The wait was long, the trials many. The reward? Well worth it.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Amazing gameplay, excellent graphics, the funnest game made to date.

Cons: STEAM connectivity, plot shortcomings, some minor bugs.

The Bottom Line: 
A simply amazing game. Highly recommended.

Author's Review
Half-Life 2 (hearafter: HL2) is without a doubt Valve's magnum opus. I remember following the news about the development of the game, and saw the project having more ups and downs than a car on the Coney Island Comet. Valve's huge team poured almost 5 years and multiple millions of dollars into the production of what they had hoped would become the greatest FPS game ever. Well, Valve's efforts have borne fruit, because HL2 is, quite frankly, the best first person shooter made to date. Anyway, on to the review:

Plot: (I SPOIL THE ENTIRE PLOT IN HERE! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!)
HL2 picks up an undetermined number of years after the original Half-Life. Gordon has accepted the G-Man's proposition of working for him in excange for Gordon getting to continue living. HL2 takes place almost entirely within City 17, which is ripped right out of the pages of 1984. City 17, and other dystopic megalopoli are the result of humanity's enslavement by an alien force known only as The Combine. The backstory that I've managed to piece together from numerous sources goes something like this: after Gordon destroyed the Nihilanth on Xen and was put on ice by Gman, the Xen threat didn't end. The Black Mesa Incident managed to screw up the fabric of spacetime around earth, and all kinds of nasty Xen wildlife begins pouring through randomly opening teleport portals. With rural areas rendered basically uninhabitable, humanity concentrates itself in a handful of easily defensible fortress cities to survive the onslaught of the Xen threat. At some point in time after this, several of the city centers are blinked out of existance, and replaced by Combine Citadels; monolithic living structures that act as war factories and jumping off points for invasion of earth. Humanity lasts all of 7 hours against the ravening hordes that spew forth from the Citadels. The former administrator of Black Mesa, Dr. Breen, negotiates humanity's surrender to The Combine, and is made the Administrator for all of humanity's affairs under the Combine's rule. G-man defrosts Gordon, and turns him loose, with the hopes that beloved physicist/one man natural disaster can tip the balance and allow human resistance forces to throw off the Combine's chains. However, Gman is not acting in an altruistic manner, because it's all too obvious that he's running his own agenda...

(END SPOILERS)


Overall, I found the plot to be something of a mixed bag. The world that has been crafted is absolutely dripping with atmosphere, with a sense of fighting against a monolithic, faceless opporessor being at the very forefront of the game the entire time. The plot is actually a little more straightforward than the original HL, but it suffers from Matrix Reloaded syndrome, being very subtle and twisted, and raises far more questions than it answers. All of the characters were excellent, and Valve did a simply amazing job of making characters believeable. It may be a two-dimensional world, but all the characters have loads of depth. Overall, I give plot an 8 out of 10. Downright excellent character portrayals across the board, but excellent characters saddled with a sometimes disappointing plot.


Graphics and Sound: With HL2's release, I'm forced to make the inevitable Doom3 comparison in the graphics department: I'll be the first to admit that HL2 is not a Doom3 caliber graphical achievement. The Source Engine is an excellent piece of work, but don't expect it's technical capabilities to match those of something built by The Carmack. However, just because Source doesn't have quite as much under the hood as Doom3, doesn't mean that HL2 isn't a very impressive game in the visuals department. Valve took exquisite care in modeling a wide array of different enviornments, and all of them look good. There is a preponderence of dank industrial areas (City 17 appears to be a former Eastern-Bloc seaport), but Valve still manages to take gordon from zombie infested mountain villages to monolithic alien installations and back again, and do it well. Environments are really top notch, and show the amount of care and polish that HL2 has recieved.

While Source doesn't have as many cards up it's sleeve as Doom3 does, it's still has some very impressive technical tricks. The pixel shading and reflection effects are excellent, espescially on water surfaces. Fire effects are also excellent, espesically when applied to hordes of headcrab zom... I've said too much, you can see the rest for yourself. A lot of added flavor is added to the environment because of these features.

Source's real strong suit is it's character animation. Valve did some amazing work with character expressions, and mapping, so that while the rumor about the character models being on the same level of quality as Final Fantasy: TSW turned out to be false, the characters do have expressions that are just as realistic. Most of the time you're fighting faceless Combine grunts or aliens, but pretty much every character interaction you have (and there are a lot, HL2 has some heavily dialogue-driven areas) looks, sounds, and feels like the characters are real people, rather than digital marionettes. Characters in HL2 were far more realistic and expressive than those in Doom3, despite Doom3's more heavy duty engine.

