Despite a few of parts that don't work, Half-Life 2 is a fantastic-looking game that is easy to recommend.
User Rating: 9 | Half-Life 2 PC
For the first half of this game, I was ready to anoint it the best action game ever made. Everything just works so well. The gameplay is perfectly balanced, the mystery in the story builds, and everything seems perfectly tested so that it works just right. All of the additions that the game makes to the genre are ingenious. Then, about 2/3 of the way through, the game loses some steam. The level design takes a step backwards to 1998 in some areas. Other times, gameplay elements simply don’t work all that well. Finally, the story ends without answering a damn thing, making you wonder whether there is going to be any resolution for what seems like a bunch of senseless plot twists. Half-Life 2 is the most incredible looking game ever made. It blows away Doom 3, and is still easily better looking than Far Cry. Everything in the game looks amazing. The characters look, move, and act so life-like. The water almost makes you thirsty looking at it, and each of the game’s enemies are loaded with detail. The new alien enemies that you meet about halfway through the game are particularly impressive, and the gigantic striders are simply unbelievable. City 17 is a strange mix of beauty and despair. I have never played a game that so perfectly captures an atmosphere like this. Imagine what a rundown Eastern European city would look like in a totalitarian state ravaged by mayhem, and you have it in this game. Towards the end of the game, when you are fighting through bombed-out, war-torn and flaming buildings, you have to occasionally stop to marvel at the carnage. Valve really hit a home run when it comes to atmosphere. Half-Life 2 adds a lot to the original game. There are a couple of long vehicular sequences, some squad-based combat, a handful of new and interesting enemies, but most of all, physics. No PC game has integrated physics this well into the gameplay. The gravity gun is certain to be imitated by lots of other games. With it, you can pick up all sorts of objects in the environment and use them as shields or weapons. After playing through the game almost twice now, I can tell you that ripping a radiator off the wall and flattening an enemy with it never gets old. Neither does launching an exploding barrel at a group of enemies and watching them fly across the screen. The game also has some physics-based puzzles, which aren’t that much different from the puzzles in the original game. With the exception of one significant stuttering bug, the audio for Half-Life 2 is unforgettable. Everything in the game sounds so – cool. Every sound will implant itself firmly in your memory. The radio chatter and AI barks of the combine, the whirling of the manhack blades, the horrible moan of the headcrab zombies, the sounds of the gunship machine guns, the hum of the gravity gun, the resounding crack of the 357 magnum, the screeches of the ant lions, and the “thump-thump” that the striders make as they plow through the city. Level design, for the first 2/3 of the game, is brilliant. The game is pretty tightly scripted and doesn’t deviate too far from the formulas of lots of other first-person shooters. Health and shield power-ups are places just enough to make the game forgiving without making it too easy. The game throws a variety of exciting challenges at you and doesn’t get too frustrating or annoying. In particular, the hover boat level is a nonstop thrill ride, and the Ravenholm chapter is like a survival horror game on crack. But after that, you start to run into some areas that become either annoying or just aggravating. It starts with the dune buggy level, which features horrendous controls. You will spend more time upside-down in the buggy than you will spend driving it. Then there are some annoying puzzles. Three times, the game throws a puzzle at you that requires you to build some sort of bridge over a hazardous terrain using objects in the environment. These sequences all interrupt the action, they are too long, and they aren’t fun. There are also some “avoid setting off the turret” puzzles near the end that are outdated and shouldn’t have been in this game. A couple of defensive missions require you to set up automated turrets, which are easily knocked over and seemingly impossible to get standing back up again. These sequences are indescribably aggravating, as you helplessly try to get your turrets upright while your enemies blast away at you. The squad-based portions of the game are unsatisfying. The squad is either fodder or just gets in your way in the game’s tight corridors. If you have a squad, a single strider will cut it down in about five seconds, so it’s pointless to try to keep them alive. Around this time, the game is becoming a quick-save fest, as you are fighting hordes of enemies 10 or 15 at a time, getting ambushed many times. The game still has encounters that require you use the knowledge that you gain by quick saving to get through them. If you ask me, games like Far Cry and Halo have made this type of encounter obsolete. Half-Life 2 is somewhat longer than your average action game. It took me a bit less than 20 hours to complete it the first time, and it has so much to see and do that you can go back and replay it immediately. I loved Half-Life 2, but some of the parts at the end left too much of a lukewarm taste in my mouth to call it Game of the Year.
