"What is Half-Life 2's final legacy?"

Potential spoiler alert.

No doubt you will have been deluged with a plethora of reviews forever claiming the eternal legacy that is Half-Life 2. "Greatest game of all time," people are eager to claim, generally in the hopes that someone from Valve Marketing will quote them and place it in their advertisements. Hype aside, temporary infatuation inside, does Half-Life 2 bring anything truly great to the table? Short answer: No, with a but. Long answer: Yes, with an if.

Story (10/10): I've got to admit. I love cryptic stuff. I love being tossed into a world and slowly learning what the world is, what's going on, and what you're trying to accomplish. In the end, most of the game is simply a "go here, do that" but the way the backstory and the environment is revealed to you is simply amazing. Whereas Half-Life provided immersive sequences, Half-Life 2 takes this up a notch and gives you a true world.

Some people probably will not be too terribly thrilled with the continued enigmatic properties of the G-man (the briefcase carrying man who was nearly ubiquitous in the first Half-Life). At this point, I've got an answer for myself (merely a fourth-wall-breaking-character that exists for the player's purpose, not Freeman). I like the G-man. I love the potential idea that I will never know for sure what he actually is.

Sound (10/10): Sound is very well-used in Half-Life 2. While some old sounds have been re-used from the original Half-Life (headcrabs, the firing of your .357 magnum and your Rocket-Propelled Grenade, etc.), they sounded just find with my subwoofer and speakers. However, sound really shines in context of the gameworld. In a sequence entitled "Ravenholm" you will learn the tell-tale sign of a frightening, jumping zombie as it climbs up walls to you. Many times you won't have a visual signal, you'll just have the suspense of the sound growing louder and louder while you keep your shotgun ready to twitch-fire. In some of the last chapters, the sound as creatures called Striders walk around will keep your blood constantly racing, all the while as you hear the sounds of an all-out revolution taking place, as bullets go whizzing past. The sound of Combine soldiers and Civil Protection on their radio chatter will keep your blood racing. And the sound of a grenade just about to go off will send you diving, hoping to avoid the catastrophic explosion.

Music is well implemented. Instead of a constant background music, it plays in certain moments. These are always well-timed so that the fast-paced pieces (all well composed, even if many of them are re-used from the original Half-Life) will send your heart-thumping just as a huge batch of Combine soldiers ambush you and so that the slow-paced pieces will play just as you enter a suspenseful area. These help to set the mood greatly. If only more original pieces had been used.

Replayability (7/10): After you play through single-player once, there really is little incentive to grow through it again. Fortunately, Half-Life was famous for its plethora of user-created multiplayer and singleplayer mods, and Half-Life 2 will be no exception. It comes packaged with Counter-Strike Source which provides some great multiplayer kicks.

Gameplay (5/10): There are some really great highs and some really great lows with this game. One of the greatest strengths of this game is the inclusion of a pretty-inclusive physics engine. Objects will act the way you expect them to, and figuring out how to use certain objects to your own purposes is sometimes very rewarding. Tossing barrels, buzz saws, and eventually even Combine soldiers is great fun, especially when you find unique ways around things, such as holding a radiator in front of you to deflect bullets. However, as you go through the game, you probably will begin to feel as if the game is just one large tech demo for the physics engine. The puzzles are less of a "ooo, let's see what the user can do here" variety but more of a "hey, check out what's possible in our physics engine!" There are a few inspired puzzles, such as in one section where you pile objects onto a platform to drive a weight down to lift up a ramp for your vehicle, but most puzzles are unsatisfyingly contrived and uninspiring, such as the many instances in which you use two objects to cross some sort of terrain (pick up one, stand on the other, drop the first, jump onto the first, pick up the other, drop it, stand on it, then pick up the other, repeat ad nauseum).

For a game that recieves so much praise, you'd think that the gameplay is really that great, when for the most part it's essentially the same as every other shooter out there. Half-Life was revolutionary, most of Half-Life 2 is par, at best, with other games. You'll probably enjoy it greatly simply due to the novelty of the physics engine, but you'll probably also notice that some levels just tend to go on for far too long (like Water Hazard) and that some are annoyingly repetitious (Sand Traps, for example).

However, there is a big catch to that. The final four chapters of the game are simply amazing. (Anticitizen one, "Follow Freeman!", Our Benefactors, and Dark Energy.) This is when the great uprising against the Combine begins, and suddenly you are caught up in a grand struggle against a forboding force. The sheer rush of adrenaline as troops follow you into battle, as gunshots fling out from far-flung locations far out of your sphere of influence, as snipers knock out your trusty allies, as you and your AI allies launch rockets to knock down dangerous foes, as troops race across plazas, all the while screaming in pain, screaming for glory, and screaming "Freeman!" is simply amazing. The satisfaction of taking down each Strider is so much more satisfying than the ho-hum Helicopter battle at the end of Water Hazard. The finite numbers of allies is so much more gripping and nerve-wracking than the infinite Antlions in Nova Prospekt. The chaos of racing through the Combine while infinite number of Combine chase after you is a rush unparalleled. It's only unfortunate that these last four chapters are just that great. These last chapters demonstrate what ALL of Half-Life 2 should have been; not just another first person shooter with a gimmick of having a real physics engine, but a true EXPERIENCE made possible by the physics engine. These last chapters also demonstrate the incredible lack in all previous chapters of anything truly great that would make Half-Life 2 deserving of the title of "Greatest Game of All Time." It is these last chapters that made me not regret so much the time taken to get a hold of a copy of this game. It is these last chapters that made me this game marginally worth it.

Final Assessment (7/10: Half-Life 2 essentially becomes something that could have been. There is so much potential, as demonstrated by the last chapters, of what could have been done with all of it. As it stands, it is above the slew of shooters out there by a bit, making it better than the likes of Doom 3. That makes it worth a try. But after you finish, you'll perhaps feel the slightest bit of mournfulness as you realize at how much could've been done and was ultimately botched.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/21/05