Pros Cons
Great combat; tons of gameplay variety; gravity gun is worth the price of admission; gorgeous graphics and forgiving hardware requirements. Story leaves a few too many gaps unfilled; no multiplayer beyond the updated Counter-Strike; poor launch for Steam.
SIX YEARS. It's been six years since the original Half-Life introduced gamers to Gordon Freeman, a seemingly average scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility. Six years since Half-Life rewrote the book on first-person shooters by combining a cinematic presentation with gripping combat and a detailed world with memorable characters. It wasn't necessarily the first game to do all these things, but it was the first do them all together, and do them all well. And in those six years, many games have cribbed from the Half-Life formula, but not even the best of them have been able to fully eclipse it.

Until now, that is. From its opening moments to its spectacular closing sequences, Half-Life 2 assaults you with a variety of gameplay styles and memorable moments, all executed with amazing precision. Half-Life 2 may not reinvent the first-person shooter, but improves on the original game in almost every way, and brings one major innovation to the table whose effects will likely be felt for years to come. For the first time in six years, we actually have a PC game that can arguably be called the "best first-person shooter ever."

Grave New World

HALF-LIFE 2 begins with the sight of the ominous G-Man, waking you from an ethereal slumber. "Rise and shine," he tells you. "Wake up and smell the ashes." Ashes, indeed. The world of Half-Life 2 is nothing like the one you left six years ago in Black Mesa. You may have won that battle, but Earth appears to have lost the war.

In a scene that both evokes memories of the original Half-Life and improves on it, the credits roll as you arrive in "City 17" by train. It's a much faster introduction this time, allowing you to start exploring right away. You're dropped off at a security checkpoint, and you're immediately greeted with the ominous face of one Dr. Wallace Breen looming overhead on a huge video projector, "welcoming" you to City 17. You couldn't feel less welcome.

As the video of Breen unconvincingly reassures newcomers that "it's safer here," you learn the grim details: you've arrived in one of Earth's few remaining cities, and the world is under control of a group described no further than "our benefactors." The picture only gets darker as you learn more, hammered home by paranoid citizens wandering around the station. Perhaps the biggest sign that things are out of whack, however, is when you notice one of the alien Vortigaunts acting as a janitor in the station. Things have most definitely changed.

Unfortunately, Half-Life 2 often fails to provide the explanations you're looking for. The story, penned by Half-Life scribe Marc Laidlaw, continually raises more questions than it answers. What happened after Black Mesa? Where has Freeman been since then? Like an X-Files plot on overdrive, the game continually teases you with tidbits and clues as to what's happened, but never really connects the dots. The disappointment probably won't set in until after you finish the game, but I suspect it could be the fans' main gripe with Half-Life 2.

There should be no such complaints about the game's length. At fourteen chapters long, it took me about sixteen hours to finish the campaign, and -- unlike a lot of shooters -- there are many chapters I'm looking forward to playing through again. As in Half-Life, the entire game is played out through Freeman's eyes, with no cutscenes to speak of, and the entire story relayed through interactions with other characters and other scripted events. There are many characters to meet, some familiar, and some new, like Alyx Vance, the daughter of one of the scientists from Black Mesa. These characters represent the emotional center of the game: you fight for their freedom, and they would do anything to help "the freeman," whose legend has apparently taken on mythical proportions since the original game. It's really worth taking your time and not racing through Half-Life 2: there are little nuggets of information hidden throughout the game if you're not paying attention.

ONE OF THE MARVELS of Half-Life 2 is the way you're eased into its new world. You start off exploring and learning how to interact with the environment, all while taking in the story. The first two chapters are almost all exposition -- it's not until the game's third mission (at least an hour into the game) that you even get your hands on a pistol.

Once the shooting starts, the combat in Half-Life 2 succeeds on just about every level. The arsenal mimics that of Half-Life: crowbar, pistol, machinegun, shotgun, RPG launcher, crossbow, etc. For each new weapon that's introduced, you're put in situations that encourage you to use it for a while, so you quickly become familiar with each gun and the best time to use it, building a vocabulary of tactics for each weapon, so to speak.

Similarly, enemies are introduced gradually so you can develop tactics for fighting them. The most common are the creepy-looking Combine cops and soldiers who dog you throughout the game. The combat and AI is excellent: it's all about tactics, managing your weapons properly, and using the environment to your advantage. Enemies use cover effectively, run away from grenades, and will lob in gredades of their own. Battles rarely play out the same way twice, and you feel like you're fighting enemies who think and react instead of automatons with a limited palette of actions.

