Blast from the Past: Half Life 2

Brief History of Half Life 2

Anyone who remembers the end of Half-Life knows that hero Gordon Freeman was offered a job by the mysterious G-Man. Half Life 2 doesn’t bother to go into this history, instead you get to hear a short and confusing speech from the tie wearer before you wake up unsuspecting in a train. What are you doing here? How do you get here?

What about the Xen aliens? Most of these questions remain unanswered until the end, the story unfortunately only unfolds in fragments – and just when you think you’ve put most of the puzzle pieces together into a reasonably recognizable image, the game is over, with a clear reference to one third part.

Not a big problem for the X-Files-hardened gamer, but the Half-Life newbie will be completely confused by the end of the game at the latest, especially since the developers have failed to provide at least a summary of the first story or an introduction to the characters – as they did before mentioned there is no manual, not even in electronic form. This is all the more regrettable as the game oozes with innuendos, familiar characters and inside jokes that only connoisseurs can relate to.

Storyline (Spoilers)

The events of Half-Life and a subsequent “portal storm” enabled an alien race called Combine to conquer the earth within seven hours, referred to in the game as the 7-hour war. Only the intervention of the Black Mesa administrator Dr. Wallace Breen as negotiator of the human race could avert the complete annihilation of the earth. Dr. Breen was appointed steward of the earth for this reason, but he is only a puppet of the Combine.

After the conquest of the earth, the surviving people were resettled in metropolitan areas. For this purpose, numbered cities were formed from the remaining intact cities. People there are forbidden to reproduce, which is additionally supported by so-called inhibition fields.

The alien dictators justify this with the fact that people should be helped by the suppression of instinct to reach the next stage of evolution. The generation living on Earth at the time of the Combine Invasion is threatened with being the last.

The main location of the plot of Half Life 2 is a large city called City 17, which is located near a coast and is located in Eastern Europe in terms of its architecture and because of the numerous Cyrillic lettering. [5] As in other cities, the Combine built a citadel in the form of a 3.4 km high skyscraper, which is why life in the city is only possible under the control of the Combine.

The Combine forces consist on the one hand of synths, technically modified alien beings enslaved by the Combine, and on the other hand through the advancement of human technology such as helicopters, trains and automobiles. [6] [7] The Combine expanded their military might on earth through transhuman cyborgs, humans who have been technically altered through capture and made submissive under brainwashing.

During the dictatorship, an underground resistance movement against the Combine arose, mainly from the former Black Mesa workers Dr. Isaac Kleiner, Barney Calhoun, Dr. Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx Vance. They are supported by the extraterrestrial vortigaunts and civilians. [8]

The rest of the world outside the cities is devastated and populated with diverse types of extraterrestrial beings such as antlions (ant lions), headcrabs (head crabs) and parasites called barnacles. If people are attacked by headcrabs, they develop into zombies.

Game world

According to the half-life tradition, you don’t have to deal with individual levels, but with a large world, the sections of which are logically connected to one another. You start in City 17, make your way through dim canals, speed across rivers in a propeller boat and land in the small town of Ravenholm teeming with the undead. 

Then it goes through a “28 Days later” -compatible, zombie-infested tunnel to a beautiful coastal landscape, whose country roads and villages you explore with a lively (and heavily armed) buggy. Over a gigantic bridge you land in a gloomy prison, whereupon you finally arrive back in City 17.

There you can expect a guerrilla war between rebels and the mysterious Combine Forces, against whose street battles every Medal of Honor is hopelessly inferior. At the end of the game you get to see the gigantic citadel from the inside, compared to which the matrix is ​​a place of joy and peace in comparison. From the beginning to the end you need about 15 hours on the medium level of difficulty, whereby the hardness of the game can be regulated at any time in three levels.

All of this is made possible by a linear hose system that allows one section to flow seamlessly into the other. This freedom is bought with considerable loading times, which on systems with less than one gigabyte of RAM sometimes hold up the game flow for a minute. This is particularly annoying at the notorious tunnel sections: You trot stubbornly straight ahead on a straight passage until the next section is unexpectedly loaded.

If you get into a fight immediately afterwards (which happens not infrequently) and drift backwards, the previous part is pushed back into the memory – whereupon you have to move forward again (loading pause) to continue.

And it is actually less the loading time itself than the loading frequency, which is so annoying – especially in the sections on a vehicle you can see the loading bar sometimes every minute. Nonetheless, this system creates the feeling of a “real” world: There are no wild leaps or style breaks here, one section merges logically into the next.

