Description
Half-Life 2 is an FPS game where you once again play as Gordon Freeman, the MIT graduate from the
first game. You awaken a number of years after the original game on a train to City 17, an Eastern European city which is reminiscent of the World War II ghettos. And the people kept in City 17 are the remains of humanity, left at the will of the Combine, a mysterious alien group who retains totalitarian control of Earth.
You are soon brought into a resistance group, and make an attempt to bring down the Combine and liberate Earth. Why you? You saved it the last time. Or did you?
The player guides Gordon through the City 17 and the wilderness that surrounds it. On his way, he'll encounter a lot of friendly characters, but also fight dangerous foes and solve puzzles to progress. As
Half-Life 2 features a realistic physics system, Gordon can pick up objects and toss them freely, and many of the puzzles are physics-based - for example, at one point the player has to weigh down a seesaw with bricks at one end to turn it into a ramp.
Gordon's enemies, apart from alien wildlife which found its way to Earth, are mainly Combine forces, which utilize a variety of firearms, gadgets and vehicles. Policemen and foot soldiers work along with helicopters, gunships and gigantic walking machines to hunt you down. To defend himself, Gordon has a range of weapons available: from the iconic crowbar for close-quarter fighting, through pistols and rifles, up to grenades and a rocket launcher. Most notable weapon is the "gravity gun", with which one can pick up objects, hold them in the gun's antigravity field, then hurl them at the enemy with great force.
Also with
Half-Life 2 is
Counter-Strike: Source, a version of
Counter-Strike made with the new Source engine which powers
Half-Life 2, and
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, an online multiplayer game featuring the same physics and weapons as the single player game.
Alternate Titles
- "戰慄時空2" -- Chinese title (traditional)
- "半条命2" -- Chinese title (simplified)
- "HL2" -- Abbreviated title
- "Bantiao Ming 2" -- Chinese title
- "하프라이프 2" -- Korean title
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Trivia
In September of 2007 Valve's
Gabe Newell was
interviewed by gaming website Kikizo's Adam Doree about the then shortly to be released
Orange Box, asking, among other things, about the potential for a Macintosh release. Newell responded by saying that though they had been in conversations with Apple regarding the possibility "they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms." Thus, there wouldn't be a Macintosh version of
Half-Life 2.
A month later, in October,
Tuncer Deniz, a Macintosh developer and owner of the news site Inside Mac Games,
posted on his blog that while Newell's complaints likely weren't without justification, the actual reason for the lack of a Macintosh port was due to "Valve's insistence that anyone who wanted to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac had to advance $1 million to Valve. That's right, that's $1,000,000. That might be peanuts to someone like Valve, but no Mac publisher in their right mind would have given Valve that kind of money just for the rights to publish Half-Life 2 for the Mac."
