Half-Life 2 (2004)

Sure, why not?

I recently watched a playthrough of a gamer playing HL2 for the first time and I was amazed at how great it still looks. I mean, we all know Rockstar can make some beautiful games, but GTA: San Andreas (which I love) came out the same year as HL2 and there is just no comparison as far as how the games look

I've always been intrigued regarding how Gordon Freeman (and his trusty crowbar) became so iconic despite the fact that Gordon is a silent protagonist. I think the game does a good job of letting us see Gordon through the eyes of the NPC's and that allows us to really like this theoretical physicist who also happens to be a killing machine. What the hell is scarier than Gordon Freeman coming at you with his crowbar raised?

The game has terrific storytelling, puzzles and revolutionary physics based gameplay. The gravity gun is almost as iconic as Gordon's crowbar.

The game is linear, but there are out of the way areas that you can choose to explore or ignore entirely

It's just a fun ride!! For a long time, people were saying this was the best game ever made. It's been almost 20 years since it's release and while I'm not prepared to anoint it with that title, it still remains a classic

It's amazing that this game was released in 2004. A parent could've been delivering their baby while playing this on release date and that child now would be a legal adult. And yet the game feel almost modern. Sure, the silent protagonist has waned in popularity, but the level design is smart an effective, the sound design is amazing and even the graphics really hold up.

I can completely understand why contemporary players were blown away. The only reason modern audiences might not find anything revolutionary is because they've played so many games influenced by this series.

(very short review because there's nothing I could write about this game that hasn't already been written and read a hundred times and because I'm busy playing Episode 1 :P)

Half-life was a tough act to follow with the superb level design and a constant sense of impetus with the narrative unfolding seamlessly with gameplay. The main selling point for Half-life 2 was the Source engine which featured a robust (for the time) physics engine. The game bends over backwards to highlight this new gimmick and sometimes results in the pace of the game halting. For example, early in the game you are being pursued and you have to stop to stack bricks on a ramp so you can reach a higher ledge instead of jumping and doing a pull-up to get over it. That said, once you get a gravity gun, I'm more than willing to overlook contrived and silly physics puzzles. Being able to grab a circle saw and lob it at a zombie to decapitate them is awesome.

Half-life 2 has some of the most varied gameplay you will experience in a shooter. The game starts with an atmospheric exploration segment demonstrating an oppressive dystopian society under a surveillance state. It's not long before it devolves into chaotic gun battles as you struggle to rebel against the regime. There's vehicle segments, a sandbox where you get to play with the gravity gun to kill zombies with trash and traps, another where you lead an army of bugs into a prison and a befitting finale where you infiltrate the government's super base. The shooting itself is well tuned and significantly improved from its predecessor. You move fast and the controls are responsive.

The pacing is solid, with the exception of some of the physics puzzles that are shoehorned in and both vehicle segments feel like they are drawn out for too long. The narrative is again told exclusively from Freeman's perspective, featuring all in game dialogue and animation. Overall, the facial expression is pretty solid for 2004. The characters mainly stand in one place and pontificate, but each has their charm and quirks making it engaging and a nice change of pace from the combat. The characters are pretty contrived and effectively retcons of the generic scientists you encounter in the first game including the main antagonist. It's also pretty silly how everyone treats Freeman as Jesus when none of them should have seen or were aware of his achievements from the first game. Not to mention he had disappeared for God knows how long... still the story is fun without being groundbreaking. With how episode 1 and 2 end, I will also criticize the frustrating cliffhangers. Particular since we still haven't got Half-life 3 in over a decade. We did get Alyx, but I don't feel like dropping a ton of money for a VR set up just to play one game...

Overall, I had a blast and am glad I finally played this classic and influential shooter.

"I've heard this is the greatest game of all time"

• Jean-Luc's Dad

This was definitely the coolest game I'd ever played when it came out in '04, even if I was maybe a bit too young to play it at the time - the Gravity Gun was absolutely the coolest thing I'd ever seen, and it was all I could think about for the next month.

When the Orange Box came out a couple years later I was blown away by the sheer value of it - I immediately bought it on both PC and Xbox, to play with my friends.

However, now, in 2021, I had to ask myself, is this still as great a game as I remember? And honestly, it definitely is.

While some of the platforming and exploration is a little hampered by the game's age, the game is still full of fascinating physics puzzles and awesome arena challenges, and the gunplay feels as slick as ever. If you've never played Half-Life 2, I encourage you to go pick it up on steam right now. Don't be afraid to just play it on easy and sail through the game like a bad-ass, or bump up the difficulty and treat the whole game like a long series of puzzles that you want to carefully save-scum and cheat your way through.

I definitely preferred mouse + keyboard for aim precision, but controller works fine.

Half-Life 2 is nothing short of a masterpiece. In this game, Valve just about perfected the first person shooter. The game is just fun all the way through, which is not something that most games can say. Valve balances the fast-paced big action sections like plowing through City 17 with your own group of followers in "Follow Freeman", with slower, more horror focused sections like "We don't go to Ravenholm..." so well that I never felt fatigue for either style. They also sprinkled in chapters of just mad fun like "Water Hazard" where you find yourself traveling cross-country in an air-boat while running from and eventually fighting helicopters. They do this in a way that nothing felt over the top or boring and everything flows together into a seamless experience.

