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The biggest secret in video game history revealed!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 52 / 141
Date: June 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The sequel to the monumental Half-Life game released in 1998 came out of nowhere to stun both hardcore fans and new gamers alike. Half-Life 2 will raise the stakes by providing a new cutting-edge graphics engine, as well as using highly-detailed character models and advanced facial muscle technology for movie-like realism never seen before in a game. The story is once again written by Marc Laidlaw, so you can be sure of a exchilirating (and frightening) experience.

The game takes place in a fictional city called City 17 in Eastern Europe. At the center of the city is the Citadel, a 200+ story structure whose purpose is unknown. The mysterious structure is closely guarded by an international police force which includes robotic drones, gas mask wearing soldiers, and semi-robotic creatures. And this time you are working for the G-Man. But have you worked for him before, and what is his true identity and mission? Is he an enemy or a friend? This game is sure to pose more questions then it answers, which is probably the most exciting part of it all!

Hmm...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: October 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Our ability to rate this game despite the fact that the game is, as yet, unreleased points to obvious flaws in this rating system.

I am MAD

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: December 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is the slowest freakin' game install I've EVER experienced. At least they could have put a real time installation progress bar on the screen so we would know that it would be tomorrow before we could play the game!
The tedious, looong install time put me in a very foul mood, but the killer was the LONG lag for the load between games! What a bite! I'm giving it away. Kills my blood pressure. I'm going to play some more Doom 3 to soothe my nerves.

The "Citizen Kane" of electronic games

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: November 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The original Half-Life was and is probably my all-time favorite PC game. Before that, FPS games were mostly straightforward shoot-em-ups, where gameplay depended mostly on just being quick on the trigger (or mouse key) and blasting tons of dumb enemies while searching for key cards in bland gameworlds. Half-Life changed that. Suddenly, you were truly immersed in the Black Mesa incident, exploring a dynamic and believable world with a story driven by cunning level design and cinematic scripted events, battling challenging and believable enemies who actually acted almost real. It floored me, as it did the game industry as a whole, and ever since it arrived, developers have been struggling (and generally failing) to fill its shoes.

Needless to say, when HL2 was announced I was overjoyed. After months of delays and waiting for almost a year after release until I could afford a PC beefy enough to run this game, I finally fired up Half-Life 2 a couple months ago and played through it in a week of marathon play-sessions. At the time, I thought it was a pretty great game, but it never quite captivated me the way the original Half-Life did.

After beating FEAR, which came out last month, I've been thinking a little more about HL2 and how it compares to the newer game, and I've realized that, like many great works of art, the true value of HL2 can only be appreciated with time. And that's just what it is--art. There are very few games that I think can really claim that. Taken as simply a computer game, yeah, HL2 is pretty awesome, but not strictly the best in all respects. Great graphics, true, but FEAR has more impressive lighting and particle effects. Great gameplay, sure, but Far Cry has much more inventive and enjoyable core gameplay. The HL2 physics engine is pretty awesome, but aside from that there's nothing new that it really brings to the FPS table. What HL2 does bring is a great narrative, an extraordinarily polished presentation and, in short, an overall game experience that manages to be a solid mainstream FPS that also has great depth and emotional impact. Yeah, there have been games before that have stirred up an emotional response and been famous for it--Final Fantasy VII, anyone?--but Half-Life 2 is special because of the subtlety and believability of the experience. It eschews melodrama and is so finely crafted that you sometimes rush past things in the game without even really noticing them. It's easy to marvel at the carefully detailed world in the game, and also easy to get really swept up in the game's timely (and timeless) central story--maybe experience is a better word, because I found the immersion factor to be very high--about a struggle against oppression.

In the sense that it is a prime example of video game-as-art, I hope HL2 will be the progenitor of a new class of similarly high-quality, mature-minded games. That said, I wouldn't be unhappy if--from the perspective of its gameplay alone--HL2 was one of the last of its kind. As great as it is, it follows, at heart, almost the exact formula set forth by the original Half-Life--reliance on scripted events, clever but ultimately linear levels, a straightforward presentation, and a limited amount of weapons, tools and possible approaches to situations. Playing FEAR, which is a decent (but inferior) game that follows the same structure, reminded me how tired this set-up is. It's time for FPS games to explore new territory in terms of core gameplay and especially level design. Far Cry, with its wide-open levels and multiple pathways, is a step in the right direction. Taking a page from the more open-ended gameplay and high interactivity of RPGs wouldn't hurt either. Hopefully, the industry will leave HL2 as a fitting conclusion to the dominance of the old FPS formula, and start working on some new ideas for the genre.

Game is great, Steam is annoyance.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: November 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I don't need to tell you it was a great game. Every other review here does the same. Still, I haven't seen anyone comment on the amazing storyline, the life like performance, and the bonds you feel to the characters. One second I was running for my life from these giant yellow evil bugs, and the next second I considered them "my boys." I actually thought about them like that. I have never been impressed or been particularly moved by a feat of strength in a video game, but I felt such an attachment to Dog that I was close to cheering when he busts loose. Half Life 2 was the best movie I've played this year.

I would like to add that this could be the start of something bad. I completely understand why Valve put in the security it did. Their source code was stolen half way through. Pirates download 1.8 GB games in 12 hours, sometimes less. But Valve had to know this system would punish a good deal of users while pirates would eventually find a way around it(Pirate friend of mine beat the game today too, despite being banned from the server). If this trend continues, the only way to play Half Life 3 will be to go into a special Valve store and play there.

