Half life 2

To paraphrase Pauline Kael, is Morgan Freeman the savior of the human race? yes, yes he is

Let me just put it out there, I don’t like first person shooters very much, I find them kinda boring and simplistic. I make exceptions, but even then, the genre as a whole feels kinda limited. That being said, Half Life 2 is really good. Or, to be more specific, its really good for a First Person Shooter, but ultimately, that’s all it is, good for its genre rather than really a masterpiece. See, I don’t like FPS (seriously I am not going to rewrite that constantly), because they are by nature very much small picture games, IE your so limited in perspective. While it seems realistic that you’re looking through your eyes, the inability to manipulate the world around you beyond picking stuff up and shooting things makes it actually less realistic, the interactions are very detached and limited, but thats a personal bias for another time.

Let me just get this out of the way, Half Life 2 is a great game. In fact, it an excellent game, because it knows how to be a good game. No wait, I’m lying. Half life true is a fun and enjoyable game, but it isn’t excellent. Yeah, I know that is controversial, considering that Valve is sort of the Bioware of action games in terms of quality, so I have to be careful saying this, because it isn’t a bad game by any means. The best words to describe Half Life 2 is effective and fun, because it does what you expect from it, its enjoyable, keeps you on the edge of your seat and is very engaging…wow this is getting tangential. Or lets organize this.

Basically Half Life one came out 1998 for the PC, which takes place in an alternate time line, where aliens invade. Because it came out in 1998 I haven’t played it and I most likely never will if they don’t remake it or I get lucky with buying stuff. You play Morgan Freeman, who has given up acting and taken up theoretical physicists, and then single handily defeat the entire alien invasion, then defeating the entire US military, then defeating the Black Opts, then a second Alien invasion, only to be kidnapped by an intergalactic lawyer. You return to earth ten years later in the capital of Bulgaria Sophia, now known as City 17, as a second (actually third) alien force invaded and took over earth, installing a puppet communist style dictatorship. Because your Morgan Freeman, and thus pretty much the coolest human being in existence, you instantly lead a rebellion, basically becoming the messiah, which makes sense cause your playing Morgan Freeman (through some people think that your called Gordon for some reason…weird) and you know it from here.

