The game that stood out in a flood of mediocre first person shooters.

User Rating: 10 | Half-Life PC
Half-Life was the first game released by Valve, who is well-known for Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead. In a time where first person shooters were pretty much only "Walk to Point A to Point B and kill everything." It was refreshing to see an FPS focused more on immersion and story. Half-Life was critically acclaimed upon release, some hailing it has the best game ever. Some say GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64 revolutionized the genre, but Half-Life improved on it.

The game is set in a government research facility known as Black Mesa. Gordon Freeman arrives late to work on a tram that shows just how large the facility is. The other scientists welcome him as they carry on with their experiment. But a horrible catastrophe is caused when an alien crystal is placed into a large beam and causes a "resonance cascade", a phenomenon that involves beings from an alternate dimension to cross with ours. The entirety of Black Mesa is attacked by these alien creatures and Gordon, equipped with a crowbar and the powerful HEV suit, must make his way through the facility and survive the onslaughts of terrible aliens and blood-thirsty military goons.

The game is controlled with mouse look and WASD, which is standard for FPS today. The controls are top notch, never feeling too sensitive or unresponsive. Gordon has an arsenal of weapons to choose from: handguns, sub-machine guns, shotguns, the crowbar, experimental laser guns, and a freaking rocket launcher! I don't know how he keeps them all, but it doesn't matter. The alien enemies are rather easy to defeat, having easily exploitable weaknesses. vortigaunts charge up for one second and shoot, headcrabs lunge but take a bit to do it again, and bullsquids simply shoot green goo at you. The challenge is in the human enemies. The soldiers are called in to silence all of the personnel who witnessed the resonance cascade and end up becoming the hardest aspect of the game. They never border on unfair, but on Hard mode they can be quite a nuisance. The game also features several jumping puzzles which require accuracy and a bit of patience. Remembering to press the crouch button before you land is crucial because if you don't you could end up falling. The game features no cutscenes or breaks of immersion, the whole game is shown through the eyes of Gordon, who never speaks. The only interruption is the occasional loading screen, but these are never long.

A modern gamer today who plays Call of Duty would look at this game and say "Ew, look at those textures!" or "A porcupine is less pointy than this." Well, back then this game was a pretty big deal. The attention to detail is impressive, with some rooms being rather large in scale and never a drop in framerate (depending on your computer's specs). It's true that the character models are rather jagged and sometimes even ugly (The security guard model for example). The weapons in the viewmodel however are pretty slickly detailed, with great animations to boot. But the animations of the characters seem a big stiff. Given it's age to game isn't bad-looking and it never gets in the way of the fantastic gameplay. The music and sound effects, however, are perfect. The music is very catchy and the sound effects are completely original, never using a generic stock sound.

Now, Half-Life is a pretty well-know franchise, sparking a sequel that blew this one out of the water. This game is still, to this day, very fun to play and always provides different ways to beat it.

The Good:
- Fantastic gameplay
- Brilliant music
- Highly immersive
- Great variety of level design

The Bad:
- The graphics may be a drawback to some
- Rather large gap between Medium and Hard