I had a lot of fun doing whatever it was I did in this game. And that's why Half-Life 2 is so hard to grade.
User Rating: 8.4 | Half-Life 2 PC
Half-Life 2 from Valve is visualy stunning. The graphics are high-end and a worthy opponent to any of todays graphic intense FPS. What is even more enjoyable is how the game runs on it's higher performance settings on my system. Running on 2.4ghz P4 with a gig of ram and a 5500 256mb chip from nvidia ran this game shockingly well. The video card is not the best and 2.4ghz can be just shy of really good now a days for FPS's but my system ran HL2 almost flawlessly. The game delivers a very creepy vibe in the beginning, something that the fans of DOOM were hoping for but were let-down. The challenge is good with only a few "what do I do now" moments. A big draw to the game is the new physics engine and believe me it's very enjoyable. The gravity gun is highly entertaining as you can use just about any object to attack your enemy with. For some reason dragging a can of paint from halfway accross the room to you with the Gravity gun and sending it at a mindless zombie seeing it coovered in paint is fun to me. Or sending a gear or blade it's way severing it in half... ...that reminds me of some of the issues I have with Half-Life 2. The enemies you can throw paint cans at are the same exact enemies you fought in the first game. If you like killing zombies with blood sucking crabs on their heads you'll love Half-Life and Half-Life 2. They offered almost nothing in new enemies to fight and it got really annoying the further you got into the game. The most dissapointing apect to Half-Life 2 is the story. Half-Life 2 is clearly a part of a bigger whole that unfortunatly for fans of the series they will have to wait many years to find out why they just played Half-Life 2. The story in this game is simple, you wake you from some stassis you were in and from then until the end of the game you are told by everyone you meet that you must hurry to get back to Black Mesa but you are never told why and when you get there you find no answers and then BAM the game ends. When the game ended for me i actually yelled at my monitor "NO! NO YOU ARE NOT ENDING THIS GAME LIKE THIS" and sure enough they did. When I was done playing Half-Life 2 I just played one of the best FPS ever as far as look, feel, playability, and easily had the best physics I have played with. I was also faced with fighting the same exact enemies as the first game with no story backing me. Not to mention Gordon Freeman still does not speak at all which makes the dialog in this game rediculous. Forgot to mention that the game does not take long to beat at all. Very dissapoiting in that respect. Half-Life 2 was a very big let down but that was primarliy because I never had quite the high expectations for a game like I had for Half-Life 2. Hard to live up to them but they fell short with a horrible story, lack of new content, and not to mention they ripped off the public with their over priced sticker of $54.99 most places. I refused to pay that and waited a couple weeks for it to drop like I knew it would. Don't be fooled into thinking the game is trash because the graphics, physics, creepy vibe, gameplay, and the Counter-Strike visual upgrade are VERY good features to this game and how well it runs on your machine is worth $29.99 - maybe $39.99. So for the money this game came out at it was a very poor value. 
