Half-Life

The Good
Half-Life. Hundreds of publications and web-sites have praised it's gameplay and innovation. Thousands of people play the game and it's various incarnations. After purchasing Half-Life, I have one thing to say.

It has lived up to all expectations and then some.

The opening of the game feels like a movie. You are Gordon Freeman and you are a scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility - Anomalous Materials Laboratory, a decommissioned military installation in Arizona. As you arrive to work, you ride the tram into the facility. A great aspect of this "typical" ride in is that it isn't a movie. It's all rendered in real-time using the game's engine. So you can walk around the tram, look up and down, and watch the credits go by. But the intro does something else. It immerses you into the role. You get a sense of vastness and complexity, just by looking at the size of the facility.

As you start your day at Black Mesa, you start to learn and piece together facts about what you do, and what type of research is conducted. In fact, there are area that you cannot gain access to until you get your Environmental Suit. So you need to go to your locker and suit up (like if you actually worked there) before exploring the game. I like the fact that you learn about what happened as you go through the game, similar to System Shock 1 and 2.

Half-Life runs using the Quake II engine. But trying to compare Quake and HL is like comparing Castle Wolfenstein and Wolf 3D. The basis of the engine is intact, but the guys at Valve have modified it so much that it's considered a completely new graphics engine. Running on a NVIDIA 3D card, the graphics are absolutely fabulous.
Cool electrical effects run rampant through the game, as creatures from another world materialize before your very eyes. And they seemingly appear at random as well, so if you walk into a room, always "check your six", because you never know if one will pop up behind you. Luckily, the electrical noise that is made is very distinct, so if you hear it, you can be sure that their is a creature around the corner.

Another nice graphical touch involves the numerous weapons you find while escaping from the Black Mesa Research Facility. Most FPS weapons are stationary in front of you. You are always holding them, ready to fire at any given moment. In HL, If you are holding a rifle, you'll occasionally move your hands, as if you are getting tired of holding the weapon (if this affects gameplay, I'm not sure. I haven't seen it have any drastic affects yet). It's nice to see this type of attention to detail in a FPS, especially considering the state they were in when HL released. Also, you need to reload your weapons. Take the shotgun, for example. The shotgun is a powerful weapon, but only holds 8 cartridges. So after firing 8, you'll need to reload. But you'll actually see your character loading the weapon. If you are in the middle of a firefight, then you are left defenseless. So reloading your weapon also becomes a tactical decision as well.

The controls are standard FPS layout, which can be modified as you wish. I personally feel that the initial layout is a bit clunky (but then again I feel ALL FPS shooter's initial layout is clunky) but remapping your keys is a breeze.

The sound is unreal. If you run across walkways, the metallic thumping sound is quite realistic. Yet, if you decide to crouch/walk over the same walkways, the sound is muffled, and sounds like you are making an effort to keep quiet (which is useful in some levels). Digital panning and echo effects make is sound like you are in a sterilized, cavernous research facility.

In addition to the Half-Life game that is present, they ability to switch to other single player games is easy. Instead of exiting the game and having to "program" the new levels in, it simply a matter of copying the files into the directory, and clicking "Activate". There are quite a few single player MODS out there that have a polished feel to them, so scout them out. PC Gamer's "They Hunger" and "U.S.S. Darkstar" are a couple to check out.

And then you have your online component. HL makes for an absolutely incredible online experience. From the start, HL was design for the average user to just make a few mouse clicks and then POOF you are online and actively playing. Be it Counterstrike, Team Fortress, DeathMatch Classic, Day of Defeat, or any of the countless mods that ordinary people have released (OK, not ordinary, but unbelievably talented people), there is something for everyone's taste in blowing up the bad guys. And hats off to Valve for making the source code open and available, allowing the people that play the games to play in the sandbox with the big boys. They have opened up what used to be a rather closed community, and have let regular artists, musicians, programmers and gameplayers in on all the fun

The Bad
Well this is only a personal gripe for me, and it pertains only to the single-player game. It's hard. Real hard. Even on easy, you need to use your quicksave key a lot. Now I'm not saying that it should have been easier, but for those who don't eat, sleep, and drink Quake/Unreal, it could have been easier. But I'm determined to finish the game without using cheat codes (I'm in LAMBDA CORE and it's using up all my available willpower to do so!)

The Bottom Line
Get it. If you love fast action online gaming, it WILL consume your free time. If you love a great single-player experience with plenty of ways to play, it WILL consume your free time. :)

But regardless if you have free time or not, Half-Life is a great addition to any gamer's library... You do have a library.... right? :)

The Good
Half-Life is remarkable, both from the technological aspect and the design aspect. It has a REAL story line, and as the plot unfolds, you will slowly put together what happened in the Black Mesa Research Facility. The story line is linear, but it is still a VAST improvement over its predecessors (except Unreal, of course). The engaging story line is the reason one keeps going, and although the game is divided to levels, it feels more like chapters in a book then levels in a game.

The graphics are very good and the engine is quite fast. Although the game uses a modified version of the Quake 2 engine, it looks nothing like it. Clever use of pre-rendered shadows, pre-lighted textures, and wise modeling, helps to created the most realistic looking scenes ever in a real time 3D game. Everything looks, feels and reacts real.