I get why it was done, but a lot of befuddled gamers don't. You need to balance out making the gaming experience as easy as possible for your paying customers against stopping the pirates. The paying customer should win out. He didn't here.

That being said, AMAZING game. Good job.

I didn't like it either...it should be 0 stars

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: November 27, 2004
Author: Amazon User

The game play is fine other than the glitches other reviewers have noted. However, I refuse to use any software that requires an internet connection in order to be used. What if that internet phone line is my personal phone line also? Then every time I play the game that line is tied up and none of the other family members have access to a phone. What a needless hassle.
The game instructions refer to a "offline mode" but it doesn't seem to work. They even have a customer help website that has a "How to make the offline mode work" thread, (which indicates there is a problem)but it seems to be written for some other game because the instructions didn't work for my game.
My conclusion: Save your money. If they spent millions of dollars developing this game then someone somewhere was grossly overpaid! I paid $50 for my game but it's now in the county dump. Skip this one.

Awesome game but getting it to run sucks!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: December 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First of all this review applies to those of us still living in the 90's with 56k dial-up modems...

Step 1 - Open the box to find 5 CD's in paper sleeves. I HATE paper sleeves! ... and no user manual.

Step 2 - Install the game. Do youself a favor and do a complete install even if you're not going to play the on-line only "Counter Strike" multiplayer game. Yes, you could save 944MB of disk space but there's a bug in the install program that blows up your install half way through disk 4.

Step 3 - You MUST go on-line to Valve's website and register the game. Something called "Steam" gets loaded on your PC and you're required to creat a "Steam" account in order to "decrypt" the game files.

Step 4 - Sit there and wait for a) The CD Key to get registered, b) the game files to get "Decrypted", c) "Updated" game files to get downloaded to your PC and d) Just when you think you're ready to play... Wait another 10 minutes whilst Steam "Prepares to play Half-Life 2".

When all is said-and-done you have almost 2 hours invested before the game is ready to play. Even then I had to establish an internet connection and log in to my "Steam" (which should be called "Steamed" since that's what I was) account. What I found is that once the game started I was able to pull the phone plug from my computer, clear the "Your internet connection has terminated" message, and continue playing. As long as you don't reboot, "Steam" still thinks it's logged in. There is a card inside the box that says something about playing the game in "off line" mode but don't bother, it doesn't work - at least not for me.

Now if you have broadband internet I would imaging the install time would be greatly reduced.

The +'s to the game...
Awesome graphics, the Havoc physics engine is amazing, the "Gravity" gun is a howl and you get to play catch with a huge robotic construct named "Dog". The interactive cut-scenes add some nice depth to the game as well.

The -'s to the game...
Though the sound effects and music are great, playing with the 5.1 surround sound option yields echoes, stuttered speech, and an annoying "scratchy"ness to almost everything. I set it to "Two speakers" and all that went away. It's a known issue by reading the forums on planethalflife.com.

Too many and often too long "Loading" screens.

A sequence of "Air boat" levels in which you drive around in this, well, air boat trying to get from point A to point Z with these helicopters shooting at you and dropping mines on you. The first level or two are really cool but man, does it get old fast. (probably just me... you might like it)

The box says it recommends 512MB of RAM but it will run much more smoothly with 728MB or more. Lots of swapfile activity even with 512.

It's definatley a keeper game once you get past that pain-in-the-arse install!!

Yeah, 'steam' sucks, but the game is SO GOOD!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: December 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Another bar raising by valve. The AI, the vehicles, the environments and especially the directional sound and graphics
are so much better than anything out there and the control is really great too. I was playing with my bose noise cancelling headphones and those skeleton things would sneak up on me and then howl and I got so creeped out I had to go back to the speakers. UNBELIEVABLE!

A great thing about the game is it runs on my Intel 845 onboard graphic chip on my work PC so I don't have to pull out my ancient windows 98 system with my fancy graphics card unlike so many games out there (electronic arts) that require hardware T&L.

Ok this steam thing is obnoxious, and it hangs sometimes so the game won't load period, other times it is downloading crap without asking me, but even the puzzles in this game raise the bar using gravity and bouyancy and impact. FUN FUN FUN!

Steam Install will make you want to break something

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: January 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The game itself was great. But the AntiPiracy Program "Steam" is a Steaming Pile. First off the Install takes forever.
Say you pop in your disc to play your single player game, Well if Steam wants to update your halflife copy. Well you'll just have to wait to play your game, Steam has some updating to do.
One time I popped in my disc, half hour later the splash screen has no link for single player... what is this. I don't want to play online. I just want to play my game. This is so Frustrating.
Because of a few people pirating games, us paying customers have to suffer. I would pay twice as much for a game to Never have to go through anything like Steam ever again.

1 hour to install, then reboots every 3 minutes

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: December 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I may eventually get this game running right - but I don't think I'll feel bad about slamming it even if I do.

Took about an hour to get this game up and running with all the Steam junk and mandatory updates. You then get hit with popup ads pitching other sierra junk and end up with this ugly icon in your system tray. This stuff is a waking nightmare.

The game looks interesting - but crashes about 3 minutes into it. From poking around google this sounds like a common problem - but there isn't any clear solution. I've updated my video drivers / etc.

Doom 3 and many other games run on my system like champs.

If it was just Steam, or just the whole not-working bit - I might have some sympathy.

I am not buying any more Sierra games.

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