Half Life 2

TL;DR – Half Life 2 is a pretty important game, albeit primarily because of it’s influence on the PC gaming industry via Steam as opposed to it’s own merits. With that being said, the game is perfectly enjoyable in and of itself, although I must confess that I found it highly overrated at release and now increasingly over-hated these days. It’s a highly linear FPS with some cool set-pieces and world building, let down slightly by hapless AI and some weird design choices. I’d say it’s a fun little game, even if it starts off very slowly.

Half Life 2 is one of those games that will forever life in fame, or perhaps infamy depending on your opinion of our forced march into a digital-only future. Despite being an incredibly HYPED game and one that generally remained popular for years after it’s release, these days it’s mainly known about because it’s never ever getting a sequel. Which is a bit of a shame, because Half Life 2 is a decent game and while it’s various revolutionary features are now par for the course, that doesn’t mean it’s bad or unable to compete with those games that came after it. The facial animations are still pretty good, especially for the era and it’s gravity and physics shenanigans are still capable of producing enjoyable moments. It’s a shame that the game has so many see-saw “puzzles”, but at least it gets the memo that we’ve done it already by about the halfway point. Plus to be fair, at the time all this physics was genuinely pretty cool and for better or worse, the combat wasn’t quite so hot at time of release either. All of this makes reviewing Half Life 2 a bit of a pain, because you can view it in a few different ways that all equally valid. You could see the game as a linear 6th gen FPS experience in which case it’s fine. You could look at it through the eyes of it’s time in which case it has really cool features. Or you could view it as the harbinger of the current Steam quasi-monopoly which has not only dominated the PC gaming space but has influenced the console space to the point that Microsoft/Xbox are abandoning physical games. After getting in trouble for trying to abandon 2nd hand games all the way back in 2013. Vindication for Don Mattrick at last?

Regardless of Half Life 2’s wider ramifications, I’m just going focus on my experience playing the game. Which was years after release and my first time playing the game would have been in 2009, after my TF2 clan-mates (throwback) were SHOCKED that I hadn’t played it. Due to the fact that Half Life 2 was one of THE big PC releases of the time and was still a big deal all the way through to the release of the Orange Box. To be honest, I never bought The Orange Box because I didn’t care about Half Life 2 at all and instead ended up buying a physical copy of TF2 for fairly cheap (think it was 15 pounds?) and then getting Portal a year later for Christmas because it seemed cool. As such I got gifted a spare key for the game from someone’s copy of the Orange Box, played it for a couple hours and was baffled as to why everyone cared so much about the game. This was due to two reasons, firstly the opening of Half Life 2 could be charitably described as slowww and also the game really was seen as one of the greatest FPS games EVAR at the time. As such I just thought people were silly and moved on, kept playing TF2, enjoyed L4D1 and L4D2 (after whining about the $60 price tag of the latter). Only now after combing through my backlog and deciding it to give it another chance have I actually enjoyed the game. AFTER making it through the first third, which was also really slow and only gives you the crap weapons.

Which is one of the bigger issues with the game, because if you strip away the narrative and the physics then you’re left with a FPS game that has… uh… not great combat. Especially when the early levels only have a handful of different enemy types, with a handful of weapons you can use to deal with them. That’s not to say that the game has bad combat because it actually gets pretty good later on and there’s an interesting section towards the end where the game really leans into it’s physics based combat. Just that your crowbar, pistol and SMG all suck. Honestly take it from me as someone has finished literally hundreds of FPS games, the basic HL2 weapons are really bad to use. Adding insult to injury, the game has a low maximum ammo pool for most weapons, so you’re only able to get through around 5 magazines of SMG ammo from the absolute maximum. Which is a problem when it’s not very accurate and doesn’t do that much damage, much like the pistol. Fortunately the game picks up especially around Ravenholm when you get the Shotgun which remains pretty decent. Speaking of which Ravenholm introduces a bunch of zombies and really encourages you to use the gravity gun, so it’s where the game starts to come together. If you can make it through Ravenholm, then all of a sudden you’ll be in a hybrid D-Day / Starship Troopers battle, conducting a prison break and fighting a civil war in the streets. The game really picks up in the second half, so I can see why I thought it SUCKED after getting bored by the early stages of Ravenholm. If only I’d had a little more patience, and eaten a couple less pies my adolescence probably would’ve been better. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20 after all.

