Your Thoughts Exactly

So, I've finally finished it. It took a week, but that's mainly because I played in short bursts and was away from my computer for most of the time. I could have finished this game in 2 sittings. So, it definitely could have been longer. That's the thing about computer games... bad computer games can be too short, but movies are only too short if they're good. I would never say "Pi" was too short. It was too long by about 91 minutes. Anyway, I'm not implying that Half-Life 2 is a bad game. Quite the contrary. Half-Life 2 is a very good game. But it doesn't break into the pantheon of my "Great" games. Of course, mine is a short list: Starcraft, Homeworld, Half-Life, Mario 64, Knights of the Old Republic, Smash Brothers. Which reminds me, I'm definitely going to have to do a top ten list.

Anyhow, let's get to the good stuff: Half-Life 2 is among the most polished games around. Every single piece of technology and level design fits together to create a very convincing universe, much more so than Doom 3 did, which was really just a fancy graphical display so that they could convince people to use their engine. The physics engine used in HL2 brings a sense of realism, and the human characters behave, move, and talk in the most realistic way ever done in a video game. The voice acting is good, the level design is intuitive, and the graphics are incredible. While technically they may fall a half-step short of Doom 3's, they are used to much better effect, with huge levels, colorful backgrounds, and in general, a very good sense of overall realism. In that sense, Half-Life 2 is very immersive. A few times I found myself helping computer characters when in the past, I probably would have just ran right past them to get to the next checkpoint. The weapons are a lot of fun, especially the gravity gun, and the driving missions are a great change of pace. This last part isn't going to get a lot of praise in other publications, but what I found made the game much less frustrating and more rewarding than many other First Person Shooters was the fact that the puzzles were very intuitive (made possible by the game's physics). There wasn't any keycard hunting, thank god. Solving the puzzles is remarkably like what you might try in the real world.

Now comes my fault-finding. The problem with Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Doom 3, Homeworld 2, and almost all sequels is that there's this problem with expectations. Half-Life was such a revolutionary game that I expected HL2 to be equally revolutionary. Same goes for Doom 3 and Homeworld 2. Well, Doom 3 was nothing but a graphical rehash of Doom, and so was Homeworld 2. Half-Life 2 is much more than that, but it still doesn't have the same originality of the first one. Half-Life (1) was the first computer game to take itself seriously, to create a universe. As soon as you started up the game, and you were riding a train to work, while a PA system played in the background, you knew there was something great coming next.

HL2's story also finds itself lacking. You're this voiceless character, Gordon Freeman, running around in a futuristic world, where nothing gets explained at all. Things everywhere are trying to kill you, but you don't know why, and you're trying to get somewhere, but you don't know why you're doing that either. The level design is very linear- it makes for a much less frustrating game, because you almost always know where you're supposed to be going, but it makes for a much less convincing reality. When you play a video game you're always supposed to be making progress, and that's about the only reason that Gordon Freeman keeps going. There's no story behind it. In Half-Life 1, Gordon had an identity--he was that unlucky guy, in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Half-Life 2, he's just a wild card. A wild-card killing machine.

HL2 also relies too much on the old video game cliches, crates full of ammo and health, gas filled barrels that explode when you shoot them, a first person rambo who is basically unstoppable and is charged with eliminating evil, and a bunch of evil underlings who love to get shot. The enemy AI, which was so good at the time of Half-Life, actually seems to have taken a step back. They don't put up much of a fight. Where's the originality? I suppose that if this game wasn't called Half-Life 2 I wouldn't be raising these issues.

But in the end, my main fault with Half-Life 2 is, where's the story? How come I never had any real attachments to any of the characters, or to what was going on in the game? Why didn't I ever know what was going on? How are video games going to make the leap into art? Knights of the Old Republic and Homeworld were great almost solely based on their stories, but Half-Life 2 comes up a bit short. Obviously the creators of Half-Life 2 want to make expansion packs and Half-Life 3, but couldn't they come up with a self-contained episode for their flagship game? I mean, Empire Strikes back was a cliffhanger, but it still had an ending and was a damn fine movie. Now that Half-Life 2 has made the leap technologically, we should demand that games, from now on, come with actual storylines. Hopefully KOTOR 2 and Starcraft 2 can recognize this and break the cycle of bad sequels.

Overall rating: 82/100