I think the thing that Valve does better than any other video game developer is environmental storytelling, and Half-Life 2 is a perfect example. The post-apocalyptic world of Half-Life 2 is so interesting and filled with little nuggets of storytelling and world-building that I often found myself getting distracted from what was going on in the game and just looking around and thinking about what happened here before I came along. There are no cut-scenes or locked-in dialogue sequences, but the story is still richer than most games I've ever played, especially shooters.

No game is perfect, and Half-Life 2 had it's flaws as well. There were some glitchy sequences, and I wish that there was more enemy variety. It gets a little old when you shoot your 100th combine soldier. A couple sections drag on a bit as well, but that might just be me being impatient. The huge amount of positives with this game far outweigh any small issues I have, however.

Half-Life 2 is just about as perfect of a game as you can get. Now if only Valve could finish the incredible story they started.

This game is truly incredible, my favorite of all time as of right now. The best way I'd describe it is that while the specific story it's telling is somewhat standard yet perfectly adequate, the way it tells that story is where it's truly master class. For 2004, this must've been unbelievable, but it's still highly impressive all these years later. Masterful at both visual storytelling and interactive storytelling.

It's an FPS campaign on a tier that I rarely see any competitors. The graphics are dated but visually this is still unbelievably gorgeous. The facial animations especially are very well-done. The voice acting, especially for characters like Breen and Alyx, is quite good. The level design and conveyance are spectacularly masterful, and the game combines its typical sci-fi action feel with a bit of horror-esque atmosphere at times to keep it more interesting. I love all the different weapons, and the game does well to cater to however you want to approach it. The game does a fantastic job of making a mostly linear campaign feel like you're traversing all through this sprawling landscape. And I love how it all looks, the aesthetic style of the game, while going for realism, has some great Eastern European settings and tone with some really picturesque locations and great designs. New mechanics and ideas are introduced at just the right pace, and there's just the right balance of old and new in each level so that there's not too much new things being thrown at you to overwhelm you, but not too much of the same that it all becomes monotonous.

Personally I feel the pacing is amazing in the game. There's plenty of variety in the gameplay, from survival horror and physics puzzles to vehicular segments and more stealth-based portions, and it balances long segments of the game where you get to breathe and sort of relax a little more with story beats and heightened action when the slow pacing feels like it might start to get boring. It feels like the pacing changes at the right moments to avoid the game becoming too laidback or too strenuous. It ties great into the story progression, allowing enough time for Gordon to be himself and not rushing through the plot points. Aside from me wanting the ending in the citadel to be a little more drawn out and challenging, I feel it's spaced out very well at a good length. Maybe there could've been slightly less vehicle stuff and a little more at the end in the citadel, but it's not too big of a problem and I still haven't played the episodes. And while I used to not care for the soundtrack, it's really grown on me.

There are some problems with the game. Your AI companions can get in the way, sometimes characters deliver their lines too early (and some other slight acting quirks that I'm sure were part of this being very new stuff to work with in game design at the time), occasionally it's unclear what to do, there are a few brief segments that become too suddenly hard (and it can be a bit easy sometimes), and some places and props look better than others, but overall I'd say most of the flaws are minor or understandable. The ending felt a bit anti-climactic, too easy and all of a sudden, but like I said I haven't played the follow-up episodes, so maybe that too will become more forgivable.

But in summary, Half Life 2 is a classic FPS that everyone should play. It's still very impressive all these years later and has aged very well. Through every single level I found myself aware of what the designers were trying to accomplish, and you could really feel the mastery of game design, progression, and innovation in visual interactive storytelling they wanted to get across. Go play it.

This is a hard review to write. Full disclosure, I made it pretty much exactly 50% through the main story before making the tough decision to stop forcing it, and instead just watch the main story beats/cut-scenes of the rest of the game on YouTube, and then doing the same for Episodes 1 & 2. I then read the summary of what was supposed to be Half-Life 2 Episode 3 (or Half-Life 3) that's been posted online and taken by some as the "canon" ending to the story.

The main positives of this game are the storytelling and atmosphere - the way you are just dropped into the world 20 years after the end of Half-Life and slowly shown how the world has changed (knowing how you were responsible for it) is really, really cool. The shooting mechanics are fun, and the legendary gravity gun (something I had heard of and appreciated the significance of even though I never played the game before) lived up to the hype. The graphics were a huge step up from Half Life, showing just how huge the technical leaps were between 1998 and 2004.

My main issues with the game are as follows:

• the levels feel way too long and meandering. I found myself getting bored and a little frustrated really quickly. The "Ravenholm" & "Coast" levels lost me - they feel like they go on FOREVER without any real sense of progression, and the gameplay (in 2020) isn't fresh enough to make up for it.
• Through cultural osmosis, I know that the story of the Half-Life series is one of disappointment, having almost zero chance of ever being properly concluded (Half-Life Alyx is a prequel). Knowing that this is the case tempers my investment into the characters and the story, and that really hurts my enjoyment of this game - enough to make the issues with the levels themselves intolerable.

