VideoGame No hurry for a third game...
This might be blasphemous but I am one of the few Valve fans who isn't in a great deal of hurry for the Game That Was Promised. The reason is that Half-Life 2 and especially its Episodes, and the finale of Episode 2 of riding the car and fighting all those striders from invading the base has essentially taken First Person Action Adventure to its limits. In terms of gameplay with weapons, use of terrain, non-interactive cutscenes and the like there probably isn't a lot left to do. Valve being a gameplay over story company were aware of that, and that's probably why they moved on to other projects rather than complete a story and give closure. And besides there's still so much to achieve with Portal that I'd rather see Portal 3...
The main thing about the games is the wit, the moment to moment trades that make it work. Like in Episode 2, Gordon crawling up that ladder(or rope?) to find a Vortigaunt staring at him and telling him, "No pit is complete without a freeman crawling out of it." The story itself isn't really special and that's why they underplayed it and removed cutscenes so we get know characters like Eli Vance and Alyx and her D0g. Video games are the only medium where something like the Gravity Gun or the Portal Gun can make sense and be compelling objects and make interaction with physics something amazing to behold.
I have never liked First Person Shooter games but even then the Half-Life games are something you can't ignore and it's such a powerful example of its kind that you really never need to play any other game of its kind, constantly changing the gameplay bit by bit. Going from a boating to a driving machine and literally giving you the sense of physically traveling a great deal of terrain in a way that even GTA haven't achieved. And then there's Ravenholm, a game within a game, survival horror zombie stage that's better than any Zombie game ever made, especially if you use the Gravity Gun and collect those saws and clubs along the way. Episode 1 is essentially Gordon and Alyx buddy-cop game and Episode 2 is a return to form with the final level being the greatest video game end fight and of course there's that ending.
To people who's playing Half Life 2 (and episodes) for the first time, well fasten your seatbelts it's going to be a bumpy ride and one you'll never forget.
VideoGame ...Am I missing something?
I'm sorry but...I don't see why so many people like this. People have constantly told me about how this is the most immersive, well paced and well written game ever made and how it shines above others and how it uses wise gameplay mechanics such as a wide arsenal of weapons and no regenerating health. The weapons are nothing special, just your generic standard FPS weapons minus the gravity gun, which was ammusing at first but became annoying after awhile. The characters seemed rather flat, the only thing I can honestly say about most people is "they're nice to me because I'm awesome" not exactly anything to write shome about other than that they go through a couple of good emotional moments, Alyx getting angry when her father was betrayed I could get behind, but apart from that these characters didn't really stand out from all of the others that I've seen in the past few years.
Also the puzzle system feels really gimmicky and really forced, for a game that is universally praised for immersion, I have to say that stopping to stack a bunch of boxes on top of one another for figure out how a pully system works, that breaks the immersion for me, it becomes very clear that I am playing a game because stuff like this would never ever happen in the real world. The combat is, for the most part, ok. Fair and stable and the assualt rifle's secondary weapon is fairly ammusing but apart from that it's pretty bland with me just fighting swarms of the same enemies over and over again. This last complaint is rather personal and slightly nitpicky, but the level design just bugs me. Something about Combine building design just bothers me, it feels like it's just a bunch of scrap metal slapped together and it doesn't reflect servents of an interdimensional empire that well, in my opinion at least. Other levels feel repetitive, generic and oddly dirty for no real reason.
Overall, not bad, but not the groundbreaking, immersive best game ever made that I've heard about. The sad thing is that I was really excited when I got this game, thinking that I was in for the ride of my life. Sadly though, it just didn't deliver.
VideoGame It's Pretty Good...just ignore the hype
This is easily one of my favorite games, although that may be considerably biased as I am a massive fan of almost anything Valve puts out and I have a very limited exposure to FP Ses, as most of what I play are indie and simulation games. The story is nice, even if it is difficult to find in certain parts. Some parts of the game are on the line between 'fun challenge' and 'so hard its just plain mean spirited', although thanks to plenty of available walkthroughs this is considerably less of a problem than it was in the past. I can understand how some people dislike the game, though, given that the fan base treats as a flawless work of genius. I don't think there's a single game that could live up to that kind of expectations. To summarize, Half Life 2 is a great game so long as you have patience, acess to walkthroughs, and can ignore the hype.
