A wild, immersive, and foremost fun ride, perfect for an PC first-person shooter fan.
One thing Valve, the developer, often boasts about is the game’s physics. The Source engine creates an awe-inspiring interactiveness within the game world – boxes tumble realistically, corpses spin through the air from explosions, et cetera. In Half-Life 2, you receive a weapon never before seen in any game before it – the Gravity Gun. With this weapon, you can pick up items, fire them at enemies, build obstacles, and generally interact with the environment, which pretty much milks the physics engine for all it’s worth.
Another thing the developers pride themselves upon is the story. In Half-Life 2, you play as Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist with an MIT education. He also has a surprising skill with firearms. You never leave his view – the entire game takes place from Gordon’s perspective.
The game begins when you pull into a train station in the post-apocalyptic future. The human race has been enslaved by a galaxy-spanning superpower, the Combine, and you have been sent in since your disappearance ten-or-so years ago to defeat it by a mysterious being calling himself the “G-Man”. The game takes you through 10+ levels, ranging from a zombie-overrun mining town to a war-stricken city, and lasts 12-14 hours.
The graphics are quite amazing, if you have a good enough computer. The “digital actors” have incredibly realistic faces and animations, and the voice-acting is excellent. The AI in Half-Life 2 is varied and fits; the Combine soldiers attack, flank, and retreat after taking losses; zombies slowly advance without stopping; metropolice will call in reinforcements and deploy mechanical allies. Everything looks, feels, and fits great.
Half-Life 2 comes with two multiplayer games, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike: Source. In HL2:DM, the gravity gun is incredibly over-powered and players rarely use anything else. In CS:S, you will often encounter leet-speakers, spammers, and general idiots.
Including some aspects of the multiplayer, Half-Life 2 is not without its problems. There are quite a few technical issues, including crashing, and the Steam program that comes with the game (which requires the Internet, and you can’t play without it) seems to have made these even more common.
Other than that, Half-Life 2 is an excellent game, and deserves a slice of any first-person shooter fan’s hard drive.