Half-Life

The Good
Half-Life is an odd breed. It is widely hailed as the best first person shooter ever, if not the best game to ever grace the PC. Being the first-person shooter fanatic that I am, I just had to give it a try. I write this review with mixed feelings; you will soon find out why.

So first, the good.

• Game engine. The first thing to look at in a first-person shooter is its 3D engine. For a 1998 game, Half-Life certainly doesn't fail. I wouldn't say it brings unprecedented levels of visual fidelity to computer games (that title is reserved to Unreal), but with its modified Quake 2 engine, Half-Life certainly is nothing to sneeze at; the Research Centre looks exactly as it should: gray walls and red lighting where needed. Luckily Valve's engineers didn't skimp on the colours and lighting, so this game looks for the most part terrific (with some really amazing scenes, such as right at the beginning where there is a room with a scientist who's been taken over by an alien, right next to the locker room). I would say that visually the game is stunning.
• Audio: the game features one of the best audio engines I've ever heard (although I haven't had the chance to play Thief yet). The "regular" audio implementation, that is without any positional audio extensions, is relatively good (for the most part it's easy to pinpoint from which direction voices are coming from and at what distance), but with audio acceleration it excels: despite generally lacking EAX implementation, the A3D 2.0-enabled engine is incredible and adds a sense of depth to the game I've never experienced before. This is very notable from the beginning (especially in the test chamber) and becomes very useful as the game progresses, since you can hear exactly where your enemies are, and with reflections coming from all around it's just as easy to pinponit where in the corridor you should aim. The audio reproduction is terrific, and the voice quality isn't lousy either (unlike a lot of other games).
• The music, where there is any, is great; admittedly most of the ingame background music consists of short, atmospheric tracks, but it's good enough as it is.
• The atmosphere in this game is one of the heaviest I've ever experienced, especially at the early levels. The suspense is incredible: things fall and blow up, catching the player surprised; an elevator with screaming scientists falling down and exploding on the bottom of the shaft... Half-Life heightens the sensations to points never experienced before. Unfortunately, this feeling doesn't last too long, and before reaching the middle of the game one becomes so accustomed to everything that it's difficult to be surprised again.
• Half-Life's plot, while not deserving a Nebula award-winning book, is easily one of the best in any computer game to date. The only similar game I can think of off-handedly that has a better plot is the masterpiece System Shock. Half-Life's story evolves quite well (not as well as I would like though) and is executed to a science in the game, something that is missing in most other computer games (and is the main reason why Half-Life is considered such a good game).
• Some things in Half-Life are incredible: the "dragon" monster (the big one with three heads) part is a stroke of sheer genius. The guy with the suitcase helps heighten what could've been boring-out-of-your-mind levels to interesting plot elements. That rocks.
• I have to give credit where credit is due; although I do not necessarily agree with most people that say that the enemy AI in Half-Life is amazing, I will say that the marines are certainly the most challenging "monster" in a first person shooter game I've encountered so far. People say that they really act like marines; I disagree, as what chance does some science fellow have against squads of trained marines? I will, however, agree that they are much more intelligent than a typical enemy, what with them running around for cover and throwing grenades at you. Also, the little guys that run around real fast, shoot you and run again for cover are fairly challenging. But still, I don't think what a lot of people say regarding Half-Life's AI holds true.

Unfortunately, Half-Life's fantastic qualities are severely crippled by it's less appealing ones. Read on.

The Bad
I guess the single thing that bothers me the most in Half-Life is the poor execution of great ideas; the level design is incredible, but at times I almost tore out my hairs in frustration because of such stupid design mistakes that should've never been. Seriously: Half-Life is the single most frustrating game I've ever played to date. Playing Half-Life is not a pleasurable endeavour at all. Moving along the game is, for the most part, not a test of wits, not even a test of sheer playing ability, but rather a completely frustrating trial-and-error ordeal.

I do not enjoy having to play something over and over again until I can figure out what I did wrong and fix it, and unfortunately Half-Life fails miserably in that area. Want examples? Alright. For one: the dragon monster I mentioned in the previous section. Once you get past the terrific concept, you will find that this part is utterly frustrating! I had to load a game at least a dozen times just to complete this part, because: 1. There is no gurantee that walking slowly around the monster will make it ignore you; it happened many times that I walked slowly around the wall, and still got killed. And it only takes one or two blows for the bloody thing to kill you! 2. Once you DO get across the monster, it happens twice I think that the bridge under you will collapse. Of course that in retrospect it was obvious that it will happen, but how the hell are you supposed to know that the first time you play?!