I don't regret time spent on it - this game deserves it's "classic" status for sure - but I feel a little disappointed overall.

The hype surrounding Half Life: Alyx made me eager to dive back into Half Life 2. I had played it quite a few years back and it used to be my favorite game ever. However, in this meantime, I really got into studying and getting to know game design theories better in order to have a deeper apprectiation, understanding and critical sense towards what I play, so I was afraid that delving back into HL2 would make me see a bunch of flaws and lessen my love for it, making me realize it was actually a POOPY video game.

However, after all these years, I'm happy to repport that Half Life 2 has aged like a fricking Van Gogh painting and is DEFINITELY NOT A POOPY GAME.

The game´s design is supperb. Story, mechanics and level design are all tangled like a DELICIOUS PASTA. Marc Leidlaw is one talented son of a bitch. This is a dude who can write a true GAME SCRIPT and not just A SCRIPT in the vein of God of War 2018.

The best way to understand Leidlaw´s talent, I believe, would be to read his short story about the events of Half Life 2: Episode 3. You should't read it if you don't want to spoil a game that will never be released (at least, not how he envisioned it), but if you chose to read it, you will be treated to a masterclass in how to write for games. Appart from being extremely engrossing, well laid out and AWESOME, the series of events he narrates can make you see amazing gameplay scenarios happening RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYEBALLS (metaphorically). Also it just tyes EVERY KNOT from HL2's story like it was something easy to do all along.

That makes me really sad that they never finished the game (and that Leidlaw left Valve). If they just followed his script and implemented the design he envisioned it would be a PERFECT end for HL2's saga and then that would probably achieve world peace OR MAYBE SOMETHING EVEN GREATER.

So yeah, HL2's scenarios are that good and as if that was not enough the game is soaked in some of the best atmosphere ever seen in electronic entertainement media a.k.a. VIDEO GAMES.

I have two gripes with the game though. One is: the turret missions were too easy and it felt like my game glitched out and was't spawning enough enemies. Maybe it did glitch actually. I played it on a MacBook (sorry).

The second gripe is: WHY DOESN´T THE MUSIC LOOP MORE????? It is soooo gooooooood T________T

The graphics also look really good even today showing that even if you aim for realism, your game can age gracefully if it has a great artistic direction (I'm lookin at you, Heavy Rain).

And thaaaat is it! Thanks for reading :)

(BTW, shout out to Matthewmathosis, Mark Brown, Tim Rogers and MOTHERFUCKING GROUVEE <33333 for getting me more interested in game design! (also, any Matthewmatosis fans in the house? He´s the GOAT in my opinion)).

“Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There’s nowhere to hide. Not underground, not underwater, not in the air.” -Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl

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Half-Life 2 is one of the best games of all time. If you’ve not yet stumbled across Valve’s masterpiece then waste no time in picking it up – I first played it in 2015 and immediately cursed the 11 years I’d lost in the interim. It’s available on Steam, Xbox 360, and the PS3 – you’ll find it, almost ridiculously, available at bargain bin price.

Now [steeling oneself]… whilst I, and some of other gamers, baulk at the relentlessly excessive reliance on first-person shooters by so many modern AAA developers, this one is different. It’s getting older now but, my word, it hardly shows. It’s a near-perfect gaming experience.

What exactly, then, does Half-Life 2 do so compellingly compared to hundreds of other FPSs available? Why should you enter a so intelligently constructed, dark, and twisted world of physics-based, radiation crackling lunacy which will so immerse you into the experience you’ll be left emotionally drained, yet elated, by the closing sequence? Read on, Macbeth, for the answers.

Lofty Beginnings

In the late 1990s, the Valve Corporation was rather busy riding on a wave of success, as well as working away on two projects which would shape (if not entirely revolutionise) the future of gaming. Half-Life had hit the shelves in 1998 and was immediately hailed as one of the greatest games of all time – it was radical and, whilst GoldenEye 007 had arrived on the N64 in 1997 and shaken things up a bit, this was something altogether different and exciting.

Valve was also developing its Steam software which most of us now know and love, but Half-Life 2 was also a central project continuing in earnest. It wasn’t without problems – although the company had some $40 million to spend (a piffling $40 million?! LOL!) it had to contend with intense media speculation and relentless fan interest. This peaked when a large chunk of Half-Life 2 was leaked to the internet, frustrating the development team enormously. Additionally, with immeasurable hype following the first game, Valve was up against severe adversity. It had to deliver something special – failure was not an option!

The hard work paid off as, when Half-Life 2 landed in 2004, its impact was immediate. The reviews poured in and it was a near unanimous 10/10 across the globe – this was a landmark moment in gaming and, all these years on, it’s still got what it takes to take on the latest AAA blockbusters. Why? Genius is a rare commodity, but it was very much at work here. The graphics may not rival the upcoming Call of Duty WWII, for instance, but its core gameplay and innovative nature mean it will remain effortlessly ahead of the rest for some time yet.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/10/07/half-life-2/