Half-Life 2

The Good
First things first: Valve has really got their physics modelling down pat. Half-Life 2 was, in 2004, the first major title to feature a physics engine so refined and accurate that it is the stand-out feature of the product. Many of the puzzles and challenges throughout Half-Life 2 seem designed primarily to showcase the physics portion of Valve's Source engine. Moreover, the stand-out new weapon of Half-Life 2, the Gravity gun, is a great way to impress players with how believably tables, computers, barrels, and sawblades go shooting and/or tumbling through the air when fired.

The second-most impressive aspect of Half-Life 2 is the character animation. As in the original Half-Life, Valve has used a skeletal modelling system which produces hands-down the best, most realistic animation of characters in any game today. Explosions will send corpses flying head over heels, their limbs crumpling up against walls and furniture when they land. While playing Half-Life 2 Deathmatch (a free add-on), I will sometimes take pictures of players who died in particularly comical poses.

The last great feature of Half-Life 2 is simply the graphical rendering. Lighting is subtle and seamless, wide-open spaces look great (though not nearly as impressive as in Far Cry), and overall everything looks clean and sharp, particularly with the video options cranked up.

The Bad
There's three main beefs I have with Half-Life 2: linearity, setting, and plot. Now, the first Half-Life was completely linear, but it had a mysterious, cataclysmic story line. I enjoyed going through that game, although the linearity meant I only enjoyed it once.

Half-Life 2, on the other hand, was not a treat to play through, even the first time. The game is set in a dark, dystopian future. You are allied with a group of freedom fighters, who wear drab clothes and all have skin conditions. This is a rather dark and depressing game. DOOM³ may have been dark and scary, but I'll take scary over depressing any day of the week. Scary means exhilaration; depressing means depression. It's just no fun shooting endless Combine soldiers in masks. They've got no personality. The game is a variant on Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four, only the protagonists in Half-Life 2 have little personality, little to identify with. And the character of Alyx, your buxom young sidekick, always smiling and complimenting you, was clearly aimed at falsely boosting the egos of insecure fourteen-year-old boys. She is a two-dimensional character, not nearly as interesting as Cortana from Halo.

The Bottom Line
Half-Life 2 has to be considered a landmark game, but mainly for its technological attributes. After all, future games will build upon the physics, animation, and rendering ideas developed here, but storytelling does not evolve over time, so it makes no difference in the long term that Half-Life 2 is not a great masterwork of fiction.

Well-worth buying, as the various add-ons that may be included with it (Counter-Strike:Source, Team Fortress 2) have much greater replay value than Half-Life 2 itself.

The Good
Half Life, in all of its forms is one of the most beloved IP's to ever grace computers and home consoles. It's obvious to see why, the games are thoroughly enjoyable experiences. They're solidly developed, well produced and competently paced games. The mythological status that the series has developed over the course of years may be a little exaggerated but it can't be denied the core elements of the franchise like the seamless world and well developed story are what defined the series upon release and why it is so popular and so well loved.

So, based on the core fanbase developed by its predecessor Half Life 2 had something to live up to. A change in the dynamics of the gameplay would have totally up ended the solid foundation that had been established and would have ruined everything. Then, it is logical to assume Half Life 2 is very similar to its predecessor. Similar to the point that the two games play almost identically. Judged side by the side the two games are almost identical, very little has changed and it's a double edged sword. If you're familiar with Half Life, if you love Half Life then you'd love Half Life 2. The games virtually identical control system, seamless world broken up by sporadic loads and exposition through interaction with NPC's will be comfortably familiar.

If you're not entirely familiar with Half Life you control a theoretical physicist named Gordon Freeman who in the events of the first game was forced to confront an alien horde invading a hidden government contracted research facility called Black Mesa when an experiment goes wrong. If it sounds strange that a theoretical physicist would be able to fight off an alien horde then there is more explaining to be done, shortly before entering the test chamber to begin the experiment Freeman donned an HEV (or Hazardous Environment) suit to protect himself. The HEV suit provides Freeman with protection and augments his physical strength and speed considerably.

Gordon Freeman is seemingly put into cryogensis at the end of the game and wakes up some time in the future when the world has been dominated by an alien race called the Combine. The story is serviceable and provides a few satisfying twists and turns and memorable characters like the beautiful Alyx Vance and and ex security guard from Black Mesa. The concepts surrounding the story are occasionally more satisfying than the actual reveals, what few of them there are. The hulking, synthetic monstrosities and suggested glimpses at transformation processes give hints at the malevolent machinations of the Combine, while little is actually elaborated on. This suggestion seems to work better than simply laying out a foundation of exposition as every cold war era building crumbling around you and every lonely swingset seems to tell a little story of its own. A story of desolation and neglect, indicative of the grey, depressed resignation of the human race in their subservience.

In every aesthetic respect it's a beautiful game. The Source engine is employed to give the impression of a drab, frightening and claustrophobic world of crumbling buildings and forgotten people. Long lost relics of humanities past lie in the countryside, reminders of how safe a house used to be, now only to be used a base of operation for Combine forces. The town of Ravenholm is a blood spattered mess, filled with corpses, hideous and disfigured monsters lurking in the shadows of the wind swept and long forgotten city. Suggestions of traps being laid, barricades and makeshift hospitals litter the halls of buildings and on the streets. The cityscapes are poetic and do more for the story than the actual story does for itself. What is suggested is powerful and frightening.

The Bad
While Half Life 2 is a beautiful game it lacks any significant gameplay edge. The constant moving from load to load feels like a slog through a drab, depressing neverending world of constant hardship. There are moments of quiet however these quickly end and you're forced back into constant firefights and small, cramped tunnels. It's suffers from the problems that its predecessor suffered from, the rigid insistence not to deviate from the "you are Freeman" concept limits the amount of exposition you could possibly hope to have. It also limits game play possibilities and forces you to adjust to simply going from checkpoint to checkpoint, firefight to firefight and vague narrative point to vague narrative point.