That's exactly what I mean: trial-and-error gameplay. That's not the way it should be.

I decided I will finish this game out of sheer resentment for the parts that are stupid and mind-numbing, and it was not an enjoyable experience at all. I had a load of fun up until about third of the game (I would say, up until the giant robot you have to electrocute just before the rails), and afterwards the entire game was painful to play. Constant reloads were bad enough, but what truly pissed me off is the poor control system. It's fine for the most part, but for example having climb down ladders can drive you crazy. It happened at least a hundred times during gameplay that I fell off a stupid ladder because of it and had to reload. And who says you can't strafe or jump off a ladder midway? Why should you have to do it a few times just to get it right? That's frustration.

Another thing that bothers me about Half-Life, in regards to its highly acclaimed AI, is that while enemy AI is for the most part good, the AI of the guys you're supposed to work with (guards and scientists) sucks royally. They are completely impossible to work with. They walk around doing stupid things, and will constantly forget that they're supposed to follow you. The guards will shoot you at the back because you're accidentally in their way, and the scientists wlil run around you while you're furiously fighting an alien or another, getting shot in the process. Stupidity reigns.

And the final nail in the coffin: Half-Life is literally PLAUGED with bugs, beginning with small, annoying ones (a missing polygon wreaking havoc in the scene) and ending with abysmal ones that will literally hold you back from finishing the game: When I finally got to the Lambda complex and the scientist there was supposed to let me in, he simply forgot. Why do I mean by that? Well, he said what he was supposed to, agreed to come with me, and... nothing! He wouldn't touch the bloody retinal scanner, and I couldn't even kill him out of frustration because that would forfeit the game. Eventually I had to resort to the "noclip 1" cheat in order to get past that particular section. Why?!

The Bottom Line
A potentially fantastic game, marred by frustrating gameplay and far too many bugs to mention.

The Good
Half-Life represents another chain in the link that started in 1993, when Doom shipped without any sort of "High Scores" table.

Basically, the trend of shooter games towards realism, away from gimmickiness and "arcadeness", and into the a future where games get compared to movies as works of art and you don't wait for the punchline.

Immersion is the altar this game worships at. Not just great graphics or great sound or lots of polygons - immersion. Every aspect of Half-Life is engineered to create a world you can get lost in, from the level design, to the audio, to the overall concept of the game. It's still a shooter with the same fundamental rules as Doom - the way out of these elaborately crafted environments is still generally "shoot the crap out of everything" - but with various subtle touches that seem like nothing yet add up to everything.

It's hard to overstate how successful Half-Life is at what it does. Black Mesa is never anything less than a real place, filled with vending machines, garbage cans, querulous scientists, etc. Within the first few minutes, you get to see a locker room. Open the locker marked GORDON FREEMAN, and you see some of the main character's personal effects - including some books he's reading. The main character in this game reads books! A tiny detail, yet a complete paradigm shift.

You don't find weapons and ammo lying in the middle of the hallway in Half-Life, you find it in a place that makes sense (like a gun locker or a weapons cabinet). You don't open doors with brightly colored keys, you actually have to find a scientist or soldier and ask them to grant you access (which sometimes entails an argument). In one incident a guard started helping me in a gunfight, and yelled "got another one!" as he plugged a headcrab. Despite Half-Life's datedness, scripted moments like this still have an eerie power. For just a second, he's the player and you're an NPC in his game.

Half-Life is masterful in keeping the ugly, clunky machinery of videogaming off-screen. The game seamlessly transitions from level to level. No load screens. No cutscenes. The game just doesn't cut away. It keeps you locked inside the experience, like a movie. Again, the effect is subtle, but you definitely feel it. It's like an orchestra that effortlessly segues from section to section, versus one that has to stop and re-tune their instruments at the end of each movement.

The game has barely any story, but it gives you the ineluctable sense that there probably is a story, you just aren't around to witness it unfold. Not so much "this is a plotless game" as "gee, I wonder what I'm missing out on, wandering around empty hallways with my crowbar." The widely parodied, widely mocked decision to not have Gordon Freeman speak works really well, as you imagine your own voice and your own words flowing into silences in conversation.

