BANG!
There we go. Anywho, Psys tends to start his reviews off with a rant or something completely unrelated, but I just can’t bulls@#t that easily. So I’m just gonna go straight into it.
In HL2, you play as Gordan Freeman, a former scientist in a place called black mesa, where an experiment went horrible wrong. Now, I haven’t played HL1 yet, but here’s what I’ve gathered about it so far: Gordan was a scientist working on a project that went wrong. My guess is that they were working on teleportation and opened the doorway to an alien race from another dimension, the combine. From what it looks like, the combine manifests itself as “Head crabs”, little beasts that attach themselves to the heads of their victims, killing them and possessing their body. Gordon was one of the few survivors, and it appears that he was put into stasis after escaping.
Now, it’s a long time past HL1, and Gordon is again needed. The combine has basically taken over the world, and humans are now their slaves. The combine acts as a police force, and you must join the resistance group and try again to save the world.
HL2 has the best physics engine to date. It is incredibly realistic. There are a lot of explosions, and the game takes full advantage of them. Depending on your distance from the explosion, you could lose hearing in one or both sides, or even lose your healing entirely and get that really high-pitched sound. The whole game is incredibly refined and detailed. There are numerous puzzles involving the physics engine, ranging from putting blocks on one side of a see-saw to raise the other side, to stacking boxes to make a ladder of sorts. I have no idea how long the game is, but I’ve been playing for awhile now, and I’m not even on disc two….
The AI in the game is extremely advanced as well, as demonstrated exceptionally well by these little flying robots called “man-hacks” (basically helicopter bots with razors attached to them). When a large group of them attack, some of them go straight for you while the rest hang back and observe. After decimating them, another group will try another tactic, until the whole group is destroyed.
The multiplayer is also great, even though I haven’t played it yet. It’s another updated version of counterstrike. I’m not really gonna go into it….
Unfortunately, the game requires internet access (even if you’re not gonna use it) just to play it. You have to install another entire program just to play HL2. Every time you want to play it, you have to go online, activate the other program, and wait awhile for it to connect to the server, then you can start. It’s very annoying…
The music in this game is awesome. During the fight scenes, some awesome techno music plays, and there aren’t any errors that I can find in it, such as in other games (*cough cough enter the matrix cough*), where the music won’t kick in if you don’t hit the right spot or something similarly ridiculous…
The voice acting is another high point of the game. Another revolutionary idea is an exceptional facial expression engine, where everyone’s face is realistically rendered to show emotions and talking. The voices are great, and I haven’t seen (heard, whatever) anything better…
The sound is also stunning. At any particular time, you can hear anything within range. If there’s a fire on your left, you hear it to the left, at an appropriate volume for the distance. You can hear the sloshing of the water nearby, frogs and other animals, the wind, distant helicopters, your own breathing, everything!
The controls in HL2 are almost intuitive. I had problems at first, since I was using an old-a$$ keyboard that couldn’t do more than one key at a time. There are multiple functions for your environmental suit, like the flashlight, sprinting, everything! Basically, the suit has an auxiliary power supply, which can be used to improve your speed, give you more air while underwater, power your flashlight, etc. Once you get the gravity gun (easily the coolest weapon, EVER!), you just have to push “G” to switch to it, and “G” again to switch back.
In the game you can also control various vehicles, such as airboats and cars. They are kinda difficult to control, since you have to control the vehicle with the keyboard and look around with the mouse, which can take some getting used to… it’s even more complicated when you get a gun on the vehicle, since you have to multitask like crazy…
This game is fun, what can I say? What other game can you use the gravity gun? Can you pick up any random object and beat the crap out of zombies with it in Doom 3? Didn’t think so! My first time with the Grav gun, I freakin hit myself in the head with a sofa! It almost killed me, but I got closer to dying laughing! There’s one area where you are in a zombie-filled residential area, and there’s this one crazy dude that set up all these traps to kill zombies. That was a lot of fun…
Even more fun than that were the “barnacles” in the first area. Basically, these are big blobs that hang from the ceiling and hang their tongues down to the ground. If you touch the tongue, it wraps around you and drags you to the ceiling and eats you. When you shoot it, it tends to regurgitate body parts and/or explode…. tons of fun!
This game is of the highest quality I’ve ever seen! The graphics are flawless, the storyline is perfect, the AI is freakin’ sweet, and everything is awesome! I haven’t found any glitches at all! This game is almost the exact opposite of Enter the Matrix!
Things that help this Game
– Very realistic
– Enthralling storyline
– New Physics engine
– Gravity Gun!!!!
– Nice weapons
Things that hurt this Game
– Must install second program to play, and internet access (boooooo!)
– Difficult to control vehicles, multitasking is hard….
Review Written by Avatarian86