There are sequences where you are able to drive a buggy or a jet boat however these are either too long or too convoluted. There is no pay off for completing them other than going from point A to point B.

The story itself is nothing special either. There was wriggle room to concoct an impressive science fiction story however the narrative elements in this game are either poorly explained or not explained at all. Almost everything has to be picked up from paltry pieces of dialogue or things taped to notice boards and it just isn't enough. The environments tell a story, but they can only tell so much.

The Bottom Line
Half Life 2 is a game that does a lot of things really solidly but ends up coming across as vacuous and Valve as somewhat arrogant. They're convinced that the narrative elements in the game can purposefully remain vague so long as the engine is solid and the game play is too.

The game play is very solid, the firefights are challenging and satisfying and the little deviations like being able to drive a buggy and jetboat are welcome. This doesn't help to alleviate the overwhelming sense of aimlessness. It doesn't help alleviate the feeling that you're simply going through the motions, going from checkpoint to checkpoint.

As much as I enjoyed Half Life 2, I can also appreciate its flaws, which it contains in abundance.

The Good
The Source engine is a lot of fun to play around with. It's quite stable once it's booted up, switching between weapons is easy and you can jump very well. Those three qualities pretty much mean that the engine is tailor-made for the Half-Life series. Thanks to Source, I played through the entire game with barely any problems whatsoever, only the occasional crash while impatiently tapping buttons while the game was booting.

The gameplay is also very challenging and combines the shooting from games like Medal of Honor, with running and jumping that is most reminiscent to the Mario games. Both of these vastly different mechanics start off just as easy: You shoot some slow enemies with a pistol and then continue to jump across some platforms, but nearing the end I was having massive squad-based battles with huge enemies while making jumps that would instant-kill me if I slipped. What remained consistent though is that I never felt like I could just play without paying attention, there was always a degree of challenge and I I always felt satisfied after making it past another section.

Early on in the game you will get your hands on the Gravity Gun, which is one of the main items you will be using. This weapon can pick up objects and fire them away, which is insanely satisfying to do against the Combine. It also pulls double-duty as a puzzle-solving device, as it allows you to reach objects you couldn't normally reach. Another weapon I find criminally enjoyable to use are the beetles. At one point in the game you obtain a little ball that constantly summons beetles, throw it at something and they will go there and kill everything inside. I love it when games give me weapons like these :)

There are also a few vehicle sections spread across the game that were really fun diversions from the normal gameplay. The boats and cars you will be controlling have really smooth controls and are therefore very fun to drive. When they have a gun on top of them, it gets even better!

The world is brilliantly designed and it really makes the story more compelling than it would have been in any other game. From the moment you arrive in City 17, you will notice just how vastly different it is from anything you are used to. It has a linear path that you must follow, but you can never predict what you will see or be faced with next. Valve also totally nailed the atmosphere and I really started caring about the people, not just because of the characters, but because I saw how they treat everything first-hand.

The story focuses on a small group of core characters and their design is also really great. They also have some great writing and voice-acting backing them up, which in the end leaves us with some of the most memorable characters in a video game ever. Hell, when the credits rolled, I was suddenly a lot more interested in buying Half-Life 2: Episode 1, a purchase I had specifically planned not to make.

The Bad
I am going to be honest with you guys: I never finished the first Half-Life. I got to like 80% of it, but in the end I grow a bit bored or I just get myself saved into a corner and can't progress. Going into Half-Life 2, I didn't think I needed any sort of explanation, but once I started playing I was just completely confused. Who are these people? Where are we? Who the heck are these Combine? Some kind of explanation would really help here, but I was given none and just had to make do with what little I could extract out of the dialogue. I also find it peculiar that every plot-point from the first 80% of the first game is seemingly abandoned and that this must mean everything worth mentioning was crow-barred into the last few hours of the game.

It's still quite possible to get yourself saved into a corner, though it's a bit harder this time around. The first time I had to restart the game was during a vehicle section with a boat, where you had to jump over a fire that almost always hit you. I took a lot of damage early in the section, got past three checkpoints and never found any more health, so when faced with the fire, I had no chance at survival and nothing to reload from. Like I said though: it's a lot harder to mess up now.

One section in the game has endlessly respawning enemies, which is a game-design sin I simply can't overlook. It's just ONE moment in the entire game, but it mystifies me how somebody can possibly think we can do proper puzzling and platforming when there are zombies who throw headcrabs at you spawning right around the corner. There is also no indication that you are entering a zone with endless amounts of enemies, so the first time I wasted an insane amount of ammo trying to keep the buggers at bay, until I realized I had to advance, only to be faced with a Fast Zombie and no weapon that could kill him.

The Bottom Line
Every once in a while I get a bit tired of games. I play a lot of RPG's that last 60 or more hours: Zelda, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy (more recently), which aren't really games I can just boot up two hours before work. During these times I just sit at my laptop and do nothing. Eventually I pop in a good FPS and I feel really spirited again, so when I did this with Half-Life 2, I was pleasantly surprised that the game was more than "just an FPS". Possibly one of the best, if not the best, in its genre, Half-Life 2 neatly combines deadly firefights with equally as deadly platforming.

The characters are very enjoyable, the atmosphere is amazing and the game plays very well, Because the story seems to leave new players in the dark, I recommend this game mostly to the fans of the franchise. If you are new to it though, there is no real reason to skip out on this one, aside from the story not really filling you in on some stuff. Only if you prefer your shooters in a more realistic way, without platforming in them, or you just don't like shooters in general, then you should probably find something else to play.