THE CHANCES OF ANYTHING COMING FROM MARS…

Myst IV astounded with its amazing intro. Half
Life 2 scooped me
up with it and made me forget it was just a game. Whereas Myst made
the mistake of tutoring you directly through Atrus tuning a machine,
Half Life 2 lets you learn on the fly as you meet a character named
Barney who helps you escape. It even extends the intro to help settle
you into the world. Eventually, after circumstances take a turn for
the better, you exit from a small door into blinding sunlight and
onto the square from the Menu, with the spire in the distance. It’s
here where it begins to feel like a futuristic B-Movie, evidently
taking it’s cues from H.G. Welles’ War of The Worlds. An inspiration
more evident when you round a corner to witness what appears to be
a 30ft tripod (Strider) patrolling a nearby street.

Although not perfect, what Half
Life 2 does is couple the abilities
of the engine with some graceful and very well implemented visual
and audio design, be it through the crackling radios of the Combine,
the distant threat of the spire or the disconcerting sight of one
of the Combine’s strange, organic flying machines. This combined
with the excellent voice acting and the physicality of the actors,
even if their modeling isn’t quite right, is the first big step in
gaming in a while. It also has a narrative that, although subjecting
the title to linearity (in a way similar to the adventure genre),
pushes you gently onward and relies on your natural instinctive reactions
to get through what are, essentially, completely interactive movies.
The entire opening 20 minutes is basically a self-directed cut-scene.
Myst IV took the game away from you constantly, and it was an annoyance
to have these beautiful rides locked up due to FMV constraints as
you moved throughout the gameworld. The other advantage is that the
space required for such content in 3D is on a far lesser scale.

The game then progresses
through City 17 as Gordon manages to escape and eventually meet
a woman named Alyx. Alyx is the first fully-fleshed
(as it were, no pun intended) character you meet “in the round”.
No locked off shots here. As she talks directly to you, it feels
completely natural. You can walk around her, and she’ll still act
in your direction. Her personality and voiceover is warm and friendly,
and moreover, incredibly human. Later on, when she gets argumentative
or has dramatic scenes, the emotion that emanates from this digital
avatar is truly convincing. Even during action scenes where she fights
alongside you, she looks to you and makes quips. She’s the first
game character that really, for me, feels almost like a real person.
Everything the Source engine does through her facial acting and her
interaction with the scenery, coupled with her voiceover and animation,
work together in unison to create a truly original and clever simulation.

She is an important step in games characterization because of the
talent and time that’s obviously gone into creating her. Although
many of you may never play Half Life 2 – and some of you for good
reason – one of the arguments for even attempting this review is
this one character. She showcases what can be done in 3D without
sacrificing realism and is the first digital avatar (yes, including
the aforementioned movies) that even comes close to portraying a
realistic human. All of the actors in the game are well done – Barney
the security guard and his charming quips being one of them – but
Alyx, being the sidekick if you will, is truly the standout. Valve
even take the time to allow the player to kick back and get to know
her, even if no interaction (unfortunate for some, I’m sure) actually
takes place. Strong writing and voice acting do play a part here,
but the Source engines powerful facial rigging really pull the character
out of the screen during arguments with other characters or playing
with her 12ft pet robot, Dog. Which, charmingly enough, acts just
like its name.

It does showcase some of the essential flaws that the adventure
genre suffers from – namely, stiff lifeless acting. Characters run
through cycles and mouth everything with no emotion, they don’t emote
their lines, they don’t act and the player is unable to relate to
them. We as gamers are expected to truly believe in these characters,
but they are almost totally devoid of life. That’s not to say characters
like April Ryan or Kate Walker are devoid of the proper essence,
but if these characters were presented with even half the life (no
pun intended…again) of the characters in Vampire or Half
Life 2 it would make a massive improvement. Why? We’re being presented with
characters in a visual medium. If I wanted a radio play, I’d listen
to the radio. A Kate Walker that could emote, act and react to her
situations would further involve the player if only developers paid
more heed to the importance of physical gestures.

It’s a shame that other
genres that rely less on the need to involve the player are now
leading the way in things that should be commonplace
in adventures. Not that it’s really anyone’s fault, seeing as the
adventure genre has dropped out of publishers favor. However, what
Half Life 2 does showcase can be learned
from or plundered. Troika,
the creators of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines,
are quite a small developer, but have made great use of the power
of the Source engine
to create convincing acting in their characters’, which raises the
game from being quite average to something rather special. Not that
every adventure should necessarily use the Source engine – especially
as Detalion made
great headway using Monolith’s Jupiter engine with Sentinel:
Descendents in Time – but within it it’s hard not to see the opportunity to do something
within the adventure genre that truly shines, using its preprogrammed
assets.

