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Dom Robinson reviews
Vivendi Universal Games
- Price: £39.99
- Players: 1-online
- Dolby Digital 5.1: Yes (allegedly)
- System requirements (mine):
- Windows 2000/XP/Me/98 (XP)
- Pentium 4/AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz (2.66Ghz)
- 256Mb RAM (512Mb)
- Hard disk space: 2.6Gb
- Memory: 256Mb (512Mb)
- Other: Internet connection, DVD-ROM drive
- DirectX7 graphics card (128Mb GeForce MX440, DirectX 9.0c)
It’s taken me rather a while to get round to playing Half Life 2 properly as I dipped in now and again but just couldn’t get as excited about it as I knew I was meant to and was expecting to.
The basic premise of this sequel, which boasts around 20 hours of gameplay, is that again you play Black Mesa scientist Gordon Freeman joining up with another scientist, Eli Vance, and his daughter, Alyx, in a mission is to save the world from being overrun by the Xen invaders. In short, you just run from scene to scene blasting the baddies when you get a chance, or doing the best you can when you run out of ammo and have nothing but a crowbar to fight back with.
There are a number of good things to this release. As you begin to play, you get the same feeling you had when embarking on the original mission first time round. We’ve been waiting for 7 years to reprise the role of Gordon Freeman.
One of the first new enemies I came across were the Manhacks, little buzzy things that looks like personal mini-fans flying around, but with the deadly intention of hitting you and inflicting damage. These are best twatted with a crowbar, same as with the headcrabs that make a reappearance. Also back are the barnacle creatures which eat you up after sucking you all the way up to the ceiling. You can get caught out by them at some very inopportune moments such as when you’re racing along on a waterboat.
As you make your way through the lush, detailed landscapes, you must pick up things and throw them at enemies, such as oil drums, or go one better and get those white-headed freaks to walk under a car then crush them! I did think about going one smarter and smashing wooden plank ‘bridges’ so your enemies can’t follow you, but then realised that I’m not going to visit the places where I did this, so far… and they weren’t following me anyway. It’s a nice thought if I do come across one though.
I also enjoyed having a blast on the aforementioned water boat, which is like riding Steve McQueen’s bike in The Great Escape. There are some neat graphical effects such as the smashing of glass and when you do come up against something that seems tricky at first such as the best way to make a ramp elevate to the right position, you’ll find the puzzles are relatively simple so you can get on with the game.
I’ve also enjoyed the sections that involve a gunship blasting at you as you’ve got enough going on around you, just in a bid to stay alive, and the ability to shoot at far-off objects and see the dust return off a building as your gunshot hits it.
However, while I do find this long-awaited sequel relatively enjoyable, it is very linear. You don’t always mind this too much but it rather feels like it has Love Actually sydrome – i.e. you get into it while taking part, but when you exit out and have time to reflect it just doesn’t feel as good as it was meant to.
Right, let’s sort out the problems. Firstly, it didn’t need to be so jerky on occasion when the PC has a chance to draw breath. The first game wasn’t so processor-heavy so why couldn’t they have toned things down while still making this game look fabulous?
It also doesn’t feel as *busy* as the first game, or even as engaging. Maybe things have moved on in terms of what we expect from a high-profile title such as the complex-deep-down-but-easily-accessible GTA series? Also, looking back from a few hours gameplay at a time, it just doesn’t feel very memorable as it all rushes by so quickly and samey. Overall, it just looks nicer but doesn’t impact as much and little has changed, apart from the graphics being up-to-date.
Talking of the graphics, I wanted to select the widescreen option but it makes the picture go funny and I see a selected segment of the screen, not just a case of making it anamorphic and then displaying the result on a widescreen TV.
Now for some of the most pain-in-the-arse things about about this release.
It’s annoying that the game always wants to update itself as often as it desires. Why? This is very controlling of valve. The latest time it did this it kept whinging about an outdated video driver. I cancelled this as it was fine when I first played the game so felt there was no need for an update. The next day when I was playing an unrelated video file the PC was slowing down to a crawl and the CPU usage was on 100%. Only when I came to rebooting, as a result of this, I found this ‘outdated video driver’ program was still on in the background!
In addition to this, when you install the game it takes around an hour (although the loading times aren’t too bad) and it makes the PC register itself with Valve’s “Steam” service online first in a bid to combat piracy. I’m not a pirate, Valve, just a game player. Stop attempting to tar all your customers with the same brush!
I also can’t get the Counter Strike add-on to work now as an update for that makes it crash when I go into the options menu. For some reason the Dolby Digital 5.1 sound isn’t output by the game and I can’t test this in Counter Strike’s 5.1 tester because of the options menu problem. This is why I prefer to play games on the Xbox most of the time – they play perfectly well AND THEY WORK!!
In conclusion, I’ll give Half Life 2 another crack when it gets released on the Xbox as it won’t interfere with any PC programmes or take an age to install and see if I can get into it more, including completing it, once they’ve tweaked this or that, but I won’t be holding my breath for it to be radically different.
Just a shame that they have spent so long to bring this one out, partly delayed by having the source code allegedly stolen, which meant it came out in November 2004 instead of Xmas 2003. Come off it, if you were writing the biggest sequel in a long time would you only keep one copy? No.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.