Half-Life 2

Review - The gaming event of the year...

Imagine this scenario. A few years ago, back in your untroubled youth, you had a brief but very passionate affair with a most alluring woman. Before you met her you thought you knew all about sex. Yet soon after she entered your life you realised that all your prior experiences amounted to little more than adolescent fumblings. This woman showed you things you didn't think were possible, and took you to heights of pleasure that you haven't experienced since. Cruelly, the relationship ended rather suddenly after it had taken an unsatisfying lurch into the bizarre. Still, for years you pined over this gal, stumbling from one woman to the next, always in hope that you would find the magic again, always disappointed. Then the woman comes back into your life. You had an inkling that this might happen and so had been building up your stamina and holiday time so the two of you could enjoy each other without interruption. Then finally the big day arrived. She came back into your life. And the sex was even better than before. Since the two of you had last been intertwined she had obviously learned a whole bunch of new tricks, possibly with a Chinese circus, judging by the impressive gymnastics she was now capable of. And the years had been more than kind to her looks. Her expansive beauty was practically off the scale. All seemed right with the world again. Yet... all of a sudden it was finished once more. Right near the end things had been building up to something, but that something never came. One minute you were in the middle of a determined coupling, the next she was sashaying out of your bedroom, slipping on her chemise while muttering that she may see you again, sometime. Your were crestfallen, nay heartbroken. After the initial shock had subsided you could look back on your time together with a wicked grin on your face and a sense that you had again experienced something wonderful. But the abruptness of her departure tainted the relationship that you had built up over the years, and while you eagerly looked forward to seeing her again, sometime in the future, a part of you was tiring with her constant teasing and inability to commit to you.

So, by way of the longest introduction to a review that I have ever written, we come to the critical analysis of the biggest PC release in years, possibly the biggest game release of any format in 2004. And where I waxed lyrical to ease you into the review, Half-Life 2 offers little in the way of explanation. The game begins with you/Gordon Freeman being told by the G-Man that, "your hour has come again" and that you should, "wake up and smell the ashes". Then Gordon opens his eyes to find himself on a shabby train. A fellow passenger remarks that he didn't see you get on the carriage. The mystery has begun.

What follows is 14 chapters of some of the most varied and enjoyable action yet to grace a PC. Where the first game placed you at the centre of a simple story about stopping an alien invasion the sequel prefers to place you at the front of an enigmatic plot which, as far as the player is concerned, seems to be all about moving Gordon from one location to another. Set a few decades on from the events at Black Mesa, the Earth is now ruled by the shadowy Combine, apparently an alien organisation bent on the eventual destruction of the human species. Their representative on Earth is Dr. Breem, previously the head administrator in Black Mesa and a man with much on his twisted mind. He soon becomes aware of Gordon's reappearance and orders a citywide search for the problematic physicist. The metropolis in question is City 17, a vaguely Eastern European-looking place which is oppressively policed by the Overwatch. These are the guys tasked with hunting down the bewildered Dr. Freeman and these are the guys that you will spend the entire game dutifully trying to increase their ratio of lead to organic matter.

The very first thing that people notice about Half-Life 2 is how pretty everything is. This is almost exclusively down to the vivid diversity of textures that the very impressive Valve art department has used to create a richly believable world. And while the environmental models are, on close inspection, really rather basic, the range of different visual styles and near-photorealistic quality of the textures combine to make Half-Life 2 an exceptionally gorgeous game to behold. Although the textures lose some definition when you are standing right in front of them Valve have not shied away from using all sorts of fancy shader technology to make things look even more life-like then you would have thought possible in 2004. The water is spectacular; I spent plenty of time just admiring the distorted reflections and shadows on the surface of the canal systems.

The shaders and textures are joined by some incredibly detailed models to make up the characters that populate the gameworld. Where in Half-Life 1 the people that Gordon encountered were mostly nameless figures whose sole purpose was to point the player in the direction of their next objective, this time round the plight of the characters is often what drives the narrative - and hence the action - forward. Much of the latter half of the game revolves around rescuing Eli Vance or dealing with the aftermath of the rescue attempt. The level of detail and believability of these individuals is marvellous and one of the most impressive things in a long list of impressive things about Half-Life. I found myself concerned for the well-being of those that I met and became attached to them like I would a person in a film or book. Unfortunately the many incidental characters in the game seem to have been cloned from a limited stock of originals, a lazy aspect of the game which does harm the believability of the gameworld. Why Valve didn't create an extra 10-20 faces to make everyone unique is beyond me. This becomes most apparent later on in the game when the now active resistance joins up with Gordon in his fight through City 17. Your controls over them are limited to two, although this makes little difference as they are never needed to get past any part of the game. The incredible ease with which they die soon puts you in the position of having a fallen team-member quickly replaced by his identical twin. Or octuplet. A shame. It is also somewhat ironic that the most memorable and playful character in the game is a giant robot that goes by the name of Dog. Ideally hope the rumoured downloadable episode staring Dog sees the light of day as the robot was the most personable character in the game.

But pretty landscapes and cute characters are not the only weapons that Half-Life 2 has to influence the player with. It has the best physics implementation yet seen in a game. And rather than stop at the admittedly cool rag-doll effects and movable scenery Valve have chosen to make the physical properties of objects an integral part of the gameplay. Numerous physical puzzles dot the game, from counterbalance tricks which; for example, require the player to fill up a submerged basket with highly buoyant barrels to fix a broken ramp. And while these puzzles are never too taxing they help to both make the world more believable and ensure that at no point does Half-Life 2 ever descend into mindless key/button searching. And the icing on the cake is the fact that even the most modest machine should be able to get a game out of Half-Life 2. My home rig (XP 2800, 1G RAM 9800pro) ran the game in 1280 with all the details up high and 4xAF and 2xAA filtering. The framerate was always playable and frequently topped out at 60 FPS. I then tested the game on a P4 1.8, 512 RAM and GeForce 3 Ti200. I had to drop down to 1024 resolution and take some details down a couple of notches but even on this creaky rig the game remained eminently playable. A little jerky at times, but never fatally so. The technical capabilities of the Source engine are frankly astounding. For such a graphically intensive game to run on such outdated equipment will be a cause for celebration amongst the majority of gamers who don't own spectacularly powerful and expensive rigs. It's akin to a return to the olden days when programmers had to eek out the very best from the machine at hand rather then rely on their customers shelling out more money to upgrade the system.