TO THE GRAVITY OF LOVE

Another thing that Half-Life
2 does is keep the player playing a continuous, unbroken (save
for load times) narrative from just one
point of view. The direction required to be able to do this is very,
very difficult to get right, but Valve have succeeded. You feel like
you’re undertaking a journey from one place to another, moving ever
onwards towards your final destination. Although the story itself
is rather two-dimensional – being a typical science fiction invasion
plot – this game is testament to the adage “it’s now what you
tell, but how you tell it”. Valve excels at maintaining the
player’s interest through the incidental details, be it the
non-player characters various utterances (a couple in the apartments
at the beginning are almost heartbreaking in their desperation) or
discovering information pertaining to the gameworld through in-game
reading material. One wall in a later science lab is plastered with
newspapers describing how the Combine arrived, and the ascendance
of its human administrator, Dr Breen.

It’s also impressive that
tightly scripted sequences – such
as the Kleiners Lab teleportation scene – retain the player’s interest
while also requiring them to participate. In a way, it’s sort of
an “action-Myst”. To further this comparison, however indistinct,
it also has a decent amount of puzzles for a shooter, many of the
early ones involving getting a boat from A to B. Often you find yourself
using your head rather than your gun trying to find the best way
to solve situations, sometimes with the answers cleverly sitting
right in front of you. Nothing is ever rocket-science, but occasionally
it knocks you for six, and the exceptional use of an anti-gravity
gun introduced partway through the game constantly requires the player
to find new and creative ways to get through each scenario – in one
scene, rather sickly, pulling buzz saws out of the wall to fling
at zombies instead of wasting much needed ammo.

Ah… the zero-point energy weapon. Action freak or no, it’d take
a hard person to admit that it isn’t a great idea. It can be used
to solve physical puzzles, lift and throw items at enemies, or during
one particularly tense scene, create bridges of junk over sands containing
vibration-sensitive 6ft insects. It also provides a great game of
ball with the aforementioned Dog in a nicely timed out playable cut-scene
where you learn how to use it. 3D’s recent move into the physical
with all sorts of objects being able to be manipulated, albeit in
a rather basic way in this game, is encouraging. Developers are starting
to think of innovative ways to use it rather than just being a basic
tool for throwing bodies around. Half-Life 2 also has a weighting
system for each object, breezeblocks being heavier than cardboard
boxes, and animation and specific sounds set for each material. Although
personally I can’t think of any possible applications for this kind
of technology within the adventure genre right at this moment in
time, it does bring another set of tools to the table when it comes
to thinking of new ways to intrigue and involve the player.

For one thing, it makes
the gameworld much more interesting in it’s possibility, not just
it’s presentation, to the player. Stuck in
a room you can’t get out of? Pile up those boxes freely, unlike Broken
Sword: Sleeping Dragon’s
need to push and pull them into place. Can’t cross that gap? Look
for a plank long enough to make a bridge or fashion something out
of nearby objects to get there. Can’t swim? Use those boxes to create
a group of stepping-stones. Need a shield? Rip that radiator off
the wall with the gravity gun and hold it in front of you. All quite
simple, but until recently something that games couldn’t do. The
possible applications are almost infinite.

BURNING LIKE A MONKEY

There isn’t much left to talk about in this game which I haven’t
already, unless it’s about the shooting aspect, which – let’s face
it – isn’t something that is truly going to appeal to the core audience
of Just Adventure +. Suffice to say it’s solid and requires, thanks
to the variety and great AI of the enemy you meet throughout, more
than a modicum of strategic thinking to get through with a good selection
of interesting weapons on offer.

Hopefully, what have been said is food for thought… if not argument
and debate. As mentioned, it’s a shame that advances which would
be more applicable to the adventure genre are being applied elsewhere,
although that said it’s great that such things such as acting, environment,
narrative, maturity and thought are now pushing their way into the
mainstream culture. Who knows? It could create a need for more titles
that require the element of thought, not necessarily with the need
for action to go alongside it. Half-Life 2, although not totally
without fault, is a game of exceptional merit. It’s not original,
yet basically takes old ideas and mixes them up into something distinct
and pushes hitherto underdeveloped elements that exist in gaming
to the forefront.

As an adventure, I’m sure you’d agree – it isn’t. It contains elements
of the genre, but mixes it in with other genres in the FPS format
to create something which flows seamlessly from one scenario to the
next, from chases to vehicle elements, from survival horror to puzzling,
all within the context of one game. What it does do is push important
gameplay basics further than before and create something satisfying
out of them. If you can get it running smoothly, possible even on
basic systems, and get through the painful Steam process, and can
play or have a modicum of interest in action games it’s essential.
If you can’t, at least rest in the knowledge that there are elements
here that are usable in our genre and that the mainstream now recognizes
the need for intelligence in gaming.

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Final Grade: A+
(find out more about our
grading system)

System Requirements: