Hot on the heels of completing Half Life, I made the seamless transition to the game's sequel. Half Life 2 was released in November of 2004, six years after the cliffhanger-ending of the original game; the wait must have been excruciating for fans at the time.
Without giving anything away, the sequel starts up where its predecessor left off; an encounter with the enigmatic G-man proves equally mysterious, and once it is over you are deposited in a world that has been adversely affected by the events of the first installment of the series. "Dystopian" barely begins to describe the dire state that humanity finds itself in.
Taking out the Combine, one soldier at a timeGraphically I was able to crank all of the settings up to eleven (thanks to my recent acquisition), and maxed out the game looks astonishing. Characters move realistically, textures feel deep, and ambient effects and superfluous details abound. I'm no graphics whore, but for a 2004 release I was more than impressed. Sound is equally impressive, and the voice acting is top notch.
Game play in Half Life 2 is similar to the first game: it is a highly polished first person shooting experience with just enough suspense and horror to keep you from charging headlong through the levels. Using cover seemed to be crucial to surviving many encounters without suffering too much damage, and at least once I used movable bits of the terrain to survive a particularly tough sequence by building a barricade.
One quibble I have with the game is that, outside of a few select circumstances, there is absolutely no reason to use more than two weapons: the shotgun and the energy rifle. Yes, you need to use the rocket launcher to take out vehicles, and yes the bow is great for the odd sniping job, but aside from that ammo is plentiful enough that there is simply no reason to mix up your weapons. The original Half Life, by comparison, forced the player to cycle through his arsenal by limiting the amount of ammo there was to grab; this resource management metagame is a lot of fun, in my opinion, and Half Life 2 loses something for largely phasing it out.
Here buggy, buggy!My other minor issue with Half Life 2 is that it forces the player into gimmicky scenarios on five occasions: two driving levels, a turret sequence, a bug management section, and the final level. While not badly done, these abrupt changes of pace distract from the entire reason that I'm playing Half Life 2: it's a damned fine shooter with a great story!
Minor gripes aside, I had a blast with the game. The story is a perfect sci fi thriller, with enough plot twists to keep me engaged and salivating for more. Half Life 2's action is intense at times, and on normal difficulty is a challenge without being soul-crushing. The physical puzzles presented by the game are not always obvious, and sometimes take a bit of out-of-the-box thinking to solve - which is excellent.
All in all I was sad to see Half Life 2 wrap up, and immediately fired up Episode 1. The best, I've heard, is yet to come.
7 comments:
I firmly believe that the limited ammo aspect of Half Life 2 was a key component of what made it great.
Every truly fantastic game seems to have something like it, something that gives the player meaningful choice.
In your last post, you say you feel that the difference between a game and a movie is that the game makes you earn your story. I'd argue that this - while perhaps your opinion - is flawed. Not incorrect, but not a broad enough view. To me, the most important aspect of a game is that it allows you the ability to DECIDE your story or, failing that, provides a convincing illusion of the same.
This needn't necessarily mean decide how the game plays out in the macro sense - the plot could well be hard coded - but rather that you can make meaningful choices throughout the game. All good games feature this.
Look to Resident Evil (the first one). The game had a completely hardcoded plot, and allowed very little real deviation from it. However, the critically limiting ammunition forced the player to decide carefully whether to go in guns blazing, or find another way through an area. These choices were hard to make, and a decision to fire precious bullets was not made easily. Come the end of the game, you feel that you've really made it through on your own wits. It FELT difficult, even if in fact it wasn't a really hard game.
Now, it could well occur in any way. The single most important aspect of a any game is that it forces the player to make choices, and that those choices be (or at least appear to be) difficult.
Unfortunately, in my experience sequels (while often good games in their own right) often fail at this when the first game did well. Usually, this is because a second studio (or at least a different design team) takes what they thought made the first game a hit and toss it into another game. Couple that with screaming hordes of fans who want to blow stuff up, asking on forums for more ammo so they can go hog-wild. Most of these fans, when they get what they asked for, realise it's not as good as the first game. I've seen this play out dozens of times over the years.
Once you unlimit resources; or otherwise remove meaningful choice in whatever flavour it exists, the game seems hollow, a hand-holding excercise, or a marginally interactive movie.
Making meaningful choices is what really works to make a game appeal intellectually, working for both the challenge-whores and lore-whores. In fact, in my opinion having to make difficult choices is the only way a game can feel very challenging without risking becoming soul-crushing, or being challenging basically because you're forcing the player to play against a crummy UI instead of the game itself(think Ghosts and Goblins - it was ridiculously difficult because of really crappy controls/character movement).
The reward - for me at least - conquering a game that was intellectually stimulating as such is much better than beating a game that was just difficult because it was difficult to play.
And with that, I'll end a long and rambling comment that had little really to do with Half Life 2 :)
Derrick,
Like the post, I would however say that
"or, failing that, provides a convincing illusion of the same. "
Would be the more important part of the statement. Very few games have ever pulled off the you get to decide your story. The illusion of it being the real key.
I remember playing Half Life 2 - it was an awesome game. Not sure I could go back to it but it will also be something I enjoyed a lot.
I also loved the original Half Life and it's multiplayer killing mayhem :)
@Plainsrunner: Not quite. It's not about actually deciding your story, it's about making meaningful choices along the way. Many, many games do this; and while it's rarely recognized as the benefit it is, I personally think it's a critical element of a games success.
You don't need to really decide your whole story - it's still largely impossible, though some sandbox games do a good approximation. You just need to make choices that matter, and are not easy to make.
@Derrik:
"I firmly believe that the limited ammo aspect of Half Life 2 was a key component of what made it great."
Do you mean Half Life #1? HL2 had seemingly endless ammo, which was my complaint.
"To me, the most important aspect of a game is that it allows you the ability to DECIDE your story or, failing that, provides a convincing illusion of the same."
This is certainly important as well, but I believe that the feeling of earning one's story is equally crucial... gaming isn't about being told a story, it's about living it. Perhaps the two are different sides of the same coin.
Stellar comment on the whole, by the way! You always blow me away with the depth of thought you put into your remarks here, and I appreciate it.
@Spitfires:
"I remember playing Half Life 2 - it was an awesome game. Not sure I could go back to it but it will also be something I enjoyed a lot."
Why not? Graphics? Been there - done that? MMO's ruined single player games for you? Something else?
"This is certainly important as well, but I believe that the feeling of earning one's story is equally crucial... gaming isn't about being told a story, it's about living it. Perhaps the two are different sides of the same coin."
I think they are two sides to the same coin. You can make a game challenging without requiring choice, but it's not nearly so fun a form of challenging. If you know exactly whatneeda to be done, and it's just a matter of hitting buttons at exactly the right time, it's just annoying (IMHO anyways)
far better is challenging because you need to make the right choices - be they attack or evade, or being provided with a variety of attacks in a fighting game and needing to work out which is best to use in a given situation, or chiding which of a selection of paths to take through a level.
Challenge created in this way is far, far better than challenge created by difficult UI or just mastering controls. It's just much more rewarding when you win.
IMHO anyways!
Oh, and yes, I meant the limited ammo in HL1, not 2. I post on my phone, type-o's are my bane :)
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