Half-Life 2

drmac1231 29 months ago

i love half-life 2 [+5 stars]

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i love half-life 2

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dimakua 34 months ago

Perfect game! [+5 stars]

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Perfect game!

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ScoutGames 35 months ago

"Gaming evolution"

Half-Life was a revolution. In a genre dominated by mindless sci-fi blastfests, Valve's debut title took first-person combat to the (vaguely) real world with the thrilling story of research assistant Gordon Freeman and his rise to alien-shredding earth-saving MIT-educated badass. With a beautifully told storyline, revolutionary tactical combat and astonishing levels of AI and environment interaction, Half-Life secured its place as a classic almost instantaneously.

Half-Life 2, on the other hand, is an evolution. We've waited 6 long years for this game, and now that it's here we find that it delivers nothing new. Don't be disappointed; HL2 is, rather, the culmination of six years of action gaming growth, delivered with the kind of maturity and panache that we would expect to wait another half-dozen years for. For this, we have only Valve's design skill and genre savvy to thank.

Far Cry's cunning AI and dizzying scope; Max Payne 2's realistic physics and character-enriching scripting; Halo's massive squad battles and vehicle action - HL2 takes these influences, and outdoes each and every one of them, creating an utterly-seamless, endlessly-changing experience.

Yet despite all these advances, it's still Half-Life. It's still a perfectly-paced always-linear FPS, as thrilling and atmospheric as before. In the beginning, when the game fades in and you find yourself mouselooking once more, even newcomers will find the Half-Life condition immediately clear; you are Gordon Freeman, in body and mind and soul, and absolutely nothing will take you out of this experience. He knows what you know: very little, aside from the fact that it's another day, and you're riding another train, pulling into another station. Another passenger remarks that he didn't see you get on, and you know exactly how he feels.

The train grinds to its halt, and familiar controls work easily as you step into the lazy sunlight filtering into the crumbling station. Smoothly, the world of HL2 begins to slide into focus. You are in a major European city, and, from a massive telescreen, a smiling, Big-Brother-esque man welcomes you to City 17. The Administrator smiles warmly as he explains that his city is a place of wonderful technology, complete safety and boundless prosperity - the evidence suggests that only one of these statements is true. Ubiquitous gasmasked metrocops bully the citizens (grimness evident in their convincing expressions). As you leave the platform, a man is needlessly beaten into a luggage cart (scattering suitcases, which tumble realistically). Blocking your exit, a particularly smug officer knocks a can to the floor with his electric nightstick, before demanding you pick it up and bin it (with the E key). You finally leave the station, and see the skyline; a death-black skyscraper pierces the heavens from the center of the city, wordlessly declaring itself the source of all corruption here. Half-Life 2 is set in a violent dystopia - but it's one as tactile and malleable as can be.

It's not surprising, then (especially considering how much fun it is fighting back by hurling glass bottles and televisions), that you quickly find yourself in big trouble with the law. An initial attempt to resist arrest leads into lucky meetings with a few new friends and a heart-warming reunion with your trusty crowbar. With you at last free to beat back the bastards grinding you down, the game's first few 'real' levels have a quiet kind of intensity to them; you are quickly fleeing the city on foot through the industrial backyards as sirens sing in the distance and a cool female voice reads you your rights through PA systems. The police pursuit efforts lead to shootouts across the rattling train tracks and through gloomy aqueducts; the physics become something to strategize around rather than marvel at, as the adept (if faintly disorganised) cops shred patchwork cover with pistol fire and roll flaming drums down stairwells.

After a few chapters, the tables are turned and the game really begins to shine. After bombing through the city's outskirts in a superb, flawlessly-implemented airboat and meeting up with a few of the game's major characters, a few more scenes of plot development (executed with the same panache and sensitivity you've already came to love) reward you with the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator, AKA the Gravity Gun. With this kickass piece of technology, you can pick up objects far bigger than those you can pick up manually, and then send them hurling. In a scene that exercises the same live-and-learn principles as that can-tipping cop, you learn to use it playing catch with mecha-juggernaut pet DOG (the stellar animation comes through once more to make the ground-stomping beast genuinely adorable). On mastering the gun, that gloriously-interactive world stops being a just really cool threat, and starts being your greatest weapon.

Example. Soon after acquiring your lovely toy, night falls, and you find yourself lost in a dilapidated ghost town. Two things are present in great numbers - wailing flesh-desperate zombies, and rusty razor-sharp saw blades. The carnage that ensues is positively life enriching; cleaving multiple undead bloodsacks in two at the waist is one of gaming's greatest pleasures. Makeshift weapons are everywhere; radiators, wardrobes, car engines, washing machines. For a while, you'll want to fight every battle with only furniture and debris.

