When I played the excellent Industria recently I was reminded that it was my intention to go back to City 17 this year in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the sublime Half-Life 2 and the story of everyone's favourite scientist cum commando Gordon Freeman was pretty fresh in my mind after having played the unofficial-but-blessed-by-GabeN Half-Life remake Black Mesa just last year. At the end of the game, if you don't chose death, Gordon is placed in stasis by the mysterious G-Man to await the next assignment. That assignment is granted when at the beginning Half-Life 2 you're awoken by the G-Man and inserted on a train bound for City 17, a dystopian hell-hole ruled over by The Combine a race of aliens who seized control of the planet in just seven hours some 20 years ago. Evidence of The Combine is everywhere in the world which adds to the oppressive feeling of their regime and psychologically constructs this in your mind without needing to explain it. A human overseer appears Big-Brother-like on ever screen and guards don't hesitate to to beat down any inkling of resistance to the rules (or because they feel like it). The atmosphere created in just the opening sequences sets the tone for the game and proved Valve's excellence at narrative storytelling through dialogue, sound and world design. You do manage to get out of City 17, amass an arsenal of weapons and allies and as you'd expect - get some payback - but this is Half-Life 2, and even with a couple of subsequent add on episodes released in the following years, there is a bittersweetness to know there's no final act, no final episode, no sequel - the only dark cloud over Half-Life is that it's an unfinished masterpiece.
That dark cloud however is no reason not to play Half-Life 2 of course. The gameplay is what separates interactive video-games as a narrative tool from books, movies or TV shows and the gameplay here is what separates Half-Life 2 from all competition. Half-Life was in many ways iterated on with Half-Life 2. All the standard weapons (but none of the silly/alien ones) including the iconic crowbar return with the addition of one of my favourite FPS weapons: The Pulse Rifle which is suitably lethal here and of course the weapon that made the game stand out and high above the competition - the "Gravity Gun" which could pull and push many of the game's objects and be used in both combat and as a method of solving puzzles. This becomes your primary tool to manipulate the world and mastering its use makes exploring the world, as well as some enemy encounters, much more enjoyable.
Unlike it's competition at the time consisting of mostly WWII shooters and maybe Halo games, a standout feature of Half-Life 2 is its variety. You wander through streets filled with Combine enforcers and depressed citizens, navigate murky sewers filled with goo and nasty creatures, drive a hovercraft though canals avoiding mines, pass through an undead filled shanty town with the aid of a priest, traverse the underside of a huge railway bridge avoiding a fall to certain death, attack a prison using an army of giant murderous ants, perform feats of fast-paced vehicular heroics with a dune buggy armed with a gauss gun, all before organising an army of resistance fighters to storm The Citadel, the Combine's miles-high monolithic tower which dominates the skyline as it pierces the clouds themselves. There is no other FPS that can come close to this variety and why it remains unsurpassed in that regard to this day.
Final Verdict: Half-Life 2 was 2004's Game of the Year on every magazine (remember them?) and website that made a GOTY declaration - and rightly so. At the time it was graphically sublime and its gameplay standards are relatively unsurpassed to this day. It was a welcome break from the first-person shooters which had become shorter in length as the years went by and felt more valuable for it. Featuring the voice talents of a trio of late actors Robert Culp (The Greatest American Hero), Louis Gosset Jnr. (Iron Eagle) and Robert Gullaume (Benson) with Michelle Forbes (Star Trek: The Next Generation) and music by Kelly Bailey, Valve didn't revolutionise the FPS genre with Half-Life 2 but it did create the very apex of the genre and City 17 is well woth a (re)visit 20 years on.
Technicals: 15 hours via Steam on Windows 11 with an RTX4070Ti @ 3440x1440/175FPS.
Bugs: It makes sense that Valve's magnum opus is flawless and runs flawlessly on modern systems.
The Half-Life series:
- Half-Life (1998)
- Half-Life: Opposing Force (1999)
- Half-Life: Blue Shift (2001)
- Half-Life: Source (2004)
- Half-Life 2 (2004)
- Half-Life 2: Lost Coast (2005)
- Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006)
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007)
- Half-Life: Alyx (2020)
