Rise and shine, Mister Freeman: Half-Life 2 Retrospective

November 16th 2004 marked the Windows release of Half-Life 2, bringing to an end a difficult and protracted development cycle costing $40 million. Its predecessor (and Valve’s debut title) Half-Life had taken the world of gaming by storm and revolutionised the industry; no small act to follow! But despite the difficulties Valve faced during the five year production cycle, they were about to change the industry again.

Half-Life 2 received perfect scores from sources such as GameSpy and The New York Times, and lies at the top of Metacritic’s all-time highest rated PC game rankings. Maximum PC called it “the best game ever made” and awarded the title 11/10. So, by way of celebrating its 10 year anniversary, I ploughed through the game in its original form during one of my quieter weekends, to see if it has stood the test of time.

City 17, a refuge controlled by the mysterious Combine, and the scene of Half Life 2’s iconic opening Photo: Flickr/Ian Dick

The game opens with a monologue from the mysterious G-Man as he brings silent protagonist Dr. Gordon Freeman out of the stasis he was placed in at the end of Half-Life. Set in an alternate Earth history under the heel of the multi-dimensional Combine empire, Freeman arrives in City 17, home of Earth’s administrator Dr. Wallace Breen, former administrator of the Black Mesa Research Facility where the events of Half-Life took place. Freeman proceeds to join the resistance movement alongside survivors from the Black Mesa incident but, following a failed teleport to resistance HQ Black Mesa East, he’s revealed to Breen and the Combine forces, and must fight his way out of the city on foot before using an airboat to travel to the facility.

Upon arriving, Freeman is equipped with a gravity gun, or “zero-point energy field manipulator” to use its official name. After a raid on Black Mesa East, he escapes through zombie-infested Ravenholm before travelling along the coast to rescue fellow Black Mesa employee Dr. Eli Vance from the sinister Combine prison, Nova Prospekt. The prison is destroyed in the process, and Freeman returns to City 17 to lead the rebellion against the Combine, culminating with an explosive finale atop the citadel.

The game’s stellar pacing and atmosphere do more than enough to make up for dated visuals. Photo: Flickr/Alex Hopkinson

Worryingly, my first thought as I started playing was that Half-Life 2 certainly looks 10 years old. Although the Source engine has received numerous updates since its release, Valve have never retrofitted Half-Life 2 with these upgrades, and the appearance of the game in the opening stages, though once awe-inspiring, is now somewhat lacklustre, with texture and model resolution both on the low side even on high settings. Further, in an exhibition of the Havok physics engine used by Source, which was brilliant for its time, there are several physics based set-pieces early on which now feel childish.

As the pace quickened, however, my thoughts of graphical inadequacy were quickly forgotten. By never leaving Freeman’s perspective and having no flow-breaking cut-scenes, I always felt connected to the world as I moved through it. Atmosphere created by ambient noise and subtle insight into the world beyond gave the constant impression that events were taking place just outside the bubble of my own view, while Kelly Bailey’s soundtrack expertly accentuates the mood throughout, providing the best backdrop to any FPS game I have ever experienced.

The relentless zombies of Ravenholm, conquerable only through Father Grigori’s guidance and gory traps. Photo: Halflife.wikia

The true strength of the Half-Life series as a whole lies in the world it creates around the player. Key to this is the passive description of the world as the game progresses; while thoroughly enjoyable and challenging when taking a gung-ho approach and racing through in a linear fashion, Half-Life 2 truly comes alive as you interact with and explore the world; it is up to the player to determine their level of immersion into the story. Talking to nameless NPC characters and finding countless details of how the Combine took control of the planet allows for a much fuller experience than sprinting through with all guns blazing.

Although the animation software used is now somewhat primitive, numerous characters display emotion and are developed to a level that few games can claim to even approach. Perhaps one of the best examples comes in Father Grigori, mad priest and apparent sole-survivor in Ravenholm. Grigori appears sporadically during the journey through the ravaged town, providing Freeman with advice (and better, a shotgun!) interspersed with manic laughter and biblical references as he “tends to his flock” by killing the zombie inhabitants of the town. Despite his brief appearance, he is one of the most memorable personalities of the game, and the series as a whole.

Half Life 2’s gravity gun, one of the most influential video game weapons of all time. photo: Flickr/Adam Messinger

Perhaps the single most iconic feature of Half-Life 2 is the aforementioned gravity gun, which led to the popularization of physics weapons in modern gaming, providing a whole new dimension to combat; it is described as a “thinking man’s death tool” by Electronic Gaming Monthly. It further expanded the ways in which the environment can be used in puzzles alongside its warfare applications. The concept has since been used in numerous games with little variation beyond appearance; after all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I finished my playthrough reassured by the knowledge that although maybe now a little rough around the edges, Half-Life 2 is well worth its claim to being the best game ever made. Valve wrought a pinnacle of FPS gaming which, ten years later, is still being used as a cookie-cutter for many a modern shooter. There are few other game worlds which can compete with the Half-Life universe’s completeness and attention to detail, nor boast so many expertly crafted personalities.

Now, Valve, about Half Life 3… [divider_top]

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