Great and awsome come to mind but every game isnt perfect
User Rating: 9.5 | Half-Life 2 PC
Let me first say i havent beat the game yet but im about 3/4 or so of the way done. Well its has been a very long 6 year wait since hl one came out and HL2 we have been looking for, for many years and its finaly here but did the test of time work with it? First i will talk about the gameplay, in short its very fun to play u can kinda think of it like farcry where the levels are set up for u and u have an understanding what to do but u can get there anyway u want. The probably biggest add on is the use of physics and not just the use of um just how they are incorprated into the levels. Almost everything u possibly think might have realtime physics dose from every bottle to chiar to every broken down car on the side of the road. Not only is this cool but u are pretty much thrown into useing them in gameplay fromt the start where u can only pick up small things to where u get the gravity gun (a gun that can pick up almost anything and fire it very far) and u are introduced to this gun by a very cool robot dog thing that u play fecth with (its much cooler than it sounds because the dog is like 8 feet tall). there will be many puzzles involveing the use of thease physics probably the first game to do it this much also there will be a few jumping puzzles. One bad thing i might say about the gameplay is it will take u much longer to do almost anything then u would think it would by looking at what u need to do. Like in one part of a level (one part i said really there is like 30 parts to a level) u need to unplug a cable to unraise the shileld blocking your way but to unplug it u need to cross the bottom of a very long bridge and fight many a monsters then cross back the brige and will probably take u 30min just to cross a shiled. While stuff like this keeps the game long it kinda slows down the action. Anoteher new thing is being able to drive cars and stuff, most of the stuff u will drive is kinda a hunk of junck (like a dune buggy a kinda rusty big go kart) it is still fun to drive. And yet again what u think will be a simple drive form here to there will in the end take u well over two hours to get to there (because u have to fight drop ships stop in buildings to get stuff and do stuff like that bridge crossing thing i said before). But the most important part of a fps is hows the shooting part is like and i asure u its the best part of the game. one cool thing in fighting is almost everything in the wrold (really almost everything u see besides buildings and stuff) can break and it can break into many pices even the people u fight and all those pecies use a physics system (i can drive enough how much the phisics are in the game) so that means after a big battle if u look around probably most everything will be dystroyed and it will look like a junck yard afterwords (much like it would in real life). and your guns all seam very powerful and strong but all that said u feel kinda overpowerd in lots of ways like your person can kill waves and waves of people with out too much troulble. But then again u will lots of the time feel underpowerd not because u cant kill something because in the end u probably will, but the odds they put u up at are overwhelming at first like haveing to dystroy a huge drop ship many of times (u get to use a very cool homeing rocket luancher to do this) u will see that this ship is like bigger than a tank its almost as big as a commercial airplane. But when u do dystroy one of those u fell very good because of how hard it falls. One little problem is sometimes the AI in the game is very real and somethims it feals like u are always outsmarting them but over all the AI is very good. (whoo that was a lot of typing lets move on) Graphics the game looks great it looks very good (some even better than doom3) not only looks great but u can make it look great even on a lower end system. if u got a direct x 9.0 card u will be wonderd on how good the game looks. there is cool water reflestions lighting shadows everything u see in games nowa days. u will see great stuff like realtime reflections on glass even glass bottles. One bad thing is it dosent have much bump maping but do not let that stop u because they find very good ways to make up for that they trick your mind soo much into thinking something is real u might think some of the that some of the stuff is real in there. Also a great thing is what they did with the real time lighting every thing sparkles and shines exactly the way it should and u get some very look looking stuff because of it. Oh yeh i can forget probably the most impressive thing is the character modules that look not only great but animate so life like u will wonder how they did it. There is everything from face expressions to the way differnt people walk. and even real life and non real life things feal like u could really get to know thease people like the way that one girl interacts with her 8 foot tall robot dog she pets it and calls it and says stuff like "go get your ball" and he digs through and finds his ball and wants to paly with u its a very cool sean. over all its one of the best looking games out there. Sound the game sounds great also every gun and thing sounds just the way it probably would in real life and the music kicks in right when u want it to or dont want it to (by that i mean weird sounding mucsic in dark place to make u feal uncomftorble). The only reason i gave it a 9 was because i think they use a few of the same sounds from the first that might make u feal the coulda updated um a little bit. the voice acting is also top of the line they sound very like they would in real life and since the move so real u start to really feal for these people who talk to u and u dont want um to really die. over all it isnt as huge of a hit that the first was the second was probably all u have been waiting for and more so go buy it its loads of fun. oh yeh it also comes with CS source that i wont go that into too much about but its a very fun update to counter strike that u will like so i added that to the score.
