»17th February 2005
Half-Life 2 Rant
What is good about Half-Life 2
The water effects
They are really good. The reflections look ace and the water only tends to look oily and fake at certain angles at close range.
The AI
Well, it's okay I guess. The Combine Troopers were pretty cool at first.
It doesn't need a CD to play
I like not having to put the CD in the drive just so the game can run some shitty anti-piracy stuff which doesn't work anyway. Though this was offset by the fact Steam is compulsory and the whole Internet Connection fiasco.
The game comes packaged with CS:Source
Whilst I'm not particularly a fan of CS, I do welcome it alongside HL2 as it is probably the second most important reason why I didn't uninstall the game after completing it out of sheer frustration. It comes with bots, which fucking rocks for people with no motherfucking internet connection. Go figure, Steam. The bots are actually quite good too.
What is bad about Half-Life 2
Weapons
Where to start... Well, firstly there never seemed enough. Two of each class of weapon, that's ten, which is usually enough for most games, but when you consider that the two pistols are fairly similar, the two machine guns are fairly similar and that the grenades, as always, aren't that good, you aren't left with much choice. The pistols aren't too much of a problem, one being your first proper weapon and the second been the quite cool .357 Magnum.
The real problems start with the sub-machine guns, the standard SMG and the Pulse Rifle are pretty much the same. Okay so one holds fifteen more bullets and fires faster than the other more powerful one. Big fucking deal. It never really mattered which one you used much as ammo was always plentiful for one or the other in most cases. The grenades are different, granted, the standard SMG has a (surprise, surprise) standard grenade launcher (which has an annoying maximum capacity of three (more on that later)) and the pulse rifle has a weird bouncing globe thing not entirely unlike a beefed up version of the primary fire on the spinny-disc-gun (I'm sure that wasn't its name) from Unreal Tournament. It seemed strange why two such similar weapons made up the rather short list of weapons. I think the pulse rifle might be a projectile weapon (a la Quake 3 Plasma Rifle) as opposed to a hit-box weapon (Instant hit, no travel time), but if it was, the shots went so fast it barely mattered and didn't require much correction at long ranges.
The array of weapons I had throughout the game never seemed completed, it was only really near the end that it became clear I wasn't going to get a cool looking laser gun, tau cannon, egon gun or anything even remotely as cool or complex as a BFG. On the subject of cool and complex is the Gravity Gun, an original and fairly cool 'weapon' or more accurately 'tool'. It just felt that Valve just went onto auto-pilot as soon as they'd made the Grav-gun as the rest of the weapons shown little originality. The RPG is really nothing worth mentioning, kinda interesting how it locks onto flying enemies but I can't remember there been a 'laser-off' secondary fire like on the first game. The grenades didn't feel as though they'd been thrown the way they flew out from the centre of the screen (though I must say that it is clear Gordon had been working on his limp throwing arm since the first game). The grenades were vastly limited in use by not exploding upon impact with enemies. There may have been a fuse and hold-before-firing function but I never used it.
The shotgun in Half Life 1 was ridiculously over-powered (you could kill most enemies on Medium and Normal with one double-shot at point blank on Medium or Easy). The shotgun remains over-powered in HL2, though at least Valve have now recognised it's Thermo-nuclear potential and put it in the fourth weapon category with the similarly powerful crossbow. The crossbow was unremarkable, the only interesting feature of it was the bizarre bolts it fired which looked kinda like red-hot iron rods, not exactly what you'd expect a crossbow to fire.
Finally, the squeezy Ant-Lion ball thing was what I hoped would be the first of a plethora of cool alien weapons. Sadly it was the only one and was only useful on the one level where you could control the Ant Lions. Now that is what I call a worthwhile weapon, completely useless after the one level where you have to use it! Nice one Valve! Seriously, I like it when a bit of tactics are involved in the use of weapons on an FPS. The choice of weapons and use of weapons on Half-Life 2 is about as satisfying as the choice and use of a Rhino Tank rush or a Kirov rush on RA2.