Firearms do regain their allure somewhat as the sun rises and you move on, building up a small collection of effective, satisfying peacemakers (including that wonderful laser-guided RPG) as you go. The Gravity Gun remains your most important tool, though, and new uses are constantly found as you travel the scenic coastal route through the countryside; it comes in particularly handy for flipping over the superb turbo-charged attack buggy you get to drive. It also comes into its own as a defensive weapon - manipulating cover and blocking doorways - once your enemies finally get their act together and send in the army: the inhuman Combine soldiers.

These well-armed troops bring the heavy artillery and are a great deal more organised and tactical than the bumbling metrocops. It's rare that their AI exhibits the robot-like precision and bulletproof tactics of the original HL's marines, but they seem a great deal more human; prone to feats of surprising cunning as often as abject foolishness. Admittedly, their mental hiccups appear to be due to under-tested rather than well-written code, but the bugs rarely detract from the experience; the Combine are more than able to stir up some frantic gunplay when you stumble into the various farmhouses and checkpoints on your path that they occupy.

These elite Combine don't appear until nearly halfway through the game; before then, hugely-taxing scenes are few and far between. However, like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 exhibits a skillful sense of rhythm and timing that keeps the game constantly interesting. That early sense of serene tension persists for a good two thirds of the game, save for the occasional well-timed moment where the superb techno soundtrack kicks in and you're thrust into a fearsome set-piece battle; this is until a plot twist brought on by a thrilling midnight prison raid sends the game into overdrive with a series of thrilling squad battles in the war-torn city. The difficulty level fluctuates with the action - for the most part, the game is relatively simple. There's a few quickload-demanding fights and it gets a great deal harder towards the end, but overall it's an easy game, especially the surprisingly-untaxing finale.

Don't worry about that, though, as it's also one of the most exciting and visually-striking conclusions you'll play. A Half-Life game's allure isn't in punishing challenge, but in the spectacle of the thing, in every tiny detail or massive set-piece that makes you just shudder with amazement. The first time you take down one of the magnificent tripedal Strider robots, its spindly legs collapsing across streets and sending cars rolling. The grin that spreads across old friend Barney's face when you first meet him, a million times more sincere than the Administrator's sickly smile. The moment where the bone-chilling sound of a lonely wind is made oddly pleasant by a tinkling wind chime. The bit with the awesome cargo crane.

HL2's own triumph is that its most awe-inspiring scenes aren't pre-scripted; the always-interactive levels and the competent AI that goes with them means that the greatest moments are often entirely your own. HL2 is a perfectly-orchestrated sci-fi masterpiece intended to impress, excite, and enthrall you, set in a world just as alive as you are.

Half-Life 2 is the first-person-shooter evolved. [+5 stars]