Sound was also excellent, with plenty of attention paid to all variety of sound effects, plus loads of little audio touches that made the gameplay very immersive. My one gripe was the fact that the music was used too sparingly. HL2 features some excellent music, most of it of the scary techno-ambient variety, and uses music well throughout the game. Eerie ambient tracks may signal the approach of something particularly freaky, while a throbbing buttrock goa style track is the signal to load up your boomstick and prepare to dance with the devil. Soundtrack work was absolutely top-notch, adding as much to HL2's already rich atmosphere as Doom3's soundwork added to it's otherwise nonexistant atmosphere.

Overall, HL2 scores a perfect 10 out of 10 in the graphics and sound departments. HL2 may not have as big of ponies as Doom3 does, but it makes far better use of them. The engine isn't visually stunning very often, but the way the engine is put to work is stunning quite often. System requirements are a bit steep, but with the current generation of games, that's pretty much a given.


Gameplay: If HL2's graphics and sound are the most enjoyment you can get and keep your pants on, then HL2's gameplay should be a mortal sin. All of the hype on HL2 being the 'greatest FPS of all time' was well deserved, and possibly even understated in some cases. The original HL pretty much defined the 'Thinking Man's Shooter' genre of games, and HL2 follows faithfully in it's footsteps, with a lot of challenging puzzles that are hard enough to make you use your noodle, but not so hard as to make gameplay impossible. The thing is, I could go on for hours about how damn fun this game is, and I'd just be talking about doing Stupid Tricks With HL2's Physics Engine™.

As much fun as the game is though, it's not without it's flaws: First, loading times are a huge achilles heel for this game. It's a major annoyance to charge through a pack of enforcers, guns blazing, pound my way into the nearest open door, and then have my cordite-fueled frenzy brought to a halt by LOADING.... Load times are a neccessary evil, but they really destroyed the rythm and pace in a lot of places. Another source of frustration is some of the puzzles. Valve did a very good job of herding the player in the right direction, and then letting them figure things out for themselves, but sometimes the solution to your problem was less than obvious, and it could be time consuming and frustrating to have to try-try-agin. Another issue is STEAM connectivity. HL2 has to 'phone home to momma' to activate the game when you first purchase it, a process which can take a loooong time if the STEAM servers are heavily loaded. The final, and probably most annoying issue is with some of the balance in the game. Enemy AI is fairly intelligent, but most of the Combine grunts you fight simply go down too easily to pose a challenge, no matter how good they are at teamwork and finding cover. Two pistol shots to the head will drop roughly 80% of all enemies you'll ever encounter, and most of the weapons you can get your hands on are ridiculously powerful. While these issues are fairly minor, they do bring to light the fact that HL2 is not perfect by any means.

Now that I've discussed the shortcomings of gameplay, I think the shiniest gems in it's crown deserve a look as well: Probably the best addition to the game has been drivable vehicles that are actually useful. There are two extended sequences where Gordon gets to play wheelman, and both are without a doubt some of the absolute most fun I've ever had in a game. I spent a lot of time humming Waylon Jennings tunes, and wondering what 'them freeman boys done got themselves into this time' if you know what I mean, and loved every minute of those parts of the game.

The other top-notch area of the game is it's physics engine. You can directly (very directly, later on in the game) manipulate a lot of objects to your advantage, and do a lot of just incredibly cool stuff with the HL2 physics engine. While I won't spoil the game too much, let's just say that you'll learn to love a certain heavy-lifting device, as it's good for everything from slicing and dicing zombies, to playing catch with your friendly neighborhood Dog.

Overall, gameplay is a perfect 10 out of 10. I wish I could give it an 11, it's that fun. When I finished Doom3 the first time, the immediate next thing on my agenda was playing around with cheat codes and console commands. With HL2, as soon as I finished, I immediately turned around and started a new game. "Best FPS Ever" is a fitting title. HL2 will very likely be stripped of that title one day, but until then, it reigns supreme as the most enjoyable gaming experience I've ever had.


Overall: I've already written an epic review, and haven't touched on so many things (The Hammer map editor, HL2SDK, STEAM distribution, or Counter-Strike:Source, which is deserving of a review of it's own) but I should probably cut it short before I just start unabashedly gushing about how great this game is, lest you guys think that Valve has kidnapped my cat or something. If you've got a decent PC and $55 burning a hole in your pocket, I can't think of a better place to spend it than here.