Half-Life 2 doesn't do one thing right, it does everything right. This is the most engaging first person shooter ever.
Of course the most popular subject with this revolutionary game is the technology that powers it. Indeed, this is quite a beauty to behold. However, there’s much more at work here to bring the world to life and to cast you into the near future. Doom 3 had brilliant graphics, but to me the artwork was lacking. Every setting you encounter in Half-Life 2 feels fresh. The artwork is absolutely superb. The dazzling portrayal of a European City facing hard times of oppression from the “benefactors” who watch over the city from the citadel that looms in the distance, reaching up to the heavens. As much of a sci-fi shooter that Half-Life is, it has a unique sense of realism about it. This is something that feels like it could happen, unlike Doom 3 or Far Cry or other such titles. Far Cry isn’t a great example because they weren’t trying to be realistic. I felt that they were going for the over-the-top-movie kind of feel. In Half-Life 2, the setting feels real, the enemies feel real, and most importantly the characters feel real. The portrayal of human emotion is something that adds an extra sparkle to the game’s prime finish. The level of realism unparalleled.
Many games these days are like your average supermodels. Goodness in all the superficial aspects, however very little content, and by this I mean plot. The story has been rather lacking. I like a story that keeps it realistic. Not like Far Cry where you have a bunch of genetically altered super-apes scrambling after you or Doom 3’s hell-infested Mars Installation. This game has a plot that keeps everything simple enough to comprehend at a single glance, but if you dig deeper you’ll find loads of plot and story to serve as the driving force of the game. After all, single player relies entirely on plot to drive the game and make the player keep plowing through the game to uncover more. The story is engaging, interesting, and doesn’t feel over-the-top at all. It adds to the realism that the game portrays visually.
No Half-Life 2 review would be complete without talking about the Source Engine. This game engine must be a modern marvel. On day one of Half-Life 2’s release, I had perfect stability. No quirks at all and the game ran perfectly on the following machine:
Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 3.2GHz
1GB OCZ Gold DDR500 Memory (Running at 400MHz)
Intel D865PERL Motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
Western Digital 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive
This particular machine is probably a little overkill in the graphics department on what you would need to play the game. That may be surprising to those who have seen the level of detail in the graphics, but my testing shows that the game can run fine with the highest detail settings on an older ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, approximately ½ of the graphics processing power of the adapter used to review the game. The engine is extremely efficient, especially on older ATI hardware, and has an unprecedented amount of scalability. I was able to get the game running very well on an older machine running a 2.0GHz Celeron and a GeForce 4 MX. However, the engine is a lot more capped off by the amount of physics processing it requires. You’ll need a beefy CPU to handle all of the crap that the developers have strewn about the world. Using the gravity gun you can manipulate hundreds or even thousands of objects throughout the game at your leisure. That being said, when there’s a big explosion and everything goes flying, on the older hardware the game will slow down drastically because of all of the physics calculations required. However, in practice, it would seem like a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 will get the job done, and processors of this class seem to be becoming more and more common.
Your eyes aren’t the only thing that will be pleased with Half-Life 2. Your ears are in for quite a treat too. The sound effects are great, and the surround sound is there, if not in the best implementation. Valve opted for a CPU based audio engine in Half-Life 2. Owners of sound cards like the Creative Labs Audigy series won’t be at much of an advantage here. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing though because the surround sound and sound effects are still great. The quality is as good as any game, and features some neat effects that spruce it up a bit.
Gameplay is probably the most important driving focus of a first person shooter after the story, and as I said before, Half-Life 2 delivers aces in all categories. The action is very well thought out, even if the scripting is a little obvious at times and doesn’t always work the way that the developers wanted it to. The controls feel tight and well refined. The weapons recoil in such a way that it gives the game its unique feel and style. The weapons are all cool in their own distinctive ways. A few of them seem a little generic, but they’re just about the coolest generic weapons ever. All of the weapons are fun to use, including the pistol, which is rather on the weak side. It’s good for general purpose utility like smashing boxes, although a crowbar is more fitting if it’s up close. The gravity gun becomes your “utility” later, but the pistol serves a decent purpose.
Valve have done an excellent job at portraying humans and their emotions in Half-Life 2. You can understand the character’s emotions on a level never before seen on the PC. Valve obviously went a long way to make sure that facial expressions and body language were as realistic as possible. You can easily sense when your comrades are hurt, angry, happy, or scared. They seem to have paid special attention to Gordon’s co-pilot, Alyx. Her character model is incredibly detailed and displays the most amount of emotion. Truly superb work.
Valve have really outdone themselves with this amazing piece of work. This is quite honestly the best shooter I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. I have one minor complaint: for those of us who wasted loads of time on Counter-Strike and other fast multiplayer games, the AI isn’t very challenging. If you have the headshot of Counter-Strike down pat, then even the hardest difficulty is a breeze. This isn’t the focus of the game, but I think that they still could have made the enemy AI a little better, as that’s one of my most vivid memories of the original Half-Life.
I highly recommend this game to anyone who has a computer that can handle it. When you have the graphics settings all the way up, the game does an incredible job of immersing you into the fictional world of Half-Life 2. I couldn’t have been more happy with the turn-out of the sequel to my favorite shooter, Half-Life.