VideoGame A Chapter By Chapter review.
Point Insertion/Red Letter Day: 7/10. Nothing really exciting here, but exposition is always important, as is getting familiar with the controls.
Route Kanal: 6/10. Easily my least favorite part of the game. It's just a bunch of tedious "puzzles" to me.
Water Hazard: 6.75/10. Slightly better than Route Kanal, in that you get to shoot that goddamn helicopter out of the sky.
Black Mesa East: 8/10. Short, but sweet. N Ice to not have everything shooting at you for a few minutes, and the getting the Gravity Gun is a plus.
"We Don't Go to Ravenholm..." 8/10. Infamous as it is, I give it an 8 simply for scaring the hell out of me at 4:00 A.M., and for having Father Grigori.
Highway 17: 6/10. The Antlions. That is all you need to know about this chapter.
Sandtraps: 8/10. I liked it, honestly. The "don't touch the sand" bit was hard, but it was a fun challenge, honestly. But still, poor Lazslo...
Nova Prospekt/Entanglement: 7.5/10. It was nice finally being able to order the antlions to maul the Combine soldiers, but I give this section a 7.5 because of those damn "set up the turrets and fight a bunch of soldiers while Alyx dicks around for a few minutes" parts in Entanglement.
Anticitizen One: 9.5/10. This is where I believe all of the truly awesome stuff starts. Seeing the rebellion standing up and fighting for their freddom just felt great, and commanding squads of rebels was pleasant. The only reason it doesn't get a 10 is because of the end. It took me 3 HOURS to get out of that area.
Follow Freeman!: 9/10. Continuing from the last chapter, leading the rebellion was cool, and I liked the challenge of fighting the Striders. Also, I loved fighting alongside Barney, and I don't think he could have delivired a better ending line: "And if you see Dr. Breen, tell 'im I said 'F[crash] you!'"
Our Benefactors/Dark Energy: 10/10, Easily the best parts of the game. Losing all of your weapons except for the Gravity Gun is initially a letdown, but once you discover what it can do now that you're in the Citadel...it's just the most fun I think I've ever had in a single-player FPS.
All in all, though it may be a bit overhyped, it's definitely worth a weekend of your time, and any subsequent playthroughs.
VideoGame Half Life 2
The Half Life series is often lauded as being one of the greatest FPS series of all time, with almost everyone saying its completely perfect. Simply put: it's not. Its great, but not perfect. Let me explain in this review of Half Life 2: The game is often lauded for its great production values, enemy AI, immersion, physics engine, and easy modding tools. It deserves a lot of this praise, but the game no doubt has some problems. For example: some of the "puzzles" are really really stupid. Like in one chapter, "Route Canal", you make your way through a sewer, gunning down a whole bunch of Civil Protection officers, when you come across this unreachable area. To get to the area and proceed, you must locate a valve on a pipe to flood the sewer. Thats not even a puzzle. Thats just "find this random red thing located in a red and gray background". However most of the puzzles are pretty good, especially the ones with the gravity gun. Also, I never really felt immersed. Maybe its the giant health bar, or the fact that you cant see your hands while driving, but I never really felt that I was' Gordon Freeman. One more thing: my biggest complaint with the game is that the gunplay is horribly unbalanced. While the MP7 (SMG) and the USP Match (pistol) feel powerful when you are fighting CP officers, they simply feel like toys when fighting combine soldiers (it takes over a dozen MP7 shots to kill one soldier). Later in the game, the only really useful weapon is the shotgun. It kills most enemies with one shot at close range, has plentiful ammo, and has tight enough spread for medium range fighting. The Colt Python (magnum) and the crossbow have nowhere near enough ammo to be effective in normal gameplay. The AR2 is pretty powerful and is a bit more accurate than the shotgun, but the shotgun is still way stronger. Now this might sound like I'm bashing the game, but I'm only pointing out its flaws because the game receives enough praise as it is. It has good AI (even on the resistance members), high quality voice acting, likable characters (especially Alyx) and an awesome physics engine. However, its not the perfect god send everyone makes it out to be. Its a great game (the pros far outweigh the cons), but not perfect.
Final Verdict: 8/10 I'd recommend buying it on steam, but chances are you already have.
