Half-Life 2 is a mediocre game and a limp successor to one of the greatest PC games of all time
User Rating: 6 | Half-Life 2 PC
Half-Life 2 is a mediocre game and a limp successor to one of the greatest PC games of all time. Developer Valve tries and fails to follow in its own groundbreaking footsteps, but the only genuine improvements on the original game are in the graphics, which are spectacular. I was one of those who were eagerly awaiting this game, and when I finally got it to run (more on what a rollercoaster ride that is later,) I was ready to love it. I really wanted to be impressed, but even my rose-colored glasses couldn’t allow me to see this game as anything but a dreary gray. I would love to give this game a good review, but I just can’t. So let’s get started breaking this sad excuse for a story-driven shooter down into its various inadequate parts. Starting with the most positive, I’ll first mention the graphics, which are extraordinary in the textures, animations, and character models. The lip-synching is particularly well executed. There is mood, personality and emotion to be found in the games environments, and a number of spectacular scenes that can drop your jaw or make your heart skip a beat. Some of the monsters are extremely scary-looking, and some of the corpses evoke horror, particularly those with burned-off lips and hideous rigor-mortised grins. It should be mentioned that while the graphics are great, they are no better than any other state-of-the-art game where graphics are the focus, such as Doom 3. I’m holding back on giving this a ten out of ten primarily because the death animations are pretty weak and there’s a LOT of killing going on so it’s very noticeable. The audio is good, but there’s nothing special to be said about it. The sound effects are fine, but not ground breaking or even particularly noticeable, and the music is non-intrusive when there is music. The voice acting is adequate to the task, but that task is not particularly challenging or inspiring, since the dialogue is predictable and somewhat dull, typical for a video game and probably written by a programmer (My game had no manual and IMDB.com doesn’t list a writer so I can’t check the credits.) If it was written by a professional writer, though, he or she should go back to the Syd Field workshop because not only is the dialogue boring and predictable, but the story is an absolute disaster that starts nowhere under the guise of being a mystery, and goes nowhere flying proudly under the banner of laziness, inadequacy, and/or simple lack of caring. Now, speaking of the story, it is just plain bad. Half-life, for it’s time, was a huge leap forward in storytelling, particularly for first-person shooters. It engaged the player with drama, surprises, and emotional content. Half-life 2 is maybe a half-step forward from that, which leaves them about four and a half steps behind the rest of the world since this sequel took well over five years to produce. This would have been a pretty good game, story-wise, if it came out 12-18 months after the first game, but in the wake of games like Knights of the Old Republic, Metal Gear Solid, and Morrowind: Elder Scrolls, it just left me yawning. There are things going on, but there’s no reason to care about them, and the pacing is so poor that even if one felt interested in the story, there would be no time to digest it. I’m aware that it’s a little unfair to compare what is essentially an action game to role-playing games like KOTOR or Morrowind, but I think that Valve has sold this game as story-driven, and it obviously attempts to tell a compelling tale, so I think I’m judging it by its own standards here. There have been plenty of examples in the last few years of how to tell a great story in a video game, and Valve can fairly be blamed for not learning from those. As for the much-heralded physics engine, I don’t see anything there to be particularly proud of. There are a few interesting bells and whistles, but they’re carefully choreographed and obviously placed in the game in order to be noticed. Other than those few exceptions it’s exactly like any other game: some items are meant to be interacted with, and these are obvious, others are clearly not and they are just dead objects with textures but no interactivity. A few examples: some windows can be broken and others are completely indestructible no matter how much firepower you throw at them, despite them all presumably being made of glass. All doors are completely unbreakable, no matter how thick or thin, and many of them don’t open at all for no apparent reason (except of course the firm hand of the design team shoving the player down their appointed path.) Some garbage can be picked up and manhandled, such as cinderblocks and fire extinguishers (of which there are an absurd amount, because they explode when thrown,) but most garbage is just a lump with a generic garbage texture slapped onto it. As I mentioned before, the deaths are particularly lame, and no matter where you shoot the bad guys, they all die the same death (unless you shoot them with a circular saw blade, in which case they all die the same identical cut-in-half death regardless of where you actually hit them with the blade.) Injuries don’t seem to count at all; NPCs have two states in combat: dead and not-dead. I’m amazed at all the hype this physics engine is getting. To me it looks like a lot of pre-release marketing noise followed by a lot of reviewers not taking a clear-eyed look at the actual product. Now for the worst part of this game: the Steam server system. This game cannot be played if you are not connected to the internet, or if the Valve-created Steam server is busy, for example when a lot of people buy and then play a vastly over-hyped game on its release day. Let me say that again, because I think it bears repeating: just buying and installing this game on your PC is not enough to allow you to play it. You also need, every time you start it, a clear connection to Valve’s servers. I personally have seen several versions of a failure state when starting the game, all related to Steam being too busy for me, and the forums here at gamespot.com are full of other stories like mine. I suspect this setup was a reaction to the theft of the Half-Life 2 source code last year and the release of unofficial versions of the game that followed the theft. Not only is this a case of locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, it’s also punishing the entire class for one childs behavior. My attempts to call their tech support phone number were met, all day long, with the message “All circuits are busy,” so one can only hope that Valve is learning the hard way what a tragically stupid, insulting thing this was to do to its paying customers. I would have tilted this game low anyway, but the Steam server is the reason I gave it a three instead of, probably, a six. All in all this is a fairly standard action game that will sell many times the number of copies that it should, and earn the people who created it a lot more money than they deserve.
