steve kwan user experience designer

The One Free Man

(November 28th, 2004 - 11:50AM)

So I finished Half-Life 2, and...wow.

You don't see games of this quality very often. All of the hype surrounding Half-Life 2 is easily justified, and it was well worth the wait.

The game has some of the best and most engrossing levels I've seen in a first-person shooter. Especially amazing are:

• The "Water Hazard" level, in which you guide an air boat through an alien-controlled canal (see picture below)
• The "Highway 17" level, in which you drive a dune buggy across a Californian highway
• The "Anticitizen One" level, in which you lead a team on an urban assault of City 17 (the city in which the game takes place).

Like the original, Half-Life 2 raises the bar in several ways which are likely to become de facto standards in other first-person shooters. Saying that Half-Life 2 has excellent graphics and gameplay is a given. However, there are a few things about the game that really stand out:

• There is tremendous diversity in the levels. Throughout the course of the game, you'll visit City 17, cross canals, drive highways, visit zombie-infested ghost towns, break into correctional institutes, and so on. The game manages to contain tremendous diversity in its levels without creating the "stupid" factor that usually accompanies this (I'm referring to games like Metal Gear Solid and Painkiller, where the diversity in the levels makes the games almost cartoonish).
• The character models are breathtakingly realistic. Half-Life 2 isn't the first of the "next-generation games" to be released; it is following behind FarCry and Doom 3 in this respect. However, in FarCry and Doom 3, while the graphics may be realistic, the character models look like really big, high-resolution plastic figures. In Half-Life 2, they actually have skin texture and can effectively show emotion. This results in a very engrossing gameplay experience.
• The Gravity Gun is one of the single coolest innovations in any game I've seen lately. Half-Life 2 has great physics - that is no secret - but the Gravity Gun (a weapon you get early in the game) allows you to interact with the physics engine by picking up and manipulating objects. You can then hurl said objects at your enemies, use them as shields, or stack them to solve puzzles. This weapon is tremendously fun and really showcases the physics of the Source engine (on which Half-Life 2 was built).
• There are a number of little things that stand out in the game. The attention to detail in Half-Life 2 is far higher than you're likely to see in other shooters. When you're walking in a corridor with another character and he talks to you, you can actually hear his voice echo off the walls. Little things like this just make the game so much more involving.

However, that's not to imply that Half-Life 2 is perfect. There are several problems with the game:

• The Steam service is the most disgusting distribution method I've ever seen for a game. After you install Half-Life 2, your computer loads the Steam application, which is Valve's distribution/authentication mechanism. Steam attempts to go online and validate your CD key (which several people have apparently had trouble doing). Steam then has to essentially decrypt your Half-Life 2 installation, a process which takes around fifteen minutes. Additionally, whenever you play Half-Life 2, it is required that you have Steam running in the background. For some reason, Steam takes around 14MB of memory. I don't know what Steam is using all that memory for, but I would guess that it's not necessary for Half-Life 2 to run.
• The game could stand to be a bit longer. From start to finish, Half-Life 2 takes about fifteen hours to complete. While it's not a short game, Half-Life 2 isn't a long game either. Doom 3 was at least twenty hours; however, Doom 3's levels were far more repetetive than those in Half-Life 2, so maybe that's not a fair comparison.
• The ending to the game is quite disappointing. Valve seems to have chosen to set its players up for Half-Life 3 rather than give them a meaningful conclusion at the end of Half-Life 2. This was probably a poor choice.

However, most of the problems mentioned above are forgivable. The game is just amazing to play. See the screenshot below; I don't think I've seen such immersive environments in any game to date.

Screenshot of the "Water Hazard" level, in which you guide an air boat through a canal. Click the image to see a larger screenshot.