Half-Life

The Good
The entire story is told through interaction which is the best way to tell a story when you make a game. The story is also much better than any other shooter I played in the 90's, they even made an effort to put in some decent characterization. I had to laugh at this because there were only a handful of models and they still acted very differently.

There is a nice balance between platforming sections and fighting sections. Like the story, this sets it apart from many other games that try to combine two genres, most if not all of them end up leaning too much towards one of the genres, automatically making the other feel like an annoyance. In Half-Life both the shooting and the jumping are part of the game and both have a difficulty curve.

The boss-fights are rare, but also unique to Half-Life so far. I am not even sure if they are boss-fights as the game uses the same "bosses" multiple times throughout the game. The thing here is that the fights are mostly a collection of clever puzzles that you need to solve in order to kill the boss. There are enemies along the way and you will need to sneak past the monster, which is very scary and keeps you on the edge of your seat. At the end all the puzzles you completed form a connection which allows you to deliver the final blow to the monster. Good job Valve, good job.

The Bad
The game is very difficult and at one point I actually had to quick-save between every few shots because I couldn't do the fights in a single solid attempt anymore. I had to constantly reload saves where I was able to fire a few good shots without taking too much damage and that is just insane. It also has the problem I mentioned in Dragon Age 2 where incredibly huge fights can be right around the corner, sadly you don't have a mage with healing magic in this game to keep you going, so you need to be extremely careful.

The level design is a big problem, not just the design, but also the progression. All the scientists keep urging you to get to the surface at the start of the game, but once you get there you will be forced to go underground again before you even got to look at the scenery a little bit. As the game progresses the design also gets very confusing nearing the end and I mean in the Doom or Wolfenstein way where everything just looks the same.

I arrived at the point that the game was almost impossible for me in every aspect. The puzzles were still fun, but the combat and platforming was near-impossible, but there was still like four hours of game to be played. The game wasn't even fun anymore, I was done with it. This seems to be a nasty habit of games that are amazing, Psychonauts had it as well, nearing the end when you decide for yourself that the game should end before it outstays its welcome, it still keeps going for another hour or more.

The Bottom Line
This game is still pretty fun, but it also has some very serious problems. The game keeps going for way too long and becomes very difficult and repetitive nearing the end. HOWEVER! This game is still worth checking out because of the great balance between platform end shooting sections and a well-told story.

The game offers a lot, but you do have to give a little yourself as well if you want to fully enjoy it, is what I am trying to say here. If you can ignore the very annoying flaws of this game then you will be able to enjoy it, but if you are like me and you don't have enough time to play through a game like this, you might want to skip it.

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.

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.