The AI is unprecedented. The enemies you generally face are not tough. They are clever. Very clever. The marines, particularly, are amazing. The act as a group, covering each others back, taking cover and always moving, changing their position to better get their target - you. They will never: blindly charge you, get in each other's line of fire or stay in one place, waiting for you to finish them off. They will: run from cover to cover, retreat to a better position, and throw a grenade at you before charging at you. They move, act and fight so much like real marines, that I won't be surprised to find that the developers consulted actual marines, or at least had some knowledge and experience in combat in an urban environment. It is obvious that without the power suit, which protect you, you won't last 20 seconds against even one squad of marines. The same, although to a lesser extent, applies to the aliens in the game. They too will act as a group, run away if necessary, and come at you when you least expect it. I sometimes load save games simply to experience the feel of fighting these marines, trying out various ways to trap them, or pick them off one by one.

The level design is clever and varied. The levels are realistic: the labs look like labs, and contain a lot of equipment, offices, and elevators. The security stations contain weapons lockers, sandbags, barricades and many trigger-happy guards. The missile silo contains blast doors, sophisticated panels and a giant alien beast, which you can't kill, so you will have to find another way to move around it. In fact, the levels are GOAL oriented and not kill oriented. You job is not to kill everything in sight, but simply to get from one place to another,or restore the power to certain areas and so on. There will be some obstacles which you can't kill, and you will have to use your wits to go around. All this makes for an extremely addictive game - and I couldn't leave it until I finished it.

The sound effects are of exceptional quality, even for a 3D shooter. And if you have a 3D capable sound card - you will find that the 3D sound makes for a completely immersive environment, and you can actually rely on it in combat.

All these things make Half-Life the best 3D shooter I have ever played, and the only one I didn't get tired of after a few levels.

The Bad
No game is perfect, and there are always a few snags:

• The plot is interesting, though it is not overly original. But the real problem is the ending, which is very unsatisfying, and is a very big disappointment.
• There are some very small parts of the game, which I think should have been kept out of it. For example, there is a section where you simply jump from platform to platform, and if you fall, you die. It is very annoying, since the game interface, although perfect for a 3D shooter, is a very bad choice for a platform game.
• The save game mechanism is horrible - since you can't actually write a description for your game. It simply gives you the place, and the time the game was saved. This is a REAL problem when two people play the game on the same computer…

The Bottom Line
This game is still one of the best of its kind: smart enemies, clever design and immersive and challenging gameplay. What more could you want?

The Good
The entire story is told through interaction which is the best way to tell a story when you make a game. The story is also much better than any other shooter I played in the 90's, they even made an effort to put in some decent characterization. I had to laugh at this because there were only a handful of models and they still acted very differently.

There is a nice balance between platforming sections and fighting sections. Like the story, this sets it apart from many other games that try to combine two genres, most if not all of them end up leaning too much towards one of the genres, automatically making the other feel like an annoyance. In Half-Life both the shooting and the jumping are part of the game and both have a difficulty curve.

The boss-fights are rare, but also unique to Half-Life so far. I am not even sure if they are boss-fights as the game uses the same "bosses" multiple times throughout the game. The thing here is that the fights are mostly a collection of clever puzzles that you need to solve in order to kill the boss. There are enemies along the way and you will need to sneak past the monster, which is very scary and keeps you on the edge of your seat. At the end all the puzzles you completed form a connection which allows you to deliver the final blow to the monster. Good job Valve, good job.

The Bad
The game is very difficult and at one point I actually had to quick-save between every few shots because I couldn't do the fights in a single solid attempt anymore. I had to constantly reload saves where I was able to fire a few good shots without taking too much damage and that is just insane. It also has the problem I mentioned in Dragon Age 2 where incredibly huge fights can be right around the corner, sadly you don't have a mage with healing magic in this game to keep you going, so you need to be extremely careful.

The level design is a big problem, not just the design, but also the progression. All the scientists keep urging you to get to the surface at the start of the game, but once you get there you will be forced to go underground again before you even got to look at the scenery a little bit. As the game progresses the design also gets very confusing nearing the end and I mean in the Doom or Wolfenstein way where everything just looks the same.

I arrived at the point that the game was almost impossible for me in every aspect. The puzzles were still fun, but the combat and platforming was near-impossible, but there was still like four hours of game to be played. The game wasn't even fun anymore, I was done with it. This seems to be a nasty habit of games that are amazing, Psychonauts had it as well, nearing the end when you decide for yourself that the game should end before it outstays its welcome, it still keeps going for another hour or more.

The Bottom Line
This game is still pretty fun, but it also has some very serious problems. The game keeps going for way too long and becomes very difficult and repetitive nearing the end. HOWEVER! This game is still worth checking out because of the great balance between platform end shooting sections and a well-told story.

The game offers a lot, but you do have to give a little yourself as well if you want to fully enjoy it, is what I am trying to say here. If you can ignore the very annoying flaws of this game then you will be able to enjoy it, but if you are like me and you don't have enough time to play through a game like this, you might want to skip it.