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.