Aside from the humanoid enemies, there are other interesting threats like the "manhacks," flying metal buzzsaws best fought off with the crowbar or the shotgun. The headcrabs return in new varieties, which can be a true nuisance to deal with in packs. Some of the best moments involve ground-to-air combat against Combine gunships, which conveniently appear whenever there's a supply of guided rocket-propelled grenades nearby. Just as you get the hang of fighting these enemies on their own, they're thrown at you in varying combinations, forcing you to develop new tactics on the fly. It's a joy to play through.

Lest you get bored with the run-and-shoot, Half-Life 2 offers plenty more to do. There are two lengthy sequences involving vehicles, an "airboat" and a buggy, which put you full control and are filled with memorable moments. There are defense missions, sections where you fight alongside allies (human and otherwise), and even some areas where you can go stealthy if you want to. In Half-Life tradition, there are also a number of puzzles, which are usually more elegant and intuitive than what we've seen in the series to date, often tying into the game's advanced physics in ingenious ways. The game does so much, and does it all so well, that it's hard to imagine anyone ever getting bored before the end.

The Gravity of the Situation

Half-Life 2 shines brightest when you're given access to its most intriguing weapon: the gravity gun. Like everything else in HL2, a typical tutorial won't do; you learn the ins and outs of the weapon with a memorable game of catch, with a "friend" of Alyx's who's equally unique and memorable. Using the gun is ridiculously easy: the right mouse button pulls an object towards you and grabs it; the left button propels objects away.

In the beginning, the gravity gun seems like a novelty, picking up barrels and throwing them at enemies. Before long, however, you realize that it opens up an entirely new set of gameplay options. You can pull a radiator off a wall and use it as a shield against snipers. You can grab supply crates from out-of-reach places and snatch valuable powerups from across a room. You'll use it to build makeshift bridges, and once you realize it's strong enough to push cars around, you'll walk into areas filled with debris and start bouncing everything at anyone who comes near you. Half-Life 2 would have been a great FPS without it, but the gravity gun adds an entirely new dimension to the game unlike anything that's come before it.


Finally, there's no better proof of how Half-Life 2 outshines the original than its endgame. While the original Half-Life ended with a highly criticized trip to the alien world of Xen, I thought the final missions of Half-Life 2 were the best in the game. There are several scenes in the final hours where you go toe-to-toe with the "striders" -- towering three-legged creatures that are a sight to behold in action. Once these epic battles are over, you move to the game's final two chapters, about which I'll only say (a) they're significantly different from the rest of the game and (b) I had a blast playing through them. Even if the story leaves questions unanswered, I found the gameplay in the two final chapters to be an immensely satisfying conclusion.

Half-Life 2 was built using Valve's new Source engine technology. There's not much point in comparing it to id Software's new technology used for DOOM3; they're both incredibly attractive, but in completely different ways. While id's latest was set primarily in dark indoor areas, leaning on light and shadows to set the game's tone, Half-Life 2 covers just about every type of area imaginable, from expansive outdoor areas to the tight interiors of run-down buildings. As you can see by the screenshots on these pages, every area is brought to life in vivid detail.

For starters, the architecture and level design throughout the game is staggeringly good. From the opening train station to the coastal sections of Highway 17 to the Nova Prospekt prison, every area has a lived-in feel to it that makes you feel like it really exists somewhere. Hi-resolution textures give the world a crisp feel, and character models are particularly impressive, with evocative facial expressions and animations that look far more natural than what you see in most games. Even the lip-synching is great, which helps sell the illusion that these are real people you're fighting for.

The sound of Half-Life 2 is equally impressive. Playing on a 5.1 surround system for two days straight was such an assault on my senses that I felt jittery by the end of each day. There's also an impressive list of actors bringing the characters to life, from Robert Guillaume to Robert Culp to Lou Gossett Jr., all of whom do a fantastic job. Maybe my only disappointment was that the music didn't play a bigger factor -- there's a soundtrack that comes and goes, but it's just sort of "there" -- it never adds or detracts from the overall experience.

Testing 1-2-3
While our initial playtesting was done at Valve's offices, it left some major questions unanswered: how would the game perform on our own machines? How would Valve's new Steam technology work? With so much new technology in play, there was certainly a concern that there could be some opening-day issues, but now that we've had the chance to test on our own machines, the good news is that everything seems to be running pretty well so far.

