Dystopia was finally released the other day, after about two years in development. So far it’s just a demo with a single map, but it still rocks.

Dystopia is a multiplayer mod for Half-Life 2 that takes elements from Starsiege: Tribes, Deus Ex and some cyberpunk and tosses it all into a blender. The result is an objective-based game where two teams, the Punks and the Corp Mercs fight against each other by taking over or defending objectives.

There are three armor classes for both teams, the standard light, medium and heavy, each class with its own set of available weapons. You’re equipped with a melee weapon, a light machine pistol and a heavy weapon of your own choosing. Then you get to the really interesting part: the implants.

Each armor class has a certain amount of slots for implants (think equipment) that give you certain abilities — thermal vision, stealth suit, sound wave triangulator, a cortex bomb… These all draw energy when activated, which replenishes slowly over time when no implants are running.

The most interesting implant is the Cyberdeck, which allows you to jack into cyberspace terminals. When you do this you enter a Tron-like world where you can hack items that affect the real world — open and close doors to help your team or restrict the other team, reprogram defense turrets to fire on the other team, and other stuff.

The fighting takes place in both cyberspace and the real world, and sometimes it takes a coordinated effort in both places so that your team isn’t torn to shreds by defense turrets when they try to open a door.

This is a great mod, and still only in its first beta stage. Future versions will include vehicles as well. I’m playing quite a bit with some guys from the Penny Arcade forums. If you see [PA]Echo on a server, that’s me.