Half-Life 2 is a 4 year old game at this point and already a classic of the genre, so writing a conventional review of it would be pointless. But I’ve just spent the past week playing it for the first time, so I thought it would be interesting to write about my impressions on it as someone who’s played most of the current crop of modern FPS games. Technologically of course, Half-Life 2 can’t hold a candle to its successors. 4 years is after all a long time in the computer industry, and the latest graphics engines put the Source engine to shame (even the Source-engine powered Portal, new and innovative as it is, looks somewhat bland compared to current games). But overall the game still looks good enough that playing through it didn’t feel painful (unlike say, when I tried to replay Aliens vs. Predator 2 a couple of years ago) and the game’s many strengths more than made up for it.

One of my first surprises was how long the game felt compared to more recent shooters. I find that most modern shooters these days can be finished in three or four evenings of dedicated playing, but Half-Life 2 sprawling tale stretched out for the most part of a week for me and took me into a variety of locales and situations that most other shooters can’t match either. Another factor that added to its length are the storytelling sequences. Half-Life 2 has no cutscenes per se since the entire story is told strictly from Gordon Freeman’s perspective without any temporal jumps from the player’s point of view. But the story is advanced in a number of scenes which are only minimally interactive in which other characters hold lengthy dialogues with one another in Freeman’s presence. These are worth hearing alone because they show off one of the strengths of the Source engine that is still valid even today: the facial expressiveness of characters animated in the Source engine but they’re not skippable and do add to the overall length.

A third reason why playing through it took so long is the reliance on puzzles rather than the difficulty of the fights in the game to regulate the pace of gameplay. Indeed the actual combat in the game is rather unchallenging. The enemies don’t really make any significant effort to take cover or work together, so it’s relatively simple to gun them down one at a time. Even my wife commented on the ludicrousness of the sight of me standing toe-to-toe against enemies and trading shots until one of us dropped. One of the changes in FPS games since the original release of Half-Life 2 is more emphasis on cover and this is a change I heartily welcome as it obviously makes combat more realistic and dynamic.

This reliance on puzzles was in fact one of the reasons why I chose not to play Half-Life 2 at the time. Generally, when I play FPS games, I play it for its shooter elements and hate it when developers try to include puzzle segments in the game. In my opinion, these ruin the pace of the game. One moment you’re moving along blasting enemies merrily and suddenly you have to stop short at a puzzle element while you try to figure out what it is the designers intended for you to do. These puzzles include ones that make use of the game’s physics, traditional jumping puzzles and what I like to call the “where the heck am I supposed to go to next?” puzzles. Thankfully, most modern shooters now have maps and objective arrows to largely eliminate that last problem.

It’s not that I necessarily hate puzzles, but I generally like puzzle elements to stay in puzzle games and shooters to keep their main emphasis on the combat elements. I realize that parts of the game were deliberately designed to showcase the physics engine, a novelty at the time, but I think that, as Crysis did, physics handling should be used to enhance combat and make it more realistic rather than be used as way to add additional challenges for the player.

Another oddity, a well-known one by now, is Valve’s absolute refusal to include any views of the protagonist, even in a reflection, or to have him say anything at all. It’s a testament to Valve’s writing skill that the story is well told despite this handicap (Half-Life 2‘s alien invasion scenario is much more interesting than, say, the one in Crysis), but it’s so jarring that I think that continuing on with this little in-joke is hardly worth the trouble.

Despite all these archaisms, Half-Life 2 still makes for a great gaming experience today. Valve does a particularly commendable job with world-building. The alien-ness of the Citadel, the survival horror sequence in Ravenholme, the ragtag nature and scattered camps of the resistance against the Combine, the 1984-esque oppression that humanity is suffering under the invaders are all wonderfully atmospheric and convincing. My favourite part of the whole game is still the first segment where you wander the streets of the new Combine-controlled Earth, with aggressive, baton-carrying alien guards everywhere, hovering camera bots snapping photos of anyone suspicious, checkpoints at the end of every street and the way the remaining humans miserably whisper to each other as they pass on the street while refusing to make eye contact. If Valve had just taken that scenario and made it into a shooter/RPG-hybrid in the vein of Troika’s Vampire: Bloodlines (one popular theory on why Bloodlines failed commercially was because it was released at the same times as Half-Life 2, I suppose I was one of the few people who bought Bloodlines instead of Half-Life 2 then), I think it would be one my favorite games ever.

Still a gem definitely worth playing and I’m looking forward to seeing how the adventures of Gordon Freeman unfold in Episodes One and Two.