Physics is on point

In Half Life 2 you unexpectedly take on the role of a popular hero: Everyone knows you, everyone adores you – at least in the friendly ranks. The opponents who, on the orders of the opaque Dr. Breen act, of course, have a different opinion: Combine soldiers, zombies, headcrabs, antlions reminiscent of the bugs from “Starship Troopers” or manhacks (whirring shredders, spraying sparks with a creepy wasp sound) make your life very difficult .

In addition there are fat helicopters, movable gunships or the monstrous striders, which resemble the tripods from “War of the Worlds” – and can distribute them at least as devastatingly! Even boss fights await you at irregular intervals: in which you compete against particularly well-armed helicopters, gunships or monster beetles. 

Your weapon range has a lot to counter this threat: pistol, magnum, machine gun, shotgun and rocket launcher with steerable projectiles are a good start, most guns also have a second fire mode. The crossbow, with whose steel bolts you can staple opponents to walls, is better. But it really takes off with two booms: Number 1 are the ingenious »Pheropods«.

With these scented sachets you can get the otherwise deadly Antlions on your side and rush on your enemies in a controlled manner – the mindless beasts pounce on everything but you, screaming. Number 2 is the Gravity Gun: With it, like Darth Vader in “The Empire Strikes Back”, you can pick up all sorts of things and push them away again with smack: radiators, bricks, boards, cupboards or saw blades that can be used to split cheeky enemies into two handy pieces let cut.

This practical tool will be improved again shortly before the end of the game, after which you are no longer only allowed to throw inanimate objects …

A Huuugge Success

Half Life 2 received largely positive reviews from critics and editors of the leading print magazines. The game’s strengths are the varied gameplay and the credible staging of the game world. Furthermore, the graphics and physics engines are highlighted as positive aspects of the game. On the negative side, there are mostly minor flaws such as logic errors in the main plot.

With a Metascore of 96 points, Half Life 2 still leads the ranking of the best-rated computer games of all time. [64] The game also achieved high ratings in German-language specialist magazines. GameStar gave it 93 points, the highest rating ever given to an action game at the time of the test. The PC Games rated Half Life 2 with 96%, the highest rating since Wing Commander 3 (1995).

The practice that you have to register the game online via Steam after the installation and activate it with additionally downloaded data before the game can be selected was rated negatively. This had never been the case for a single player game before and led to lengthy update processes, especially for analog modem owners.

Valve and Vivendi Universal were therefore warned by the Federation of German Consumer Organizations. [32] Many PC game magazines (including PC Games and GameStar) were only able to point out this fact after it was published, as Half Life 2 was only published shortly before the magazine went to press.

Many buyers also initially complained about the insufficient payment method when purchasing a game on Steam. The games offered there could only be paid for with a credit card. Since August 2006 you can also pay through PayPal and use the direct debit procedure. [65]

Another point of criticism is the equipment of the game box – it only contains the game DVD and a note with the most important keyboard assignments, not a comprehensive manual. According to Valve, this was done in order not to disadvantage the Steam customers compared to the buyers of the shop version. A separate strategy guide is available.

Bottomline

I can hardly believe it myself: Half Life 2 actually made a disciple out of a skeptic and a believer out of a doubter – I am converted. I’ve never heard myself say “Coooool!” So often at a game.

All the trouble with Steam, all the fiddling with the installation: simply blown away after a very short time! The game doesn’t have the best graphics, not the best AI, not the best story, not necessarily the best sound – but just like the average components make the perfect body for humans, Half Life 2 is much more than the sum in the end its individual parts. The world is coherent, everything fits together harmoniously, you really have the feeling of shooting your way through a real world. 

Okay, this feeling comes at the price of nasty loading times, but it’s more than worth it! While other shooters still despair of the feel of the first game, Valve has easily outdone itself. Half Life 2 is not a dull shootout like Doom 3, it is more of an action adventure that, despite the strict linearity, gives you a lot of freedom – which means that this linearity is not even consciously perceived as such.

It’s one of the few games where you progress as slowly as possible because you’re afraid it might be over all of a sudden. All in all, including all the contra-points, Half Life 2 is a masterpiece, a milestone, an absolute must for every PC gamer, whether shooter friend or not.

The breathing stops, the pulse is racing: I carefully venture out of cover, but a flying gunboat chases a volley of projectiles around my ears! Now take all courage and with a pounding heart, continue to the safe corner – reload rocket launchers and fire! You experience such thrilling scenes in Half Life 2 every second.

The second adventure by Gordon Freeman shows off dream optics and a crackling atmosphere that I haven’t been able to experience on the PC before. Many scenes will stay in my memory for a long time, because action has seldom been staged so gripping, so thrilling and frighteningly real. Even the weak team AI and the poor story cannot reduce the adrenaline-fueled fun. Half Life 2 is clearly the new reference – before Far Cry and well before the one-way street Doom 3.

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