplay would have been far more varied.
18 January 2010 at 9:50 pm
This is excellent. Took me some time to figure out how to progress through each puzzle. Sometimes I was just thinking WTF?!? But, a little patience and, as always, keen observation helps you win the day
What I really liked about it was the originality of the design. Some of the areas look great. Top marks.