Half-Life

The Good
If there is anything good to say about Half Life, it is this: weapon feedback. Half Life is first and foremost a shooter, it is your method of interacting with the world, and for the most part, the weapons look solid, feel solid, and sound quite good. The weapons were varied but kept well with the theme of the game and were placed logically, and just as you needed them. Specifically the .357, the shotgun and the gaus cannon provide great feel, sound, and do a good job of killing your enemy.

Half Life flows well from one region to another, with quick loading transition spots that are barely noticeable, save for a subtle change in the lightmap on occasion. You move through several environments which are mostly labs, warehouses, utility centers and the outdoors, along with an alien environment. Half Life does deliver in giving a sense of physically moving from one place to the other.

Memorable moments can be had a few times, particularly the Ichthyosaur and the encounter with the Tentacle in the missile silo, along with much smaller scenarios.

The world is fairly detailed with mild touches reminiscent of Build era games, details like the microwave in the waiting room which can have the power go up higher and higher, until it ruins a meal, and the soda machines which produce cans.

The Bad
Half Life fails mostly on where they claimed their strengths to be. It is billed as the thinking man's shooter, yet there is little thinking required, merely trial and error. You are guided through the entire game on a mostly linear path, where every action you take, save a few exceptions, is required to progress, if it is the wrong action, you are punished by an arbitrary obstacle, or worse, pain or death. Every puzzle encountered, every scripted event, every new weapon and every enemy is placed in such a way that you have to find it then and there, and every other player of the game experiences it in the same order with the same effects. There is no way to own your experiences in Half Life as it can be adequately followed with a walkthrough.

Half Life's storyline is that of Doom's, only with marines coming in as a third party. Scientists tinker with technology, a portal appears and aliens invade, however instead of military being on base to help stop it as in Doom, they come in later and do a cover up. The only true spin on this is that you play a scientist and thus must face both groups. At first it is cool to see marines duking it out with aliens, but replaying scenarios reveals that due to the low level of variance in the ai, it usually turns out exactly the same. Half Life in terms of story plays like Doom where the former marines are instead current marines, and you have to sit through cutscenes (true you never stop being able to move, but you're locked into an area for the duration of an NPC speaking).

Half Life is a cold world, the NPCs have little personality and do little to garner sympathy, in comparison with Unreal's nali, or in opposition the civilians of Blood 2 which are actively made to be disliked. The NPCs serve mostly as mobile keys for the typical locked door.

The artificial intelligence is superficial, but looks great at a glance. Marines seem to take cover and seem to want to live, until you realize that they behave nearly the same regardless of your approach style. It is rewarding to toss a grenade at a group of soldiers and hear them scream "Grenade!" and duck, but the ducking seems to happen regardless of the grenades position, and Ive successfully taken out a squad with a single grenade, as they all ducked right around it. Half Life's ai can be summed up with being on par with Quake 2's in the use of basic breadcrumbs, and stylized with scripted events.

The level design though linear was fairly solid, up until Xen, the alien planet which functions mostly as a jumping puzzle with nuisance enemies. Throughout the game the levels serve mostly as a way to kill time until the next scripted event by mowing down mindless Vortigaunts and Headcrabs.

Lastly, who coded this interface? Half Life seems to be using an external program for its menu, which leads to a lot of mode switching for your monitor. And what for? The mouse driven interface? I really don't understand why it was done this way, and it makes it a chore to do simple things like changing your controls or looking at your saved game list.

The Bottom Line
On the whole Half Life is a basic shooter that attempts a cinematic quality by playing to the weakness of cinema - linearity and lack of input. It is a decent first play through which loses itself as you move forward. Good for $10, but not for the awards it has received, and definitely not the original retail price.

The Good
This game, with over 50 international "Game Of The Year" awards behind it, was something of a success for Valve. The company shot from complete nobodies to superstars in one game. People have been waiting for their next game for about 5 years and nobody seems to be complaining, Valve can do no wrong it seems.

This game has only a few major tricks behind it, the rest is nothing particularly special. However these tricks are implemented so well that it doesn't really notice, and it's very strange how still no other games company has taken on board what they've done and improved it.

Firstly, the AI. The intelligence of the enemies in this game has been talked upon at length before. While the aliens are characteristically not the toughest foes to beat; the human opponents are astounding. They certainly were back in 1998. The soldiers were extremely quick, effective at working in a team, able to throw grenades at you, able to scatter when you threw one at them, able to flank and outmaneuver you, and able to take cover behind objects. They were nearly as good at playing as you were. Then the ninjas: lightning fast, cat-like, they'd shoot you from behind and run off when you found them, a team could pick you off in a second. The AI still has not been beaten.

The second major trick is the use of set-pieces and, bizarrely, no game has ever improved on this. Half-Life was so full of set-pieces that it seemed like literally anything could happen. Lifts would go out of control, whole ceilings would cave in, people would get pulled into vents and eaten before your very eyes. It was so intense and so amazing, why there isn't another game like this is a mystery to me.

