How to Install Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Join a Server

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch is the game where somebody kills you with a toilet.

That is not a joke at its expense. It is the entire design. Half-Life 2 shipped with a physics engine that was extraordinary for 2004, and its multiplayer mode exists to hand you a gravity gun and a room full of loose furniture and let you work out the rest. There are 146 servers listed here, which for a twenty-year-old side product is a remarkable number.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, a paid game and an inexpensive one
• Around 5 GB free

A great many people already own this from an old bundle. Our Steam guide covers account setup if you find you do not.

Worth checking your library before buying. HL2:DM was bundled with several Valve packages over the years, and a lot of people who bought The Orange Box or a Half-Life collection already own it without knowing.

Step 1: install

Install it from your Library. Files land in steamapps/common/Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, and the folder that matters is hl2mp inside it.

Launch once and let the first-run setup finish.

Step 2: enable the console

Options, then Keyboard, then Advanced, and tick Enable developer console. Or add -console to the launch options through the game's Properties in Steam.

You need it to join a server by address, and on this game you need it more than most, because the server browser is thin.

Step 3: the gravity gun

Spend ten minutes understanding this before you join anything, because a player who treats HL2:DM as a normal shooter loses to one who does not.

The gravity gun picks up loose objects and throws them. That is the whole mechanic and it is lethal — a thrown radiator, sawblade or barrel kills outright at close range, and the maps are deliberately littered with them.

Two functions:

• Primary fire punts whatever you are pointing at away from you. It also shoves players.
• Secondary fire pulls an object towards you and holds it. Then primary throws it.

The advanced version is catching. An object thrown at you can be caught with secondary fire and returned, which means a gravity gun duel is a rally rather than an exchange.

Sawblades are the ones to look for. They decapitate on contact and they bounce.

The rest of the arsenal

The conventional weapons are Half-Life 2's: pistol, SMG, shotgun, crossbow, RPG, magnum, and the orb-launching combine rifle secondary.

The crossbow is the sniper weapon and it pins bodies to walls. The RPG is guided — you steer the rocket with your crosshair after firing, which takes practice and is devastating once it clicks.

Movement, and the thing veterans do that you cannot see

You have a sprint, on shift by default, and it drains a bar that refills. Use it to cross open ground and nothing else, because being caught mid-sprint with no charge left is how people die on dm_overwatch.

Underneath that, HL2:DM inherits Source engine movement, which means the old Half-Life tricks work. Air strafing — turning with the mouse while holding a strafe key, without holding forward — accelerates you mid-jump. Chaining jumps carries that speed forward.

Someone who has played this game for fifteen years moves considerably faster than the sprint should allow, and this is why. It is not a modification and it is not cheating; it is a physics quirk from 1998 that Valve never removed.

You do not need it to enjoy the game. It is worth knowing it exists so that the person bouncing around the atrium at twice your speed reads as a skilled player rather than a broken one.

Step 4: find a server

The in-game browser is under Find Servers. The population is small enough that the whole list fits on one screen, which is unusual and quite pleasant.

Our Half-Life 2: Deathmatch list queries every listing directly every fifteen minutes, so the counts are measured rather than claimed, and each entry has a copyable address.

The scene has three broad kinds of server:

• Vanilla deathmatch. The game as shipped, usually on dm_lockdown or dm_overwatch.
• Construct and build servers. Sandbox-adjacent, physics playgrounds, less shooting.
• Modded servers running SourceMod with custom weapons, levelling or gamemodes bolted on.

Populations concentrate in evenings and in specific regions. A server that looks empty at midday is a different server at 9pm.

Step 5: connect

Console:

connect 74.91.113.116:27015

Take the port with the address. 27015 is the default and hosts running several servers on one machine have moved most of them.

First join to a modded server downloads its custom maps and content. On a server with a fast download host this is quick; without one it takes a few minutes and happens once per map.

The maps you will spend your time on

Seven maps shipped with the game and the rotation on most servers is narrower than that. Knowing three of them is most of what you need.

dm_lockdown is the one you will see most. A prison block built around a central atrium with walkways above it, which means most of the fighting is vertical and most of the deaths are from something dropped or thrown from a level up. Very good for the gravity gun, very unforgiving if you stand under a walkway.

dm_overwatch is more open, built around a Combine structure with long sightlines. The crossbow and the RPG earn their place here in a way they do not on tighter maps.

dm_runoff is a drainage system — canals, tunnels, water. Tight, chaotic, and full of loose objects, which makes it the map where the gravity gun is least optional.

dm_powerhouse, dm_resistance, dm_steamlab and dm_underpass fill out the rotation. Steamlab in particular is worth waiting for: it has environmental hazards that kill people who forget they are there, which after twenty years is still most people.

Community maps go far beyond these. dm_killbox variants are the notorious ones — a single room, everybody in it, no cover, entirely about reflexes and thrown sawblades. Some servers run nothing else.

If a server's map rotation is what you care about, the listing shows what each one is running right now.

The chat commands

Populated servers run SourceMod, so the standard set applies. Typed in normal chat:

• !rtv — vote to change the map.
• !nominate — put a map on the vote.
• !motd — the rules page.
• !admin — page a moderator.

Settings that persist

hl2mp/cfg/autoexec.cfg runs at startup and survives updates. config.cfg gets rewritten every time the game closes, so edits there are lost.

Two settings worth putting in it if you came from a modern shooter:

m_rawinput 1
cl_showfps 0

Raw input matters because Source's default mouse handling predates the convention every game now follows, and it will feel slightly wrong until you turn it on.

Problems you will actually hit

Purple and black checkerboards. A custom map referencing content you do not have. Reconnecting after the download finishes usually resolves it; occasionally the map genuinely needs a game you do not own.

"Server is running an older version". The server has not restarted since the last engine update. Nothing to fix on your end.

The server browser is empty. Refresh it, and check the filter is on Internet rather than LAN. If it stays empty, use the list and connect by address instead — the browser on this game has always been unreliable.

You keep dying to objects. Yes. That is the game. Start throwing things back.

Why this game is still running

Worth saying, because 146 servers for a 2004 deathmatch mode needs explaining.

HL2:DM never got a sequel and never got replaced, so nothing pulled its players away. The physics combat it is built on has not really been done again — later games have physics, but none of them made the physics the weapon. And because it runs on the same Source foundations as everything else in this era, server owners who already host Counter-Strike: Source or Garry's Mod can add a HL2:DM server for almost nothing.

That is the quiet reason a lot of these older Source servers survive: they are the second or third game on a machine that was already paid for.

It also explains the shape of the population. HL2:DM does not have a hundred half-full servers competing for the same people. It has a smaller number of servers with genuine regulars, most of them attached to a community that plays several of these games together. Joining one of them and coming back the following evening is a completely different experience from joining a different server every time, and on a game this size it is the only version that works.

Where to go next

Everything you learned here about the console, connect, fast downloads and autoexec.cfg works identically on every other Source game.

Garry's Mod is the obvious next step — it is the same physics engine with the constraint removed, and it borrows content from these games. Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Team Fortress 2 are the other populated survivors of the same generation.

And if the sandbox physics side is what appeals more than the deathmatch, our Garry's Mod gamemode guide explains what that game turned the same engine into.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Half-Life 2: Deathmatch servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.