The Bad
Half-Life is so overpowering as an experience that it took a while to sink in that I wasn't having that much fun.

A goofy, arcadey FPS like Quake kills Half-Life in enjoyment factor - and Quake's hardly an FPS benchmark par excellence.

Half-Life is just too clever for itself. It's filled with inventive ideas that just plain don't work in an FPS game. Too many times when you have to perform Lara Croft-esque jumps without seeing your feet. Too many places where you have to navigate instant-death tripwires with only a hazy idea of your proximal surroundings. Too many places where you're trying to push boxes around and they go unhelpfully skidding off in the wrong direction. It's like the game gets bored with being a groundbreaking FPS, and also wants to be a shitty version of Rayman.

And what's with the several million miles of air ducts you have to crawl through? Why? What's meant to be fun or enjoyable about that? I swear that half the game is spent hobbling through air ducts. Go fuck yourself for that one, guys.

Looking at Half Life in hindsight, You can see a real "cool stuff overload" coupled with a neglect to the basic principles that make gaming fun. Hit detection is seriously wonky. You're reaction when shooting isn't so much "eat death, hellscum!" as "man, I hope that last shot did damage". Overall, this game's action just isn't satisfying. The entire dynamic of the gameplay and weapons feels "off", like you're just slightly out of control of everything. And the game depends such ridiculous levels of mid-air finesse - I lost count of how many times I had to jump while crouching to fit into a tiny air duct - that it feels like you're playing a third person game hastily reprogrammed for first.

Gradually the illusion wears away, like a woman's makeup tearing. You'll see how facile and shallow much of the game is - how the bosses can be beaten by a chess-playing computer, how the enemy AI is full of holes, how the game has a tiny number of character models and keeps reusing them. It's like Being John Malkovich: The Game.

Half-Life pushed the FPS genre in directions it probably wasn't ready to go. It's an impressive exercise if you value games as artistry, or as visual experiences.

But if you value games as games? I'm not so sure.

The Bottom Line
It's an old, perhaps apocryphal story. Grigory Potempkin, lover of the Russian queen, was given the task of rebuilding the devastated towns along the river Dneiper. Rather than do this, he built a series of beautiful fake towns, with his own men playing the part of happy, well-fed peasants. They would smile and wave as the Empress passed by, and then rush on to populate the next fake town.

Half-Life is amazing to look at, even now. But don't look too hard, or too long. You'll notice the parts held together with duct tape and silly string.

The Good
OK, I am a late bloomer, I know it. So after about 7 years that I have the Game of the year edition of Half Life, I decided to see what the hype is all about.

I don't mind games with past graphics, what I really like about a game is a story and a good design that let me blend in the game world effortlessly.

With Half Life what I liked is the promise of a great story and great setting. The good stuff is here.

Also, the scripted events are cool and add to the atmosphere of the game.

OK, that is about it, But Half Life is like a cake that looks great from a distance and turns out to be plastic when you get closer...

The Bad
For some reason everything that I am about to say has already been said in the past but people chose to ignore it when they gave the game the final scoring. So here is the full list:

Design: Really sucks. This is a FSP, not an adventure game where you have to guess what you need to do next or what valve needs to be opened. It is not Tomb Raider where you have to jump from platform to platform. At times I had to reload 15 times to go past one of those jumping puzzles. Totally out of place.

AI: I guess for 1998 it was great, but by today's games, the AI sucks.

Weapons: Not cool, you have a crowbar, a pistol, machine gun, and some other not very exciting weapons. I have completed 40% of the game and no weapon was really cool.

Monsters: Stupid and not scary at all. Take the zombies for example, they walk slow and simply try to get to you so you should them and they are gone. Or the crab head. Totally annoying. Compare it to Doom's monsters and you get my point. I recently re-played Doom and it was 1000% more fun than this crap.

Bugs: Yes, annoying bugs that prevent you from finishing. Like the one that does not let you leave an elevator and then kills you since you can not move.

I could go on and on. But this game feels half baked and with lots of bugs. I am puzzled what all the hype was about.

The Bottom Line
Life is too short to waste on this crap, go spend time with you family or better still with Halo.