NeoTokyo is a little mod for Half-Life 2. It's design is based heavily upon Ghost in a Shell and plays a lot like Counter-Strike: Source. The mod itself is alright. Something I thought was interesting is that they got a guy named Ed Harrison to put together a full fledged soundtrack for the mod. If you actually play them mod, it's not something that is seeped in music. In fact, the only music I can recall hearing was the victory songs for either faction when they win a round. However, a thread on a forum I go to brought up the NeoTokyo soundtrack with links to YouTube, so I gave it a listen.

Here, have some gameplay before I give you my reaction to the soundtrack.



Ok, all good? Good. Onward to the soundtrack...



Holy. Shit.

The amount of effort that was put into this music by one person is astounding. It could be used in a full fledged game or anime series. The music itself is a weird combination of Jazz, Ambient Electronic, and Trip-Hop. It's very calm sounding. When a song is building up and hits that peak, it's like a kick in the face. Annul, the first song on the soundtrack, set's a pretty good tone to what Ed Harrison can do...



Tin Soldiers is a song more in line with Trip-Hop, but it can be hard to think of it like that with how much the track jumps around from slow bass beats into a much quicker tempo.



Scrap I/O reminds me of a James Bond song. Possibly a new theme. That would kick ass.



Reboot is the song you hear when you win a match, but it's not really extended all that much on the soundtrack which disappointed me a little. For as short a song as it is, it sound cool and I wish Harrison went further with it.



Footprint is my favorite song on the whole album. The song builds up into something awesome that blew my mind when I first heard it.




They used to sell physical copies of the soundtrack which was a 2 CD set, but they sold out and it doesn't look like they will make more. However, someone put the whole soundtrack on YouTube for your listening pleasure. Disc 1 can be heard here and disc 2 can be found here. If you like it so much, you can still buy a digital version from Amazon for only $9! That's $9 for 27 songs, over half coming in at over 5 minutes. The whole soundtrack is just under two and a half hours long. It's totally worth the buy. You can get it here.