ShylockSimmonz's Review of Half-Life

Physic Take It From All Time Great to Great

User Rating: 8 | Half-Life LNX

By shylocksimmonz | Review Date: June 7, 2021

Half-Life is certainly a great game and playing through it over twenty years after it’s initial release only strengthens that for me. That being said it is far from perfect. It’s story; characters; world building and presentation are ground breaking and still worthy of praise. It was a pioneer in not having any cut scenes and keeping you in Gordon Freeman’s shoes. It also managed a great feat in that it Valve chose to communicate the story through side characters you encounter and through announcements. Having Freeman be a mute could have been a terrible choice but they pulled it off. The presentation of the game was fantastic. In that I mean things like the intro train ride setting up the facility and little things such as Gordon’s locker giving him some backstory. The characters of Barney; G-Man; and the scientists all cemented their place in gaming history. There was a good selection of weapons that had many good and memorable choices. The difficulty curve of the game felt a bit off though with some sections feeling extremely easy and others feeling almost sadistic. The enemies were varied and all had little differences that made them unique as well as have slightly different strategies for. The graphics were good for the time. I wouldn’t say they were the best of 1998 but certainly top 5. The reload sounds and animations of the guns were varied and gave them extra character. I will now get to something that brought the game down for me from possible all time great to just great: the physics. Half-Life has by far some of the worst physics I have ever seen and to top it off it is compounded by having brutal levels of fall damage. The worst part of the physics for me was interacting with ladders. Going up or down would be an exercise in patience as it was all to easy for the game to think I wanted Gordon to leap off of it. Other times I would climb up the ladder and it may shoot me up in the air a bit having me lose half of my life in fall damage when I hit the ground. The fall damage and poor physics made some of the platforming very frustrating as well. Some of the issue was timing the jumps while others were seeming to slide a bit after landing. I had these issues years ago when I first played the game and they’re still there now. There are health kits scattered about as well as medical stations scattered as well. You can’t carry any med kits with you though.

I played Half-Life on Linux. It never crashed on me. The game ran great which given the age wasn’t a surprise. There was an option for V-Sync but not any graphics options. The game seemed to be locked to 101 FPS regardless of if V-Sync was turned on. I will say that voices felt a bit muffled or with an echo at times. I also had one time where I went through a platform and got stuck making me have to reload my previous save. There were also textures that appeared black and others that would flicker. I could manually save whenever I wanted and there seemed to be no limit on number of saves. You can also just let the game auto save if you want to. You can’t change the difficulty after starting the game. Alt-Tab works.

Graphics Engine: GoldSrc

Graphics API: OpenGL

Disk Space Used: 529 MB

Save System: Manual and Auto

Health System: Med Kits/Stations

Input Used: Keyboard + Mouse

Settings Used: V-Sync on; 1920x1080

GPU Usage: 3-13 %

VRAM Usage: 534-717 MB

CPU Usage: 14-17 %

RAM Usage: 2.2-2.8 GB

Frame Rate: 92-101 FPS

If you haven’t played Half-Life yet you really should. Physics issues aside it is a great game that has stood the test of time. I finished the game on medium difficulty in 9 hours and 30 minutes. I beat it on hard years ago and knew that with it’s difficulty curve spikes I didn’t want to do that again. I got the game for free years ago from a friend, and also got it through the Orange Box I bought for $49.99 CAD. It is easily worth it’s current price of $11.49 CAD.

My Score: 8.5/10

My System: