Version Reviewed:
PC
There is a reason Half-Life is a step above all other
first person shooters. Story. No other shooter has ever had the intricate
and unique storyline offered by Half-Life. As a result, Half-Life
is almost in a genre of it’s own as a first person shooter crossed with an action RPG
such as Zelda or Knights of the Old Republic.
It’s not a non-stop shoot ‘em up game where you rush through getting better
and better guns to blow up more and more powerful monsters; it does that but
quite gradually. You’re stuck with a crowbar as your weapon for quite a while
at the beginning. Half-Life also has a lot of puzzles you need to solve
as well as requiring some deft maneuvering. What makes this all the more
exciting is that just about everything is a life or death situation.
Health is a premium and you need to exercise caution when playing this game.
When you’re playing Half-Life you must make sure you have the sound
turned up, little snippets of conversation in adjacent rooms can give away
clues to the story or clues to how to solve the next problem. Also the AI
in this game is pretty smart, especially the Special Ops guys,
they’ll try and flank you, but if you listen carefully you can get the
better of them.
The graphics of Half-Life are not the greatest for it’s time,
but it’s not too bad when you consider that it was built on a heavily modified version of
the aging Quake 2 Engine to get the best performance possible.
If you have decent hardware it looks perfectly acceptable and on a PS2
it seems to fit right in. The Quake 2 Engine can have a slight lag in the
control and while Valve did try to fix this, the PC version can have skips
on slightly older computers, which may result in you falling to your death.
Just open up the autosave and start again. Fortunately this problem doesn’t
happen on the PS2.
Multiplayer however is Half-Life’s major strong point.
Everyone knows of the dozens of mods available for online multiplayer
available for free download, such as Team Fortress Classic,
Day of Defeat and the incredibly popular Counterstrike,
which was so successful that it’s now for sale as a stand-alone,
although it still is available for free download if you own Half-Life.
With such a wide range of games for multiplayer all different and all good
in their own way, you’ll still be using Half-Life long
after you’ve beaten the single-player game.
As quite possibly my most prized game in my enormous collection
because of all it’s greatness, Half-Life comes highly recommended
by me to just about anybody unless they dislike violence,
which is the only reason to not play this game. Even after all these years
since it came out, Half-Life is still one of the most sought after
games on the market, and if you don’t have I would seriously suggest seeking
it out for your own.
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