Ammo Capacity
Now I can't be sure whether it was an attempt at 'realism' or more likely an attempt at ballancing the game, but the ammo capacity of some weapons was annoying as opposed to 'refreshingly intelligent' (The Doom Guy can carry 50 rockets because he is a HARD MOTHERFUCKER and FUCKING PWNS SATAN, by comparison). You could carry ten grenades for your SMG grenade-launcher on HL1 which was cool as grenade launching is cool, but bad as it made the game a bit easy. HL2 limits you to 3, which I found made the game slightly more challenging but in an annoying way. More importantly you could only carry 3 RPG rockets (or 4, I can't remember off-hand). This was fucking annoying as on Medium difficulty anything which required RPGs to dispatch (i.e. Gunships and Striders) needed at least four. Which meant you had to search for one of the many rocket ammo dumps which surrounded and thus gave fore-warning of flying attack set-piece battles. Now that could be cool at times, as it could be cool sneaking around avoiding the fire of gunships and striders, but was frequently annoying when such battles occurred when you were low on life and lost in the often maze-like or dangerously open maps. To cite two examples, on Highway 17 I had a thoroughly enjoyable half hour of dying and repeatedly reloading when I found I had to take down a gunship whilst on about 12 health using rocket ammo scattered across the open and thus incredibly dangerous map. Later on, when fighting Striders towards the end of the game, I became lost in the monotonous and maze-like ruins of City 17, that's lost in a 'Where the fuck is the rocket ammo? Have I seen that pile of grey concrete rubble before?' way.
Enemies
Well in short there wasn't enough variety of said enemies. Lack of variety appears to be a running theme here huh? I mean the guns were few and far too similar and so were the enemies it seems! You start off the game by fighting Combine Troops, you then fight some Headcrabs and Zombies (now in two flavours, oh the variety!), some Ant-Lions, some more Combine Troops, Striders, Combine Troops, Zombies, Combine Troops, Gunships, Combine Troops... Yawn... Yep, the game unfortunately had only two stock enemies, which was either Combine Troops or more rarely Zombies and Headcrabs. You had to fight Ant-Lions in the middle section (the pointless and tiresome section), with the occasional sprinkling of Gunships and later on the odd-strider or two. Oh I forgot to mention the razor fliers and camera bots, silly me.
Fighting the Combine Troops was pretty cool at first, the AI is quite good and takes a while to become predictable though doesn't suffer too much for it, but after a few too many hours of killing annother wave of the never ending supply of Combine Troopers it became dull. So what if the Combine Troops come in several different uniforms and with different weapon selections. The white storm-trooper rip-off ones might have been slightly harder, I hardly noticed. The same tactics could be used on all of them. None of the tended to be very dangerous (consistently anyway, the white ones occasionaly threw you the odd energy grenade thing which could catch you off gaurd) and most were sent packing with a single or occasionaly double shot from the shotgun. I could pick them off at long range using the crossbow (which on a plus side is the first one I've seen in a game which follows a curved trajectory) but why bother? I could simply fill them with 357/SMG/Pulse Rifle/Shotgun rounds and be done with them at close range. This ties in with the similarity of the weapons, I never really cared which weapon I used to take out most of the enemies as all were equally effective. True, this is the case on many games, but not to such an extent that I get annoyed by it.
The Ant-Lions were fucking annoying when they were actually attacking you. Spawning up from the ground and doing that annoying flying charge. Most of the time I couldn't be arsed fighting them and just ran away from them which at the very least saved ammo and more importantly time and effort (they never seemed very dangerous whilst been in pursuit, you could take them for a walk quite easily). The two flavours of zombies and head-crabs were equally boring. The jumping zombies and headcrabs hardly evoked the same terror which the equally fast and jumpy Assassins did on HL1 and they tended to charge straight at you anyway which made blowing them to bits with whatever weapon you happened to be using at the time fairly easy. Oops I forgot an enemy in my initial list. The head-crab spawning flaming zombie guy! Oh how could I forget such a great enemy, mindlessly shuffling around and occasionaly spawning the odd headcrab! Those guys were boring, I mean it was like a chore destroying them, I often though 'Do I really need to? They're so slow I could just walk around them and save the ammo and effort.'
The Striders, the most imaginative and potentially interesting of all the enemies though the most blatantly-ripped-off-from-a-famous-science-fiction-novel were in a word overrated. Now I know it's not HL2's fault, well it's probably Valve's fault, that the Strider was hyped so much, but it hardly evoked much terror when I first encountered one. Upon spotting a Strider I thought 'At last', 'At least it's not another fucking Combine Trooper' and then finally 'Time to find the obligatory stash of rockets'. Thanks to the polite but generally inept allied NPCs, the Striders pretty much ignored me whilst I proceeded to pummel them with rockets from the convenient crate of rockets inside the conveniently stocked with health kits ruined building #5674.