VideoGame Alright, But Overrated
I've heard lots of praise for Half Life 2, and when I finally played it through to the end, it didn't quite live up to the hype. I'll begin with what I liked. The combat was alright for the most part. I liked the variety of weapons, and the gravity gun is just awesome. Most of the character were alright, with few exceptions. The pace was decent, and I loved most of the level designs, especially Ravenholm. However, there are some things that just plain sucked in my opinion. The developers apparently think puzzles stop and start with variations of balancing a seesaw, the enemies (particularly Antlions) become more annoying than fun to fight as the game does on, and way too much time is spent running, boating, or driving to the next proper level. This gets to the point where the actual levels feel miniscule in comparison. That last part is compounded by the fact that the vehicle controls in the PC are a bitch to handle, and like to reverse themselves for no apparent reason. my biggest issue, though, is that the good people at Valve forgot the basic rules of story telling. They don't properly set up the plot, they just throw the player into a situation and expect them to figure out absolutely everything between long segments of driving and running for your life. I don't want to be spoon fed the plot, but having to look at vague newspaper headlines on the ground and on walls to get the most basic facts of the backstory is just plain ridiculous. Did a cut scene kill the developers' parents or something? Overall, it's an okay game, but it's also way overhyped.
6/10
VideoGame This game hasn't agened well.. which is sad, because it predecessor DID
I’m here in 2023, many years after the two games and their expansions were published. For the last months, I’ve been playing all of them for the first time. Back to back. And I’ll say: I agree with the reviews here.
I loved the first Half-Life, as well as Opposing Force and Blue Shift. The atmosphere, the combat, the weapons, the enemies, everything. The second Half-Life, however, was disappointing when playing it right after its predecessor. I’ve read here that it suffers a lot from "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny, but I don’t agree (at least, I don’t think it’s only that). That wouldn’t explain why I loved the first game, which supposedly suffers as much, if not more, of that problem. There must be something else.
The story is very poor. The first game had an Excuse Plot, but it still felt like it had exactly what it needed to work. The first game only tells you that an experiment has gone bad and you must go to the other side of the base to fix it, while avoiding the marines that want to kill you, but it doesn’t really ‘’need’’ more explanation. The second game needed more than the first game, but it still took the same approach, which just didn’t work. As Grandmaster Kiramid Head said in his review: ”They don't properly set up the plot, they just throw the player into a situation and expect them to figure out absolutely everything between long segments of driving and running for your life. I don't want to be spoon fed the plot, but having to look at vague newspaper headlines on the ground and on walls to get the most basic facts of the backstory is just plain ridiculous. Did a cut scene kill the developers' parents or something?” Seriously, it’s amazing that at no point the game actually tells you who the Combine (the main villains) ARE.
The variety of enemies is lackluster. Most of the time, you’ll be fighting one of four enemies: soldiers, headcrabs, zombies or antlions. There are sub-kinds of each of them, especially in regards to zombies, but it makes the game feel repetitive, and even breaks the immersion (Earth is supposed to be taken over by an interdimensional empire with an army that conquered it in 7 hours, and all you see is a lot of humanoid grunts that feel like a reskin of the marines from the first game). It’s disappointing when comparing it to the first game, which felt much more diverse.
The weapons are underwhelming when compared to the ones from the first game. In the first game, there was a good variety of them (and that’s before the additions from Opposing Force), each of them had its own niche, each of them felt useful when played up to its strengths. Not to mention that there are some original weapons that were an interesting addition, like the hivehand or the Tau cannon. The only weapon I didn’t like was the snarks, and I think that was only because it had a very poor placement (it had the misfortune of working only against human enemies but being introduced only two chapters before human enemies almost completely vanish from the game), but hey, one bad weapon out of more than a dozen, that’s great. The weapons from the second game felt weak, because of a combination of poor damage against enemies and little ammo capacity: you’re likely to run out of ammo in the middle of a shootout because the enemies tank bullets like sponges, and you can’t carry barely any ammo. It’s as if the developers wanted the player to use the gravity gun which is given very early in the game, and as a result they made the other weapons crappy, so as to encourage the players to use the only weapon that matters for them. And, as erttheking35 said in his review, “the weapons are nothing special, just your generic standard FPS weapons minus the gravity gun”, there are no cool additions here like the hivehand or the Tau cannon, apart from the gravity gun.
