A wonderful selection of games; 3 recent Half Life games, 1 Online FPS game and a Puzzle game. Great value!
Episode 2 was a great addition to the Episodal method Valve has been releasing Half Life 3. It takes you further and further out of the city. You get a great feeling of actually travelling this distance yourself. You travel in the luxury of a copped together buggy, basically an improved version of the buggy from HL2. Some of the end battles are nothing short of epic in scale and complexity, which is something great to look forward to at the end of any good FPS game. Personally, i'd consider Epiosode 2 to be evidence of Valves super-saturated skill, in creating interesting new ways of tackling First Person Shooters, i think it's the best in the series so far.
The quality of porting to the Xbox 360 is outstanding, with framerates rarely dipping below 30fps, consistantly and reliably smooth in all situations across all 5 games. The visuals are also high quality, they didn't sacrifice graphical quality for framerate, instead doing a good job of the port and giving near-PC quality visuals, HDR lighting and Anti Aliasing. The PS3 version as i've seen, less can be said for, with framerates often in the sub-20s. Loading times ranged between 4-8 seconds on average for 360, never going above 10 seconds and are reasonably infrequent in number.
I actually already have all the Half Life games up to and including Episode 1. However it was great to have the whole latest selection of Valve games on my second favourite platform as well. It was no less fun, in fact actually i found it more fun playing HL2 and Episode 1 on the 360. It proves that the console really is a definite winner this generation, if a top PC FPS can be ported so well to it.
The other two games, Portal and TF2, are a blast. Portal is short, but very sweet. It involves a portal gun, capable of shooting two portals simultanously for access around various puzzles and mind-bending riddles. TF2 is a fantastic comedy-shooter and somewhat a rarity in todays WW2 and Modern Warfare infested online market.
Definitely a recommendation from me. It'll be even BETTER when the price drops down to £35 or less, as it surely will sooner or later. The value is unbeatable as it is, the games are fantastic and the quality is great.
This is one of the best packages to get this year, so i'm going to give it a 10/10, since there's just nothing i can fault, there really isn't. Unless of course i got stupidly pickly, which i'm not going to do. Yes, yes, this is the second game in a row i've given a 10 Perfect score too, but i'm not going soft. After the gaming wonderland that was 2007s releases, there's a couple more of these i'll be giving 10s to when i get around to reviewing them.
One of those games, will not be Blacksite.