Best Shooter

At a glance, it may seem at least a bit strange to give the highly prestigious award for Best Shooter to Half-Life 2. You might think so because Half-Life 2's strengths aren't simply limited to its shoot-'em-up gameplay, but are also found in its impressive use of physics and facial animations, its complex story, and its entertaining puzzle elements. But, then again, this year the shooter category includes a wide range of strong games that all emphasize different types of gameplay. And, the fact is, Valve's groundbreaking shooter Half-Life set a standard for story-based single-player shooters when it was released six years ago. It's a standard that many other games have since tried to meet (including some of this year's entries), yet on many levels, only Half-Life 2 has truly succeeded.

Half-Life 2's visually and technically impressive single-player campaign is another story-driven adventure starring the hero of the original game, Gordon Freeman. Like in the first game, Freeman gets pulled into an adventure that's far more than it seems, but this time around, he has backup in the form of fleshed-out allies (and enemies) given life by the developer's skillful character modeling and the Source engine's remarkably lifelike facial articulation. The story of the single-player game is woven directly into the actual gameplay. There are no noninteractive, hands-off cinematics here--only a world with characters and events that take place around you in real time.

As a result, even though the game's setting draws heavily from H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and George Orwell's 1984 (neither of which seem like particularly original sources of inspiration for modern PC games), the result is a highly immersive world that serves as an excellent backdrop for the game's equally excellent gameplay. Half-Life 2's single-player game makes liberal use of well-designed set pieces, as well as an extremely impressive use of the Havok physics engine, to allow you to manipulate many different parts of the world directly. And it certainly doesn't hurt matters that Half-Life 2 ships with Counter-Strike: Source, an updated version of the free mod that gave Half-Life legs long after 1998 had come and gone. Considering the impressive showing that Half-Life 2 makes with the Source engine's technology, the future looks bright for more mods and additions to this already excellent game.