As other reviewers have said, the physics puzzles end up feeling shoehorned. They’re something clearly from a videogame and not something you’d encounter in real life. While the first game had examples of this as well, at least there each puzzle felt unique (the only case of “I’ve done this before” was the Pit Worm fight), as opposed to the second game where the seesaw puzzle gets repeated endlessly.
The levels are quite generic. Black Mesa was awe-inspiring, with each section of the base feeling unique and having its own atmosphere. Xen, for all its flaws (I liked it much more than I expected given what I’d read before playing, but that’s not the point), at least felt unique, especially its section in Blue Shift. In the second game, apart from the nice detail of the oceans being drained, thus causing devastation seen across the levels in the form of dried rivers, there’s nothing else that stands out in most of the levels. It’s all the same: go to a ruined place which wouldn’t feel out of place in any another videogame with the appropriate setting (for example, the F.E.A.R. games), shoot all the soldiers there and the occasional headcrab / zombie / antlion, and move to the next place. The levels I would spare are Ravenholm, where the zombie apocalypse setting and Father Grigori make it unforgettable, and the first half of Nova Prospekt, for giving the player the chance to command an army of antlions.
And finally, there are other questionable points. Vehicle controls don’t work very well, although I won’t elaborate since I’ve never heard anyone say they were right. On the other hand, the second game was not only harder than the first game, at least for me, but in a way that felt unfair and tedious. The first game rewarded the player for not rushing to fights shooting like a madman, but instead checking the area and planning ahead, choosing well which weapon to use, looking for possible environmental advantages, taking advantage of chances to ambush enemies, etc. For me, this meant playing “smart” felt easy, but at the same time satisfactory. The second game usually doesn’t let the player do that unless it’s looking around the area for things to throw at the enemies using the developers’ favorite child, the gravity gun, which is something that’s only done well in Ravenholm. Combine it with the weapons being worse in several aspects, as I mentioned earlier, and you have tedious fights with crappy weapons which the game doesn’t let you work around unless it’s with the gravity gun. What’s worse, the second game ‘’loves’’ to throw at the player hordes of respawning enemies without warning. Apart from a couple of Ospreys dropping marines and the occasional headcrab rain, both of them clearly telegraphed, the only parts with respawning enemies in the first game I can think of are some headcrabs in a cave in "Gonarch’s Lair" and some pit drones in a sewer in "Foxtrot Uniform". In the second game, it’s common to have fights where you keep shooting at enemies until you realize after a while “yeah, these guys won’t stop coming, this isn’t what the game expects me to do”.
The saddest thing is, I discovered a Youtube channel called “Radiation Hazard”, and he has an excellent compilation of cut content from the beta. I watched it, and all of that cut content, had it made to the final game, would have fixed all of my problems with the game. A much more interesting story, with a more engaging atmosphere and more unique levels that actually stand out. Tons of different enemies, that actually make the Combine feel like an interdimensional empire. A good variety of weapons. Seriously, I don’t understand it. Apparently, the developers scrapped lots of those things because “they weren’t good enough”… Did they really think the final product was better than that?
The game isn’t actually bad. It has a lot of good things, it’s just that other games have done them better… OK, I can see where the people saying this game suffers from "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny are coming from. It’s just that other games that also suffer from that effect (for example, the first Half-Life) have a more cohesive experience and, when those innovations eventually get copied, the overall result is still good because the whole card castle doesn’t fall down without those innovations. Half-Life 2, to some extent, is a Dancing Bear that hinges on things like its then-revolutionary physics engine and facial animations, and the overall experience without them is quite disappointing. For someone playing in 2023, the first game was very fun even if it no longer feels innovative, while the second game feels like a showcase for a long-outdated physics engine that isn’t that fun unless you have nostalgia from when you played it when it was innovative.
Half-Life Alyx, from what I’ve seen in Let’s Plays, showed how future installments don’t necessarily have to suffer from the same mistakes. In my opinion, that game did right many things that Half-Life 2 did wrong. Even if the Half-Life 2 story was poor, the setting is absolutely incredible, and Half-Life Alyx proved it by playing to its true potential. Unfortunately, 1) we all know what happens with Half-Life 3, 2) being a side-story / spin-off, Valve likely felt creative freedom that wouldn’t feel with a main installment, and 3) for years Valve has only released games that are a Dancing Bear.