Half-Life 2
Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2004 6:47 pm
Don't know if anybody cares about this, but I finished it a couple of nights ago and had a great time doing so.
I'm not a huge gamer, but the original Half-Life was strongly recommended to me. It won me over when, after an experiment gone horribly wrong, I rescued a gray-haired scientist from a slavering green creature shooting energy bolts. The scientist looked me in the eye and said, "Well, there goes our grant money."
HL2 isn't innovative in any real way (save one, which I'll get to) but while it doesn't astonish with its intelligence the way HL did, it impresses with its sheer technical wizardry. I realized this as I attempted to navigate a system of canals in a mini-speedboat, while the bad guys sniped me from the shore, threw burning barrels of toxic waste at me, pushed a wrecked car off a bridge in my path, lit a firewall which I had to jump over, and finally brought a twenty-story high smokestack down on me. Yee-hah!
But while the technology on display is over-the-top, the game itself isn't. The pacing is good, with knockout moments like the one above tempered by quieter puzzles and character moments. (The human models are jaw-dropping, and the voice acting quite good.) Instead of the huge pile of redundant weapons many FPS games load you down with (eight different machine guns, four different types of grenades, etc.), here you stick with the basics -- the iconic crowbar, a couple of pistols, shotgun, machine gun, grenades, a rocket launcher.
And then there's the innovation -- the gravity gun. This sucker is a hoot. While through most of the game it's not much of a weapon in and of itself, you can wreak a whole lot of havoc with it. In one mode, you can simply blast objects (up to and including wrecked trucks) out of your way. In the other, you can suck any object to you, then either hold it, drop it, or fling it away. Held down by sniper fire? Use the gravity gun to rip a radiator out of the wall and use it as a shield. Crate of ammo just out of reach? Just draw it to you. Big bunch of bad guys show up? Grab an explosive barrel and throw it at them. You can even grab a grenade that's thrown at you and hurl it back at the attacker. Great fun.
Throw all this together with a serviceable plot and couple of killer vehicle segments and you've got a heckuva game. While Doom 3 was ultimately just level after level of things jumping out of the dark at you, this progresses smartly and keeps your interest. And it's nice to play a game that doesn't resort to throwing impossible-to-beat "bosses" at you.
Complaints? The end, while thankfully not the impossible feat of timing and luck that the first HL featured, is a bit on the easy side. The battles with the Combine soldiers somehow aren't as much white-knuckle fun as the Marine battles in the original -- the Combine guys don't seem as smart and quick. When late in the game you get to lead troops into battle, your comrades seem to get in your way as much as help. Oh, yeah, and the load times are watching-paint-dry slow.
But if you're into FPS games at all, this one is well worth checking out.
Ryan
I'm not a huge gamer, but the original Half-Life was strongly recommended to me. It won me over when, after an experiment gone horribly wrong, I rescued a gray-haired scientist from a slavering green creature shooting energy bolts. The scientist looked me in the eye and said, "Well, there goes our grant money."
HL2 isn't innovative in any real way (save one, which I'll get to) but while it doesn't astonish with its intelligence the way HL did, it impresses with its sheer technical wizardry. I realized this as I attempted to navigate a system of canals in a mini-speedboat, while the bad guys sniped me from the shore, threw burning barrels of toxic waste at me, pushed a wrecked car off a bridge in my path, lit a firewall which I had to jump over, and finally brought a twenty-story high smokestack down on me. Yee-hah!
But while the technology on display is over-the-top, the game itself isn't. The pacing is good, with knockout moments like the one above tempered by quieter puzzles and character moments. (The human models are jaw-dropping, and the voice acting quite good.) Instead of the huge pile of redundant weapons many FPS games load you down with (eight different machine guns, four different types of grenades, etc.), here you stick with the basics -- the iconic crowbar, a couple of pistols, shotgun, machine gun, grenades, a rocket launcher.
And then there's the innovation -- the gravity gun. This sucker is a hoot. While through most of the game it's not much of a weapon in and of itself, you can wreak a whole lot of havoc with it. In one mode, you can simply blast objects (up to and including wrecked trucks) out of your way. In the other, you can suck any object to you, then either hold it, drop it, or fling it away. Held down by sniper fire? Use the gravity gun to rip a radiator out of the wall and use it as a shield. Crate of ammo just out of reach? Just draw it to you. Big bunch of bad guys show up? Grab an explosive barrel and throw it at them. You can even grab a grenade that's thrown at you and hurl it back at the attacker. Great fun.
Throw all this together with a serviceable plot and couple of killer vehicle segments and you've got a heckuva game. While Doom 3 was ultimately just level after level of things jumping out of the dark at you, this progresses smartly and keeps your interest. And it's nice to play a game that doesn't resort to throwing impossible-to-beat "bosses" at you.
Complaints? The end, while thankfully not the impossible feat of timing and luck that the first HL featured, is a bit on the easy side. The battles with the Combine soldiers somehow aren't as much white-knuckle fun as the Marine battles in the original -- the Combine guys don't seem as smart and quick. When late in the game you get to lead troops into battle, your comrades seem to get in your way as much as help. Oh, yeah, and the load times are watching-paint-dry slow.
But if you're into FPS games at all, this one is well worth checking out.
Ryan