The Buggy
I quite liked the boat level, not only because the water effects are cool. By comparison the Buggy levels were just inane. Crashes resulted in you been swarmed by fucking ant-lions and the tau cannon that was mounted on top never seemed that useful as it was generally easier to just run enemies over as aiming whilst driving was particularly hazardous unless you were shooting pretty much directly forward. Were it not for the annoying fade to black and 'subject failed to utilize resources' message I would have quite promptly pushed my Buggy over one of the cliffs and walked Highway 17.
Music
Never HL1's strong-point. The majority of HL2's music is repeated from the first game. Whilst that is generally a good thing as the music when it did occur in HL1 was actually quite good, it represents a bit of laziness disguised as 'artiness' on Valve's part.
Steam
It's shit that HL2 unecessarily needs an internet connection. I don't like having to run a stupid front-end programme to play a game. I don't like carting my PC around in a suitcase just to get HL2 in contact with the internet only for it to register my email with Valve and thus unlock the game. Steam would actually be okay if it was an opt-in thing, but you just get the feeling that Valve reckon us idiots aren't capable of operating the game without the benevolent hand of Valve to guife you through the minefield of downloading patches, playing internet games and downloading mods. Yeah, that's fucking combating piracy. Maybe I should have saved myself the hassle and £25 and just got the thing off Kazaa. Nice one Valve.
Level Design I
The first few levels of HL2 were quite clever in that they were structured so that you felt you were wandering around and just happened to stumble upon the right way. That is pretty clever. Though later on, and upon replaying the first few levels, it becomes pretty clear that the game is 'on rails', oh what a clichéd video-game journo thing to say, but it's achingly true. I mean fair enough, Doom 3 is on rails too, but Doom 3 isn't half as pretensious as HL2 (more on that later). The attempts to mask linearity through increasingly complex and maze-like level design was commendable but highly ineffective later on. Occasionally your pre-destined path widened out a little (Highway 17), occasionaly it gave the impression of expanse by allowing you to skip sections (Highway 17), but upon playing the game again you will have to trawl across the same bleak and empty stretch of Highway 17 which you did the first time round.
An incredibly annoying and criminally overused level design trick was the good old fashioned laser-barrier. Which prevented you going down the Combine Troop spawning corridors or across the railway bridge before you killed everything under the railway bridge and blown up the gunship. The abomination which was the last level where you enter the Citadel was a mass of Combine Troop spawning corridors unsurprisingly guarded by glowing laser barries. I mean if you don't want us to go down all those fucking corridors Valve, don't put them in the first place.
Level Design II: The first and last levels
HL1 had a 'slow paced' start which gave you time to read the credits, look at the Black Mesa facility and jump around like a spaz abusing the lack of momentum in the physics engine. The first TWO chapters of HL2 involve you walking around in utter confusion with little to no idea who you're supposed to be meeting, where the fuck you are or what the fuck you are doing wherever the fuck you are. Similarly the LAST TWO chapters (I'm trying to highlight how FOUR chapters of wandering around, not shooting anything is a waste of FOUR chapters) involve a lengthy train ride through the initially awe-inspiring and spectacular, but eventually dull and monotonous Citadel and lengthy periods of not doing anything but listening to the various NPCs chat about the plot which you are only ever invited to the periphery of. Yeah, that's fucking fun.
Valve Level Designer One - Hmmm, how can we show off our super-fucking-cool physics system to the player?
Valve Level Designer Two - Erm, how about we throw in a few see-saw puzzles?
Valve Level Designer One - That's a fucking awesome idea!
Valve Level Designer Two - But what about the Gravity gun? I mean it's not really that useful.
Valve Level Designer One - Don't worry. We'll let the player throw a load of razor blades round on the Zombie levels and I'll put a few more of those bitchin' 'pull the power lead to disable to obstructive laser barrier' puzzles in!
My fucking God. I don't think I have ever been so throroughly let down by a last level on a game. I mean seriously, I can sum up the lame excuse for the 'end boss' (I don't think I can really call it a 'boss') in one sentence, not even a very long or complex sentence! Here goes...
Jump up to the top of a reactor whilst pulling out energy balls from generators and zapping Combine Troops with the instant-death-gravity gun.