There are essentially two ways you can get Half-Life 2: you can buy it in your local store, or purchase and download it via Valve's Steam service. It's worth noting that all of these installs require you to authenticate your installation over the Internet, so if you're somehow reading this review but don't have your gaming rig hooked up to the Internet, it's something you need to consider.

To start, we installed the game via Steam, and it's a huge download -- it took about 15 hours to pre-load the game over the weekend over a DSL connection. Once the game went live on Tuesday morning, there was a brief period where we connected to the Steam servers and the game unlocked, which took about 15 minutes (although this seems to vary from person to person depending on the speed of your PC, your connection, and traffic on the Steam servers. We've had a few people report they couldn't log into the service today, but that usually resolves after retrying once or twice.)

(Editor's Note: Since our review was posted earlier today, the Steam service and authentication servers have been experiencing several technical issues, preventing some many gamers from properly installing and playing the game. We will continue to monitor this situation throughout the week.)

Using a different PC, we did a second install from a boxed copy, which comes on five CDs. (There's also a "collector's edition" DVD version available.) The process might seem a little awkward to some people -- once you've installed the game, you still need to set up a Steam account and update your installation before you can get up and running. Thankfully, everything ran smoothly, but it's still easy to see PC gamers getting a little frustrated with all these hoops to jump through.

The best news is that Half-Life 2 appears to run extremely well on just about every machine we've thrown at it. Aside from my own two installations, there are four other employees here at GameSpy HQ playing the game, via both Steam and boxed copies and on a variety of ATI and NVIDIA video cards. Since the game went live, we've probably put in a combined total of twenty hours of testing, and the worst we can find are some issues with the sound stuttering on a few machines, and Valve has acknowledged the existence of at least one start-up bug. Graphically, the game appears to be extremely scalable -- despite the fantastic visuals, the game has been running smooth on just about every machine we've tested it on, even down to older video cards like a GeForce Ti4600. If you've got a top-line card like an ATI X800 or a GeForce 6800, you'll be able to crank up all the details, but as far as we can tell, you probably don't need a major upgrade to play Half-Life 2.

THE MULTIPLAYER COMPONENT of Half-Life 2 should be familiar to most fans of the series: Counter-Strike: Source, an updated version of the ultra-popular terrorists-vs.-counter-terrorists mod. I'll admit, I hadn't played Counter-Strike in almost two years, but the new version has reignited my excitement for the game.

Graphically, Counter-Strike: Source doesn't look anywhere near as impressive as Half-Life 2 (not many games do), but the important thing is that the game no longer looks behind the curve -- it looks like a modern game, with nice water effects and some basic physics like bouncing barrels and ragdoll physics. More importantly, the game feels tight as a drum -- there's been no lag to speak of and everything from the sounds and the weapons to the interface all feel like a game with five years of polish behind it.

The downside, of course, is that the game also comes with five years of baggage. A lot of people got tired with Counter-Strike long ago and moved on to games like Battlefield 1942 or Unreal Tournament 2004. The game has been available for weeks to people who pre-ordered Half-Life 2, and many of the servers gravitate towards old standbys like Dust, Office and Italy, filled with players who know the maps inside and out. Interestingly, the bots from Counter-Strike: Condition Zero are absent, so your only option is to go online against players who have been playing for years. Without any way to match players of similar skill levels together, new players should prepare for a rough initiation.

It's a shame that there's no other multiplayer included with Half-Life 2 -- some simple DM would have been great, and the gravity gun just cries out a game where players just hurl barrels and other objects at each other. Hopefully the mod community will do something to remedy that before long.

The Final Word

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I reviewed DOOM 3 and called it a love-it-or-hate-it kind of game, one that would provoke hugely opposing opinions among gamers. I feel no such way about Half-Life 2. There's just so much good stuff in the single-player game, and it's all done so well, that it's hard to imagine anyone who likes action games not enjoying it.

It's true that a lot of Half-Life 2 is essentially a refinement of the formula that made the original game and its expansions so popular. But when you factor in the new engine, its the detailed, living environments, and the possibilities the gravity gun introduces to the game, you've got a sequel that truly lives up to its billing and is more than worth the price of admission. Fans might find themselves wishing for a little more on the multiplayer end, and that the story had been tied up a bit better, but odds are you'll remember your visit to City 17 long after you've finished Half-Life 2.