Half-Life 2

"Lots of potential wasted on a generic horror game"

I never played the original Half-Life, so when HL2 was announced, I was skeptical of its merits. I hate to come into the middle of a story; however, I also dislike monster games, so I never played HL1. Thus, I watched the news of HL2 warily, assuming that it would suck. When the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, I became even more skeptical; it seemed that fans of the first game were letting franchise loyalty get the better of them.

Sometimes, I hate being right.

GRAPHICS
I'll admit, the graphics are good. My computer is too weak for me to crank the settings up too high, but even so, the graphics were pretty. They weren't of the jaw-dropping nature that reviewers were raving about, but a respectable show nonetheless; if something looks good on middle-level settings, it probably looks drop-dead gorgeous at more demanding settings. My only complaints are that the environments tend to be very dark, and it's sometimes hard to tell what objects you can or can't interact with.

STORYLINE/ ATMOSPHERE
You see that bit about potential wasted up there in the title? This is where that comes in. The atmosphere in the game is great; at the beginning, you really get the feeling of a run-down, dejected city under the heavy hand of tyrannical overlords. However, this atmosphere is squandered- the time in the streets is very brief, and in that time, everything is lifeless; the sole purpose of every NPC seems to be placed there to look dejected and complain about the head human, who seems to be conspiring with other-dimensional overlords. No one seems to have jobs, nor do they go about basic resource gathering- surely they need to go someplace to get food? the entire world seems to be lifeless in this area.

The storyline, in short, makes no sense. Maybe it makes sense to people that played HL1, but to me, it's a blur of funky-looking white masks, characters that I'm apparently supposed to recognize but don't, and a world situation that seems to have popped up out of nowhere. Things also move very quickly; one minute, you're wandering in from a train (the story behind which you still don't know, by the way), then you're talking to a random character from HL1, then you're wandering the streets, then the bad guys are after you, then you're in some weird lab, then weird crap happens, then you're back outside with the bad guys after you, and so on. It's fast, it's messy, and it makes no sense.

Perhaps the story would begin to make sense later on; however, about halfway through the game is a long maze of a town haunted by head-crab zombies (head crabs are little pillow sacks that latch onto people's heads and takes them over- original, huh?). This area is essentially a survival-horror gamut- a genre that I despise. My thought process during this was, "Just gotta get through here, then it'll be back to normal." However, then it struck me- I didn't CARE. I didn't care enough about the story to muck my way through the Village of Horrors (the creation of which, by the way, is another event that has no explanation and seems to come from HL1). When I start a story, I usually want to go to the end; that HL2's story was so dull and nonsensical that I wasn't hooked is disturbing and speaks poorly for the game.

Heck, they didn't even do the zombie portion right- no once did a wall or window explode inward as undead hordes can pouring into the seemingly-safe corridor.

GAMEPLAY/ PHYSICS
Ah, yes, gameplay- that element that is most lauded in reviews of this game. Alas, it is somewhat more lacking than they let on.

The combat is alright. The crowbar is definitely one of the coolest melee weapons in existence; however, as is common in FPSs, it can be hard to tell when you're within its swinging range. The guns are decent; however, the crosshair doesn't have handy cone-of-fire indicator, and because it's made from 5 identical dots that blend into the background, it can be hard to tell which one is the center dot. I much prefer a crosshair designed in a circle that expands according to the amount of inaccuracy cause by recoil, with 4 lines centering around a center point. A reticle like that is much easier to use that HL2's dots.

The first pistol you get is fairly accurate, but has so little recoil that it's hard to gauge your rate of fire with it; the only real indication you have that the thing is firing is that your enemies die eventually. By contrast, the second pistol, a Desert Eagle, has far too much recoil- one would expect a revolver to aim fairly well. The SMG goes through bullets too quickly, and while it has a secondary-fire grenade launcher, it's hard to use, you get almost no ammo for it, and for some reason, it doesn't do anything against vehicles. I didn't get an opportunity to play with the rest of the weapons.

The most-admired feature of HL2 is its physics engine and the Gravity Gun. First, physics. Frankly, these are just wonky. Because your character seems to consist of a floating pair of eyes and a hand holding a gun, it's impossible to gauge your location relative to objects in the world. In addition, when you pick something up, it just sort of floats there in mid-air. Finally, once you have something, it's very difficult to set it down in the place you want. The Gravity Gun is a device that basically moves things; one button repels things, while the other grapples them. In the half an hour or so after getting the Gravity Gun that I played before quitting, there wasn't a single situation in which its use was needed, or even applicable- the thing can't move bodies. Even playing with it gets boring almost immediately; you can only float so many things in the air before you just want to go blow up some aliens.

CONTENT/VIOLENCE
Whenever I play an M rated game, one of the things I look out for is how the adult content is handled. I despise the gratuitous violence of the Grand Theft Auto series, and far prefer the realism of Halo's violence. Fortunately, HL2's violence falls within the Halo range, largely- you shoot someone, the wall behind them gets a little blood spatter. No exploding heads, nothing. The only really gory stuff comes from the head-crab zombies. Here, I think that it is often gratuitous. Burned, charred corpses, bodies flayed of flesh, bodies cut off from the legs down crawling after you... Blech. In Zombie Village, the blood, gore, and trashed bodies are strewn about at random, largely. The spattered blood all over the town seems to serve no real purpose, other than to scare the player. All in all, while the game earns its M rating, only the zombie portions are distastefully gory.

OVERALL
To summarize: The graphics are pretty. The atmosphere is strong, but squandered. The storyline makes no sense to anyone that didn't play HL1, nor is it even interesting. Gunplay feels generic at best and plain unfinished at worst. Irritating conventions are used for the reticle that can't be changed. The physics and Gravity Gun in the game are nifty for about five minutes before falling flat.

All in all, I feel that the game is rather dull and overhyped. It tries to integrate three distinctly different shooter genres (the exploration of the city, the desperate run from the bad guys, and the horror village); including too many elements can and will drive off players that find themselves completely unwilling to move through a genre they despise to get to the good stuff. Fans of all aspects of the shooter genre, fans of the first HL, and people that are easily amused by moving around cans with oversized electromagnets will like this game. People that didn't play HL1, that like having an actual story, and that require something a little less gimmicky than the Gravity Gun, however, will probably find this game very distasteful.

A quote on the box claims that it is "the best game ever." It's not. It's a generic shooter with a pretty face and a lot of name recognition.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/09/05