That is about all you can say for the last level, well, the bits where you actually get to do anything anyway. I just somehow got the feeling that Valve felt they better bring the game to a close but also felt they needed to explain the fucking plot, so had to cram it all into two levels. Traditionally, the last level of a game is the hardest and/or the coolest level. The last two levels of HL2 were neither. It somehow seemed a good idea to take all the weapons from the player and just give them a super gravity gun which can kill multiple Combine Troopers in a single shot for the last two levels. I mean I was already getting bored of killing Combine Troopers, but then to remove all the challenge!? I couldn't be arsed wasting half an hour trying to kill the Strider using the super gravity gun (henceforth known as Insant Death Gun (IDG)) so whacked the difficulty down so I could kill it with about three shots of the energy balls. Look, if you were getting as bored as I was, you'd understand.
Upon pulling out some more energy balls from some more generators and throwing them at the portal which the Administrator was trying to escape in (or whatever his plan was), I was treated to some rather impressive explosions and a spectacular view of a huge tower about to come crushing down on me when suddenly TIME STOPPED. At that point G-Man walked out of nowhere, started talking a load of shit and making references to the plot which I had absolutely no idea on. A few interesting colour filters later and G-Man was walking out of a door of light and then to my horror the credits began to roll up. I had just seen the most disappointing end to a game ever, though looking pretty cool, I was left feeling that I hadn't really had to fight for the ending, that it was all pretty easy. I mean seriously, no invincible Cyber Demon, no choose-the-fate-of-man-kind decisions to make, no repeated re-loading even! The last hour of HL2 had been a train ride, zapping more Combine Troops that couldn't hurt me, an annoying battle with a Strider, a conversation with the Administrator which made little sense due to the spartan nature of the plot and all culminating in a jumping and throwing exercise to prompt a visit by the increasingly surplus-to-requirements G-Man. Wow. That sucked. As far as I can tell, Gordon gets warped off somewhere else (where exactly I imagine we will find out in Half Life 3), Alice (that is her name right?) dies, the world is left fucked up and G-Man might just be Jesus. Now that is some fucking plot resolution there. Which leads me to my next subject.
The Plot Abyss
'Hole' is not appropriate here. The plot is best described as the odd needle-like tower protruding from a vast abyss of uncertainty and lack of explanation. I will try and list as many grievances about the plot as I can. Feel free to email me explaining where these grievances were addressed or explained within the game.
-How/why did Gordon get on the train into City 17.
-How/why is City 17 relevant to the plot of the first game.
-How the story at all ties in with the first game.
-Who the hell are the combine?
-What was that giant maggot thing the Administrator was talking to at the end of the game on the big screen?
-What is Barney and all the other characters doing in City 17? (which, as far as I know, is in Eastern Europe (not that the game ever told me that, I read it in PC Gamer))
-What the hell was the 7 hour war (or however many hours it was) all about. When did that occur? Didn't the humans conquer Xen in the first game?
-How is Xen related to HL2 if at all?
-What is the time period between HL1 and HL2?
-Where did that massive fucking citadel and all that future technology come from?
-Where the fuck were all the other aliens from Xen excluding the Headcrabs and Vortigons?
-What the fuck is G-Man? (I don't mind 'mysterious' characters that are an 'enigma', except when they only pop up to gloss over gaping inadequacies in the story)
-Was there any reason why I traipsed through Ravenholme, Highway 17, Nova Projekt and Sand Traps. The last thing I can remember directly pertaining to the plot before that was being cut off from Alice and attempting to meet up with her again. (Seriously, is she even called Alice?)
-How did the Administrator from Black Mesa become the leader of the world or whatever the hell he was?
-What were the Alien Slaves/Vortigons doing on Earth? I know that the Nihilanth had somehow enslaved them in the first game, but that is only through paying too much attention to Half-Life fan sites and still doesn't explain why they help the humans out.
-Where the fuck do those Ant-Lions/Striders/Gunships/Dropships come from? Xen? Wherever the hell the 'Combine' come from?
-Again. What the fuck is the Combine?
-Why are the Overwatch trying to kill me?
-Who the fuck are the overwatch?
-What the hell was the Administrator on about through the last two levels?
-What were those weird human things hobbling around the Citadel whilst you were on the train ride? Valve been ambiguous? That would be okay if it got explained later or was seemingly of less importance.
