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.