So how does the game get better? After all, the first couple of hours would seemingly be what the game’s all about. Namely the occasional vehicle section, punctured by physics puzzles, faffing around and getting in combat encounters. You’ve got the zombies, some bugs and the combine who are mainly human soldier guys with the exception of some cyborg combat vehicles (half alien half pewpewpew). Well the main thing it does is stop locking you in rooms while someone talks to you, which it still does later on but with less frequency and with more interesting chatter. It also continues to introduce new enemy types, up until the closing stages of the game which are used to make combat encounters more interesting. The game remains highly linear, but with a few exceptions this isn’t a huge deal as areas make it fairly obvious where to go – and when you get lost, there’s some bonus ammo lying around. In an interesting nod to how games used to be, I found that a couple of times the route you were meant to take was actually somewhat hidden away. A small vent tucked in a corner or a door that seems to be blocked off, but is actually covered in physics objects that can be moved with the gravity gun. As a consequence the game flows well, but still requires you to think a little. As for the combat, as you start getting better guns it shockingly enough gets more enjoyable. You’re organically juggling through your weapons as the situation requires, instead of just using the SMG until you run out of ammo for it. It’s one of those cases where more is actually more. You learn more about the world, there are more enemy types to deal with. You have more weapons to deal with them, which requires juggling your ammo due to the tight maximum ammo restrictions. As a bonus the later stages are just more interesting in my opinion, obvious Ravenholm is cool and unique but the rest of the game hits a similar level.

Which means that OK the combat is good once you hit the halfway point, but what about the rest of the game? Well the graphics are perfectly fine for the time, although the Xbox version does have some long loading times and choppy frame-rates compared to any quasi-modern PC running the Steam version. The price is exceedingly reasonable these days, because it is a twenty year old game but still worth mentioning in a world where Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1 (the original) is still asking for 30 quid. The soundtrack is actually enjoyable, somewhat dated in terms of how it’s used, but it’s good at creating at an atmosphere and some of the tracks are certified club bangers. I’d even go so far as to say that the writing is good, as the characters are relatable and feel organic. Most of them are only used sparingly, but are still memorable due to strong performances. As for the setting and lore, it does a good job of showing not telling and many aspects of the game are deliberately left vague. The only thing I can really fault outside of the game’s slow start would be the noticeable gear-shift that the game has under the hood for it’s multiple loading screens. It’s not a huge deal, but the game does have a little moment every time you hit a stage transition (with multiple per level). The music abruptly stops, the game hangs for a moment, and then you pushed forward with the physics and power usage of your flash-light resetting. It’s especially noticeable when you’re in a vehicle, because the abrupt shove to the game’s physics often leads to some jerky handling.

In conclusion then Half Life 2 is a pretty solid game that has a very slow start. Seriously I can’t get over how much the game actively redeems itself once you get to Ravenholm and especially once you’re got to the latter stages of that level. Up until then it’s pretty bland, but once you actually get interested in the setting and can fully utilise the combat mechanics Half Life 2 really opens up. Everything else about it, aside from the console port is pretty good for the era. As for it’s much touted physics simulation, while it does add something to the gameplay I’d say it’s on the edge of just being a gimmick. The real reason to play the game is for the setting and maybe for the latter combat encounters. It remains very linear throughout, but that’s not always a bad thing. As such I’d give Half Life 2 a modest recommendation, with the caveat that you need to be willing to sit through the first 5 or so levels before it opens up.