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"Gaming evolution" Half-Life was a revolution. In a genre dominated by mindless sci-fi blastfests, Valve's debut title took first-person combat to the (vaguely) real world with the thrilling story of research assistant Gordon Freeman and his rise to alien-shredding earth-saving MIT-educated badass. With a beautifully told storyline, revolutionary tactical combat and astonishing levels of AI and environment interaction, Half-Life secured its place as a classic almost instantaneously. Half-Life 2, on the other hand, is an evolution. We've waited 6 long years for this game, and now that it's here we find that it delivers nothing new. Don't be disappointed; HL2 is, rather, the culmination of six years of action gaming growth, delivered with the kind of maturity and panache that we would expect to wait another half-dozen years for. For this, we have only Valve's design skill and genre savvy to thank. Far Cry's cunning AI and dizzying scope; Max Payne 2's realistic physics and character-enriching scripting; Halo's massive squad battles and vehicle action - HL2 takes these influences, and outdoes each and every one of them, creating an utterly-seamless, endlessly-changing experience. Yet despite all these advances, it's still Half-Life. It's still a perfectly-paced always-linear FPS, as thrilling and atmospheric as before. In the beginning, when the game fades in and you find yourself mouselooking once more, even newcomers will find the Half-Life condition immediately clear; you are Gordon Freeman, in body and mind and soul, and absolutely nothing will take you out of this experience. He knows what you know: very little, aside from the fact that it's another day, and you're riding another train, pulling into another station. Another passenger remarks that he didn't see you get on, and you know exactly how he feels. The train grinds to its halt, and familiar controls work easily as you step into the lazy sunlight filtering into the crumbling station. Smoothly, the world of HL2 begins to slide into focus. You are in a major European city, and, from a massive telescreen, a smiling, Big-Brother-esque man welcomes you to City 17. The Administrator smiles warmly as he explains that his city is a place of wonderful technology, complete safety and boundless prosperity - the evidence suggests that only one of these statements is true. Ubiquitous gasmasked metrocops bully the citizens (grimness evident in their convincing expressions). As you leave the platform, a man is needlessly beaten into a luggage cart (scattering suitcases, which tumble realistically). Blocking your exit, a particularly smug officer knocks a can to the floor with his electric nightstick, before demanding you pick it up and bin it (with the E key). You finally leave the station, and see the skyline; a death-black skyscraper pierces the heavens from the center of the city, wordlessly declaring itself the source of all corruption here. Half-Life 2 is set in a violent dystopia - but it's one as tactile and malleable as can be. It's not surprising, then (especially considering how much fun it is fighting back by hurling glass bottles and televisions), that you quickly find yourself in big trouble with the law. An initial attempt to resist arrest leads into lucky meetings with a few new friends and a heart-warming reunion with your trusty crowbar. With you at last free to beat back the bastards grinding you down, the game's first few 'real' levels have a quiet kind of intensity to them; you are quickly fleeing the city on foot through the industrial backyards as sirens sing in the distance and a cool female voice reads you your rights through PA systems. The police pursuit efforts lead to shootouts across the rattling train tracks and through gloomy aqueducts; the physics become something to strategize around rather than marvel at, as the adept (if faintly disorganised) cops shred patchwork cover with pistol fire and roll flaming drums down stairwells. After a few chapters, the tables are turned and the game really begins to shine. After bombing through the city's outskirts in a superb, flawlessly-implemented airboat and meeting up with a few of the game's major characters, a few more scenes of plot development (executed with the same panache and sensitivity you've already came to love) reward you with the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator, AKA the Gravity Gun. With this kickass piece of technology, you can pick up objects far bigger than those you can pick up manually, and then send them hurling. In a scene that exercises the same live-and-learn principles as that can-tipping cop, you learn to use it playing catch with mecha-juggernaut pet DOG (the stellar animation comes through once more to make the ground-stomping beast genuinely adorable). On mastering the gun, that gloriously-interactive world stops being a just really cool threat, and starts being your greatest weapon. Example. Soon after acquiring your lovely toy, night falls, and you find yourself lost in a dilapidated ghost town. Two things are present in great numbers - wailing flesh-desperate zombies, and rusty razor-sharp saw blades. The carnage that ensues is positively life enriching; cleaving multiple undead bloodsacks in two at the waist is one of gaming's greatest pleasures. Makeshift weapons are everywhere; radiators, wardrobes, car engines, washing machines. For a while, you'll want to fight every battle with only furniture and debris. Firearms do regain their allure somewhat as the sun rises and you move on, building up a small collection of effective, satisfying peacemakers (including that wonderful laser-guided RPG) as you go. The Gravity Gun remains your most important tool, though, and new uses are constantly found as you travel the scenic coastal route through the countryside; it comes in particularly handy for flipping over the superb turbo-charged attack buggy you get to drive. It also comes into its own as a defensive weapon - manipulating cover and blocking doorways - once your enemies finally get their act together and send in the army: the inhuman Combine soldiers. These well-armed troops bring the heavy artillery and are a great deal more organised and tactical than the bumbling metrocops. It's rare that their AI exhibits the robot-like precision and bulletproof tactics of the original HL's marines, but they seem a great deal more human; prone to feats of surprising cunning as often as abject foolishness. Admittedly, their mental hiccups appear to be due to under-tested rather than well-written code, but the bugs rarely detract from the experience; the Combine are more than able to stir up some frantic gunplay when you stumble into the various farmhouses and checkpoints on your path that they occupy. These elite Combine don't appear until nearly halfway through the game; before then, hugely-taxing scenes are few and far between. However, like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 exhibits a skillful sense of rhythm and timing that keeps the game constantly interesting. That early sense of serene tension persists for a good two thirds of the game, save for the occasional well-timed moment where the superb techno soundtrack kicks in and you're thrust into a fearsome set-piece battle; this is until a plot twist brought on by a thrilling midnight prison raid sends the game into overdrive with a series of thrilling squad battles in the war-torn city. The difficulty level fluctuates with the action - for the most part, the game is relatively simple. There's a few quickload-demanding fights and it gets a great deal harder towards the end, but overall it's an easy game, especially the surprisingly-untaxing finale. Don't worry about that, though, as it's also one of the most exciting and visually-striking conclusions you'll play. A Half-Life game's allure isn't in punishing challenge, but in the spectacle of the thing, in every tiny detail or massive set-piece that makes you just shudder with amazement. The first time you take down one of the magnificent tripedal Strider robots, its spindly legs collapsing across streets and sending cars rolling. The grin that spreads across old friend Barney's face when you first meet him, a million times more sincere than the Administrator's sickly smile. The moment where the bone-chilling sound of a lonely wind is made oddly pleasant by a tinkling wind chime. The bit with the awesome cargo crane. HL2's own triumph is that its most awe-inspiring scenes aren't pre-scripted; the always-interactive levels and the competent AI that goes with them means that the greatest moments are often entirely your own. HL2 is a perfectly-orchestrated sci-fi masterpiece intended to impress, excite, and enthrall you, set in a world just as alive as you are. Half-Life 2 is the first-person-shooter evolved.

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