Right stuff I like. Now for a sequel, the game doesn’t really tell anybody who didn’t play the first game what’s going on, which I think is a good thing. Like “Children of Men” there is pretty much no exposition in this game, as all of the characters in the game assume that Freeman already knows what is going on because he has been living here for ten years. The background information exists, but you have to look for it, like in newspaper clips and random comments by various characters rather than any actual exposition. In a similar vein, the fact that the game has literally no cut scenes is an admirable attempt to avoid players feeling bored and uninvolved (again, video games aren’t movies), but in essence, in order to move the plot along there are A LOT of scenes where you are for what ever reason unable to move and just have to watch stuff happen. Through that feeling of being trapped is used to great effect in a few scenes, most of the time it might as well just be a cut scene. Gameplay wise it’s good in that the action is always moving on, I can use the environment to my advantage, and it rewards me for being good with a gun, but honestly through, its kinda easy most of the time. While I can use awesome plans like sneaking around in the environments and taking out the communist/Combine enforcers cleverly, I could just as easily just mown them all down with my machine guns, knowing I can just reload off their bodies. Only on certain levels (Revanholm) actually force me to preserve my ammunition and made an effort to think before walking through a room randomly. Then some of the aliens are hilariously hard, but not in a way that rewards me being clever, just me shooting them constantly, like Gunships (I mean, in Nova Prospect, dear gods that was just painful). Only striders and Antlion queens (Huge land based aliens) are actually interesting to fight, and even that gets old. The AI is good enough I suppose, but honestly, my guys don’t walk into bullets (all the time) and my enemies change their tactics, but its limited. I read about the first half life game, where you have elite special opts and Marines running around killing each other and me, and using really advanced planning (such as leaving mines with nasty notes attached to them, or actually ambushing me). Its good enough to keep me on my toes, and entertained, but never challenged. The physics engine is remarkable, but the things I do with it is mostly picking stuff up and stacking stuff, it doesn’t go anywhere. The monsters are cool, but there aren’t that diverse and you can pretty much just shoot all of them. The designs are good, the many parallels to communism are fascinating (the fall of the regime feels just like the fall of communism…with aliens), but they don’t go into it, its like the fact the game is set in Bulgaria, it’s a backdrop, kinda cool, but they could have modeled the enemies after the Khmer Rouge and set in Cambodia and the game would have been exactly the same just with different setting. The only thing the game really uses to its fullest extent is atmosphere, which I will admit is wonderfully done, the feeling of decay is evident when walking through the ruined city, and even when surrounded by thousands of guards, there is something about their emotionless voices that implies sterility or stagnation. This game is one of the few that takes advantage of the very few (comparatively) amount of characters ever seen on screen in an otherwise massive city, you get the feeling that humanity is on its last legs. The Orwellian propaganda by the main antagonist (an human proxy named Dr. Breen, who saved humanity from the alien) is masterfully done, especially considering he honestly believes in his transhuman rhetoric and is trying, however ruthlessly, to protect humanity from the aliens. Actually reminds me of the Eastern European puppet dictators during the Nazi and Soviet Regime (ahem Bulgaria). The infighting between the various villains is cool, but they don’t do anything other than add scenery and some possible plans that you won’t use because its so easy. The way that the cast is ethnically mixed, not to mention with a fairly even gender ratio is great, but the fact that they have no personality beyond a bunch of random phrases (I mean, I can’t even talk to them) is just disheartening. Oh right, and there aren’t any Eastern Europeans here besides one crazy priest, where are the Bulgarians? The guns are cool, but there are so limited, and I don’t get anything new in the two expansions, just regaining my old guns. And as much as I felt like they could have done more with the villains, what they did do was impressive, I normally think that cyborgs are just plain stupid, but here they are presented as really….disturbing. Not until later in the game does it explicitly say that the humans have been mechanically altered, but there is something off about them, and the way the aliens look natural, just with ingrown machine guns suggests a sense of unnatural alien torment that it makes the skin crawl. Also, you see so little in this game, most of the worst is just implied, you only see brief glimpses of the Combine (aliens) inhumanity, but you know that it is there, just behind those white washed walls. There is something truly communist about their total lack of empathy and the feeling of a regime that is systematically destroying everything wonderful about humanity. And ultimately, even if Morgan Freeman accepts his role as the savior of humanity (you know its true), you know that the world has already been ravaged, its just an abuse child that has escaped its parent but is still broken inside. Wonderful. And when they want to do horror, they do horror well, dear gods they can do it well. “An alien in every hallway is tedious, an alien in every fourth hallway is horrifying.” Preach it. The biggest feeling of Half Life 2 is that it’s a very standard game, the first one was creative and powerful, while this is more just perfecting what was already done. Its admirable for what it does, but its like the society it presents, stagnant, able to achieve glory, but ultimately doomed to just to go through the same motions (unless the third one proves me wrong). Fitting for the middle game I suppose. If you want a game without choice, that unique aspect of video games, but perfected to the greatest extent possible, than Half Life 2 is the game for you. I know that Yahtzee (only video game critic who I respect for those who don’t know him) says that games shouldn’t add choice at the cost of quality, but without choice I feel that the game is ultimately limited in quality. Adding choice in a game is like using big words in an novel, you have to be talented to pull it off, but can try to use it to hide one’s lack of talent. However a great writer without a good vocabulary is ultimately limited in his scope. Or as my dad put it. “You can’t win Indi 500 with a Volkswagen, but even with the greatest car in the world, you need to be a good driver.” Also, my three complaints. Its a great game, i can't deny that, and I will be replaying this in the future, but Valve is too smart to content themselves with this when i feel like they could have gone even further

1) Why the hell didn’t my rocket launcher just aim straight? If I shoot and want to then hid behind a rock, that’s good, don’t make me pay for thinking smart…..

2) Why the hell is Morgan Freeman not the main character……seriously

3) You destroyed Sophia, you jerks.