Half-Life 2 is a 2005 first person shooter for the Xbox developed and published by Valve. It boasts of many advancements (for its time) like Digital Actors, Advanced AI and Physical Gameplay.
I was definitely looking forward to playing this as I constantly heard about its apparent popularity and the desperation for a third game. It gave a good imression on the menu though with the menu’s being fast andeasy to use although I don’t really know what to say about the kind of creepy noise in the background. Graphics looked like they’d be alright since its a 2005 game although I suspected most of the supposedly amazing things might of aged.
As for options theres Game, Controller and Buttons. Game is Difficulty, Captions, Music/Game Volumes and Brightness so essentially the things in game while the other 2 were ways to modify the controls a bit like what does what, how the thumbsticks work and if things should be toggled or held. I personally thought it was already set decently with seemingly nothing needing to be changed. Before I got into the game I found it weird that it sort of gave away what all the missions were but a lot of games do that. The first cutscene was sure weird.
Getting into gameplay was quite easy and controls were simple to use, it was surprisingly amusing to teach myself to pick up and throw the rubbish around by annoying the person with the tazer stick thing. It was also disappointing that most of the bins didn’t have a gap to put the rubbish in if you got bored enough to try cleaning up. In all seriousness though games that let you act like an idiot give me a sense of quality that a lot of games don’t have.
The story seemed like it would be quite good even if the bad guy of this game seemed like it would be obvious. Either way the first mission played out in such a way that ws soon as you get the crowbar you get a sense of relief (but also another way to waste time). It did seem far more serious once you got a pistol shortly afterwards though, even if I wasn’t actually running from the enemies like I think you were meant to do (I killed any that appeared). Awkwardly the pistol seemed far better than the submachine gun especially since said pistol had infinite range letting you shoot things quite far away while the submachine gun would miss most shots from that distance.
After I played for a while and had a lot of fun I realised that perhaps there was a good reason there’s invisible walls in most games since I eventually became quite skilled at stacking items and climbing them to get to the unmodeled bits you aren’t meant to be. Although I am thankful for it, even if nothing actually happens I do find it a nice time waster alongside the proper gameplay. I did find a few little skips though and a seemingly bad skip where I went into the Water Hazard level without the airboat which turned out to be literally impossible even if you spam the health code (which I used a few times as you sometimes glitch and take huge amounts of damage).
With how the physics work though you couldn’t complete the review without trying out the physics gun which was as fun as I had expected aka I wasted a lot of time throwing things. In fact the very next place after learning to use it gives you a few of those headcrab zombies and a room full of saws and explosive gas canisters to throw at them. Sadly you can’t just use the gravity gun 100% of the time from when you get it, the guns are still useful at times and unless you’re good there’s also times where the zombies would get close enough that you found it hard fo grab anything. Wasn’t a bad thing though, in a way I was glad it wasn’t too overpowered. I had heard it got an upgrade later though which I’m looking forward to seeing although for now I’ll jist enjoy going slowly through the levels acting like an idiot.
Overall quite an enjoyable game, something tells me I would of like the PC version more though. It has more cheats and you can play around more than in the Xbox version.
0% Imagination 