HALF-LIFE 2

PN Review continued... Time for some more criticism: those looooong boat and buggy episodes. These make for some of the slowest stretches in the game, although you do get to stop at times to admire the scenery or deal with some enemies before you can proceed. These stages were actually not too bad, but maybe it would have been better to have had the access to vehicles more evenly spaced throughout the game, as was done in Far Cry - there's simply less chance of the player getting bored with the particular vehicle he has to keep climbing back into. Moving on, the Valve team has - to its credit - largely omitted traditional "end-of-level" bosses from the list of enemies in Half-Life 2. This is a huge improvement over Half-Life's frustrating and unrealistic behemoths. But Half-Life 2 does take some missteps in this department: The ant lion queen cannot be hurt with your own rocket launcher, but a helpful resistance fighter can kill it for you with a powerful machine gun. The deadly helicopter that pursues you at the end of the airboat stage has a seemingly endless supply of mines and ammo to unleash on you, while its weapons bay doesn't look all that big. Alien craft and striders cannot be finished off with the three rockets your launcher can hold at a time, so you always have to duck down or run for cover in order to reload. Striders can take many rocket hits before going down. Talking of "loading", I never got used to the frequent loading points throughout Half-Life 2. They always seemed to break the flow and immersion somewhat (even though I didn't encounter the dreaded "stutter bug", thank God). Valve wanted to present a continuously flowing story as in the original, but I think the distinct chapters still being used in other games like Far Cry and Doom 3 work better. I simply prefer a half-minute's loading time every hour or so, rather than a brief but jarring pause around every third corner, as seems to happen in Half-Life 2. One thing I can commend, though, is the option to save the game anywhere in addition to the regular autosaves. An FPS is really asking for trouble if it doesn't allow the player to manually save his progress - it can be extremely frustrating to have to replay sections over and over just because you repeatedly die before reaching an autosave point. So Half-Life 2 has done it right - in contrast to a game like Far Cry (which I played using an unofficial quicksave patch). As the last point under Half-Life 2's gameplay I'll mention the artificial intelligence - or lack thereof. We're talking about a ground-breaking game here, remember? So what makes Half-Life 2's AI so special or better than what we already know from other games? If it weren't for Far Cry, Half-Life 2 could probably have laid claim to having quite competent AI. But Far Cry was released many months before Half-Life 2 and we now know what's technically possible in terms of enemies using cover, trying to surround and flush out the player, etc. These things just don't happen in Half-Life 2. Sure, the Combine grunts you face do toss the odd grenade in your direction and try to evade your fire. But we already saw the enemy do that in Half-Life back in 1998. I don't even want to go into the dumb resistance fighters who team up with you late in the game: their idea of "watching your back" is to stay so close that if you have to abruptly retreat you keep bumping into them. Their shooting skills also aren't that great, leaving it to you to deal with most of the enemies. We might have to wait for a promising game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to see if Far Cry's AI can be improved on in the near future - Half-Life 2 is certainly not a contender in this field. Story Half-Life was praised for the fact that it elevated the typical FPS theme of brainless shooting to the level of interactive story-telling. That its story was not particularly original or deep (being a more fleshed-out version of 1993 Doom's basic plot) was not the point: presentation and scripting of the unfolding events was everything. In the process, I think that Half-Life may have done more harm than good, because game designers now seemed to think that an involving story could replace engaging gameplay. Somehow, many commentators decided that in order to unlock gaming's full potential as digital entertainment - and ultimately see it recognized as a "true" artform - the simplistic games of yesteryear had to be transformed into fully-fledged interactive movies as soon as technology allowed this. No longer was it acceptable for a game to just let the player jump in, grab some powerups & armour and blast alien monsters for the sheer thrill of it. No, now everything had to be wrapped up in an appropriately dramatic plot, believable NPCs had to guide the player and a realistic game world had to be meticulously crafted as the backdrop against which various intricate events unfolded. Half-Life became the iconic flag bearer for this whole trend, at least as far as FPS games were concerned. Your squad mates are not as smart as they look... But it turned out that "interaction" beyond basics such as shooting, hitting a switch or driving a vehicle were not quite so easy to devise, given the limitations of current game engines and PC hardware. So, Half-Life still featured a lot of this basic shooting stuff (adding quite a bit of crate smashing as well). The more noticeable changes were in the form of sophisticated AI and carefully scripted events and sequences. The player was not let loose in an open-ended virtual environment to do as he wished. Rather, his actions were tightly regulated and guided according to the linear story that was being told by the game's designers. Ironically, as some games became more "realistic", they also allowed less player freedom. Such a game's back-story was no longer simply a vague introduction to the plotless action that was to follow (as in the original Doom), but instead became the backbone to which various in-game events were attached which strictly determined that the player do certain things in a specific way and exactly on cue (as seen in later games such as Medal of Honor and Call of Duty). Taken to its extreme, in such games the player has about as much control over the game's progression and outcome as a home video viewer has with his pause and fast forward buttons. Playing such an FPS is not much different from "playing" a pre-recorded movie. Six years after Half-Life this is more or less what we have with Half-Life 2: an audio-visually dazzling rail shooter that would play just about the same way for everyone, even when replaying the game several times. Choosing your own route or tactic as is partly allowed in Far Cry is not possible here. Half-Life 2's outlines are fixed, you just have to fill in the colours by the numbers. Next Page >

PN Game Reviews: Half-Life 2 > 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9

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