The rare sequel that is better than the first in every aspect.
User Rating: 9.5 | Half-Life 2 PC
The single player portion of Half-Life 2 is the game's strongest attribute. The single player is a decent length but not the huge amount that was first thought. This is still one of the best single player experiences of any game on any platform though and is not something for any video game fan to pass up. The game starts with you arriving in City17, a human city controlled by the "Combine" who have taken over earth, but it's more of a prison than a city with the way the humans are treated. Early on in the game you start by being chased by the combine and it is at this point you will start to become immersed in the game. As you progress through the story you learn of human resistance efforts and meet up with some familiar faces from the first game. The single player is complete with large scale fights and vehicular excursions, and of course puzzles which are what made the first game so unique. With the source engine the puzzles are like nothing you will ever have done before in a game, you may be putting heavy objects on the side a long piece of wood to create a ramp or you may be placing air tanks under objects in water to have the object rise so you can get use it as a bridge across. Things like this and the way the game plays out makes it feel like more than just your average run and gun first person shooter. There is always a downside though and the downside to the single player is that there is not a great deal of variety in the weapons or enemies for the most part and the vehicle ride's just last too long and the fun dissipates after just driving for an hour with only short stops in between to open the way to go and drive more. These are not major problems though and don't take away from the complete experience enough to count off for. There is one other problem though, and that's the ending. Which you will have to find out on your own, but it will leave you wanting more. The multiplayer that shipped is a revamp of Counter-Strike, the extremely popular multiplayer mod for the original Half-Life, aptly named Counter-Strike: Source. A team based game of Terrorist against Counter-Terrorists with true to life weapons and a slew of maps. It does show it's age unfortunately with only two game modes, a bombing mode and hostage rescue mode. If you are a fan of the original Counter-Strike and still enjoy playing then this is a very good thing. However if you are new to the Half-Life world or sick of playing Counter-Strike from years ago then you will probably not be to happy with what you get. Since this is the same game for the most part. At this moment there is less than the original since only nine of the maps have been brought over, and there is is only one type of player model for each team, but it is likely thatmore will be added in the future. This is what you get with the retail game but there are also many other mods, which may or may not be brought over to Half-Life 2. The game shines in game play thanks to the source engine, which sports the most realistic physics of any game to date. The gravity gun alone makes the game worth the $54.99 price tag, being able to pick up barrels and crates, desks and chairs, or any other object you can find in the game and launch them and even use them as weapons against enemies provides hours of joy. This definitely sets a new standard for other games to now uphold. At one point in the game you can even pick up a circular saw blade and launch it to cut an enemy in half. Toward the end of the game you are able to pick up enemies and throw them right back at the squad they came from. The game just has that perfect feel and is in every way deserving of the highest praise in the game play department. Though I do wish that I was able to shoot my team mates since they have a knack for standing in doorways or walking over laser "trip wires". The major thing that I seem to disagree on the most from other reviews that I have read are the graphics. While very good they are not the jar dropping graphics that so many reviews make them out to be. Now a few parts of the game are just drop dead gorgeous, I will say that. Then there are some parts that look worse than all the other first person shooters out there. Maybe I'm being too harsh on it but I just don't see the graphics being worth a ten like everyone else. The sound is the worst part about the game. The voice acting during conversations is fantastic but the music and the lines that your allies that fight along side with you say aren’t quite as impressive. The music is composed of out of place techno music that pulls you away from the game and takes you out of that immersive environment, it just doesn't seem to fit with the style of the game. Luckily the music does not come around that much and doesn't last for too long. The lines that you allies say aren't poorly done they just are just repeated too much, I can't tell you how many times I heard. "I'll follow you Dr. Freeman", "Hey look it's Gordon Freeman" or my personal favorite the line "Watch out Dr. Freeman", after I throw a grenade. The voice acting during the conversations in the game make up for a lot of that. They are just superbly done along with the animation of the characters speaking, which really brings them to life. Value is a tricky one for a couple of reasons. There is a long single player game here but the multiplayer is just the classic Counter-Strike that we all know and love. As fun as Counter-Strike is, it is still in the end the same game that's been out for years, with the same game play, weapons, less maps, and less player models, but with upgraded physics and graphics. If that was where it stopped then the value would be lower than what I've given it, but there is a lot of promise in the mod community and there are also more older mods being brought over like Day of Defeat, a world war 2 mod. So with that hope of things to come not having a new multiplayer is not going to count off as much, it's a shame that they did not create a new kind of multiplayer game to take advantage of the full power of source though. There could have been something new and great here which would bring the value way up, but there isn't. That is the biggest problem with the game, the other problems are small and for the most part can be over looked. Such as the car and hover rides which get dull pretty quick and the annoyance of having to run the game through steam, which feels the need to not find my games half the time and make me log in and out until they appear. Only the hope of something to come saves it from getting below a 9 or even an 8 here. If you've read to here you know that I like the game, a lot. Even with the things that I have a problem with at the end of the day I enjoyed it to a large extent, enough so to give it a perfect ten in my tilt score. It's an epic game with large scale exciting battles that everyone needs to play at least once. Final score - 9.5
