I'm probably the last human on earth to play Half-Life 2 so I feel pretty guilty for doing this review, but I'm working my way through the Orange Box and this is the first.
There's something about a game which was 'amazing for its time' and is still just as good that strikes me as awesome. I really don't know how Half-Life 2 does it, but something which revolutionised graphics, physics and NPC interaction would be expected to be somewhat dated now with these kind of things used in everyday games as standard, but the formula of the game and the way these things are used still manages to raise it above these things and bring it to be one of the best, if not the best, FPS of all time.
A gripping storyline isn't the focus of the Half-Life games, it's really based on the personal adventure of Gordon Freeman - the one Free Man - in the context and his mission to save humanity from the alien Combine invasion which is suggested to have happened 20 years prior to the game's beginning. You begin on a train to City 17, now a place completely overrun by the Combine to meet with Barney and your former colleagues, now part of the human resistance. A majority of your objectives are based on 'meet me at [location], to get [weapon] and/or meet [character]', but it's the environments you travel through to get to your destination, the enemies you face and the way everything seems so alive around you that makes the game stand out so much. Even though the shooting is nothing original, it still retains a feeling of complete uniqueness.
The game will take you a good 10 hours to complete and during this time there are no cutscenes, no third person: everything is shown to you as Gordon Freeman and the gameplay is continuous. You will go from sector to sector in real-time so you will get a loading screen from time to time as the next environment is loaded and it's incredible how Valve have created this. It's not a series of maps, it's basically one huge road which, at the end, you find yourself at the beginning of as the human resistance rises up enough to take City 17 and the Combine fortress The Citadel down.
Sure, a lot of games can be big and have a lot of different environments and enemies. But Half-Life 2 is complimented with unmatched physics, enemy AI causing them to group together, take cover and fall back when overwhelmed, and graphics which might not be as photorealistic as modern games but still do a fantastic job at painting a picture of a war-torn fractured human society. You will have to take full advantage of the heavily advanced Havoc physics engine to solve puzzles to get to the next area, proving Valve's ingenuity and adeptness with environment interaction. The epitome of this is the gravity gun - allowing you to pick up objects - some very large ones too - and hurl them at your enemies, sending them flying off with it. I've still yet to see a weapon in a game which so effortlessly describes the game in itself.
I see that I'm not going very far with this review, and it's because it's so hard to describe what makes HL2 so incredible and above just about every other FPS out there. Without a doubt it has to be rated a 10/10, this is simply one of the games you have to play in your life. Defining gaming as it is today, sincerely from the gods at Valve.
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