-What were those weird lumbering aliens walking around the Citadel whilst you were on the train ride? Not everything has to be explained, I know, but Valve felt it necessary not to explain most things, meaning I wasn't that engaged to the story and thus grew tired of the endless waves of Combine troopers from the innumerable laser fence guarded corridors.
-When did Barney and the two scientist guys in particular change from petrified workers at a research lab to machine-gun toting guerilla freedom fighters? I mean Gordon is a machine-gun toting guerilla freedom fighter because it would suck if the player had to play as a Theoretical Physicist who's main objective in HL1 would be to find the nearest dumpster to hide until someone rescued him.
-On a more general note. How is HL1 at all related to HL2 beyond the name itself and about five or so characters on various peripheral strands of the rather threadbare plot?
Surface (pre)Tension
Playing HL2 was in many ways like watching the Matrix Revolutions. Parts of it were exciting (the Neo-Agent Smith battle or the first 20 or so fights with Combine Troopers and the boat level). Parts of it were nice to look at (the whole hour or so of boring CG battle or the water effects in Half-Life 2's case). But equally, some parts of it were dull (the REAL WORLD in the Matrix or the 21st-768th battle with Combine Troopers). Some parts of it were poorly explained and hard to follow (the Architect or the whole fucking plot in HL2). But through the whole experience, you were bombared by the arrogance of the people who made it. That 'This thing fucking rocks so much we don't need to add a few interesting weapons or enemies!' and that 'It doesn't matter about the boring repetitive levels or the non-sensical plot, I mean WE FUCKING ROCK!'.
Maybe I'm being a bitter towards Valve. I didn't expect as much from HL2 as I did from Doom 3. Neither game fully delivered but I know which one left me feeling most cheated of £25. Increasingly throughout the game I felt that Valve were being lazy that they had let their standards slip. The game doesn't feel finished! All the things which Valve hyped up about Half Life 2 disappointed apart from maybe the physics engine. The AI was functional but Combine Troopers rarely varied from the charge or move and fire pattern. The allied NPCs were pretty well done, not ever getting in your way, but equally never seemed to be very dangerous to the enemy. The striders weren't in the game as much as I envisioned as Valve seemed pretty pleased with them. The enemies as a whole felt like a cut-down roll-call from HL1. I was disappointed not to have seen either the Gargantua or the Human Assassins. The whole game felt too far removed from HL1, gone were the hi-tech Black Mesa interiors, New Mexico landscapes and Xen alien world, in comes some cool but seemingly out of place Citadel, a dull Eastern European City(tm) and... well not much else. The first game stood out from the crowd of Quake 2 clones in 1998 because it was an FPS that was fairly intensively story driven. If you compare the contemporary Id offering at the time of HL1 with the HL2-Doom 3 scenario just to illustrate. Quake 2's arbitrary plot was driven via your PDA and the occasional FMV. Doom 3's more involving plot is driven via a PDA and more frequent radio contacts with you C.O. and the odd well scripted cut-scene. Half Life 1's plot was driven by your chance encounters with various employees and other NPCs at Black Mesa. Half Life 2's plot by comparison is poorly unfolded with the majority of the story told in the beggining and the ends of the game with very little happening in-between. The whole idea of Half Life seems to have gone awry too. I mean it'd have been just a little nice to have been told how Gordon got from the inter-dimensional train ride after killing the Nihilanth to the Eastern European City(tm) train station which opened up the sequel. There was lots of meaningless NPC chatter in HL2 about teleportation and portals which seemed in a way linked to HL1, but it seemed like they were rediscovering the technology as they seemed to have it fairly pinned down at Black Mesa. That's just another grievance with the plot to add to the already swelling list.
Reasons I didn't uninstall Half-Life 2 immediately after completing it
1. I wouldn't be able to put it back on once I'd calmed down without carting the PC back to Heckmondwike to get the thing connected to the internet, which is most inconvenient.
2. CS:Source is actually quite fun to play with bots, especially when you suck.
3. I thought maybe once I'd calmed down the game might not seem so disappointing.
If you managed to read through all that the you deserve a medal. In summary, to at least bring some semblance of ballance and fairness to my argument I feel it necessary to point out that Half Life 2 is not a BAD game. It's just a flawed, lazy and disappointing game when you consider what the first game achieved and what this game achieves beyond being an interesting technical demo for realistic physics, so-so AI and impressive ATI sponsored effects.
This rant contained spoilers. Get over it.
Extar, over, out.
This game did not deserve 96%, PC Gamer.