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Half-Life 2 Hints

Headcrab Combat Tips

  • 1 of 7: The headcrabs can't reach you up on the catwalk segments, so stay up there and shoot down at them.
  • 2 of 7: To help save on ammo, find the explosive barrels in various places on the floor and shoot them when there are several headcrabs near them.
  • 3 of 7: If an explosive barrel isn't in a headcrabby area, use the gravity gun to pull it along the ground toward you. (It's hard to pull a barrel up to where you can throw it, but it is possible.)
  • 4 of 7: If you have Dog's ball with you, drop it down to the floor so that the headcrabs will cluster around it. When the ball gets a large cluster of crabs around it, blow them all up! (The ball is far more trouble than it's worth past this point, anyway, so it's okay if it gets blown up.)
  • 5 of 7: You can clear the floor of the starting bunch of headcrabs fairly quickly, but there are trigger points in various places that will cause fast headcrabs to spawn.
  • 6 of 7: The only way to totally clear out the headcrab cavern for good is to kill all the starting crabs, drop down to the floor, run up the stairs near the fence-blocked tunnel, and then finish off all the fast headcrabs that spawn over the next few minutes.
  • 7 of 7: Of course, that is *way* more trouble than it's worth! Thankfully, you can leave the cavern and move on without killing all of the headcrabs (or any of them, really).