Anyone can name a "moment" from Half-Life, like first encountering that incredible tentacle beast in the silo, or stepping into the suspended cage and having it plunge into the water. The fact that one of these legendary moments would happen every couple of minutes was enough to make you scream with delight. These moments were heightened with the excellent use of sound. The faint tapping you hear when you're rooms away from the tentacle beast silo, gradually getting louder the closer you get, until you finally open the silo door and see the gaming world's greatest enemy smashing it's claws against the walls looking for people. - Just terrific. The sound of the head crabs sends shivers down my spine just thinking about it. It's pretty amazing really.

The rest of the game is nothing that special. The level design is quite good, so are the graphics. That's about it. But then who cares because you know this is the only game where you could turn a corner and see a room explode, or a person being eaten alive.

The game also cleverly lets you get accustomed to this world before tearing it apart, it sounds so simple and yet no-one does it. The first 20 minutes or so of the game involve you seeing how the building is run, walking around it, and only then does it throw a spanner in the works. This makes it all the more exciting because it's happening in your new world, not some place you've never seen before. Half-Life is still the best FPS currently around at the time of writing because it introduced so many concepts that have still never been beaten. Plus it has one of the most successful mods around in the form of Counterstrike.

The Bad
There is a lot of platform jumping in between the moments of greatness. First-person platform jumping is the work of the devil. Xen is also looked upon unfavourably because it's taking the player out of the world he recognizes, and also because there is a lot of hopping about on islands. The game's trial & error philosophy is looked upon unfavourably by some, and with good reason. Although it's sometimes necessary as this game world seems so alive and it's almost a trait that anything can happen at any time, that's part of the fun.

The AI of your allies incidentally is dire, that is a bad point. The game is also pretty linear.

I also HATE head crabs. I can't play this game now because of them. They are the scariest enemy ever, and they're in an otherwise non-scary game. Which makes it pretty frustrating.

The Bottom Line
Terrific FPS. Not perfect, and not the best game ever. But it certainly might have been at the time of it's release. Introduced never-before-seen concepts as de riguer in all further shooters. It's linear, it's got scenes of platform-jumping, it's got one skin for the security guards. But it's fantastic, and in terms of pure FPS magic has still never been beaten

The Good
Half-Life was for a long time one of the best FPS games in the world and maybe it's still the number one. The Valve studios made one of the most shocking games using a genre which was a little bit stocked, only unreal was on a par with the game. The game has no important new features regarding other competitors of the same genre, it's just a FPS, with weapons (human and alien weapons), enemies (humans and aliens too), and no puzzles, just go on and kill everything that's trying to kill you and you'll finish the game. The story is more of the same, aliens on Earth and soldiers trying to kill the survivors to mask the truth.

Then, why is this game so important? It's because of its essence, it has a great story, something special is behind everything. Gordon Freeman is a perfect character, and he doesn't even speak! How is it possible? That's the essence I'm talking about. Lovecraft could be proud of this game, we have gates from another dimension, monsters coming from there and everything's because of human's mistake. Ted Backman designed the monsters and he really did a brilliant work, the aliens will not give you a fright, but they're disgusting (specially the crabs) and repulsive. There are many enemies and the game isn't repetitive.

Some survivors will help you along the way, security members will go with you killing enemies with their guns (they'll die soon, it's really difficult to protect them and they will be more like a bait to you) and scientists will heal you and can't fight. They can also open closed doors along the game (something like secret areas with extra ammo and med-kits) and that's why you should keep them alive as far as you can.

There's an enigmatic and deep story behind the game, you'll see a man with a briefcase during the entire game, talking with scientists and observing what you do from the distance. You can't reach him or shoot him and you won't know what's happening 'till you finish the game. When you play the game for the first time you'll notice him sometimes, but it's a good choice to start the game again and look for him (now that you know who he is).

The game has three difficult levels, and they're not really hard, they aren't impossible, so, if you've played many FPS try the hard level because it's difficult but not frustrating. There are many weapons and many-kits and when you know how to deal with all your enemies you'll finish the game with no problems (anyway you'll die many times).

The Bad
There are some things that are not as good as it should. The game has two important parts: Fighting against soldiers - Fighting against aliens. There are some parts in which both of them will try to kill you, but not so many, that's why sometimes maybe you'll be a little bored of killing soldiers/aliens and you'll miss the other enemies.

About gameplay, the design of the shark is poor comparing with the other enemies and fighting with it is not a comfortable experience. The survivors that will help you along the way are really stupid, they have a poor AI and they will stop walking leaving you alone. You'll have to come back to make them follow you and not walking so fast to avoid this thing, furthermore, they're not useful as a fellow team member.

Music's not good and this game deserves something better. There's only music in some parts of the game, and it doesn't suit with it. It sounds strange and out of place. It's the only important bad thing of the game (well, better to have this bad things instead of other important things like gameplay, right?). The FX is good, and the dialogues (maybe I should say "monologue" because Freeman doesn't talk and he just listen to what the others say) are adequate.

The Bottom Line
Half Life is something more than a FPS game. If you like the FPS genre you'll notice that since the beginning. The atmosphere, the characters, the enemies,the main story... Everything has something special. It's a really pleasure to play a game which you know that will make history since the beginning... and it's not overestimated.