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The beginning of a gaming empire

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 05, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Simply great. Works on many older PCs. There are tons of associated titles and mods available. And you cannot seriously plan on playing the HL2 episodes unless you have played this game. The story alone would make a great book or movie. The game is the best and is already a classic!

Well worth it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 29, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This is one of the best games every made. If you don't have it, buy and take a week off work and play it until your job/money/girlfriend situation needs attention. It come with Counter strike, a super fast online shooter. Very addicting. Great graphics & physics. It'll run on your old computer and won't require a powerhouse to enjoy great graphics. This game was the best when it came out and still is not outdated. Well worth the money, you'll enjoy it if you like sci-fi, shooters, online multi-player shooters, puzzles. This has a plot, and comes with Counter strike if you dont feel like getting emerged and just want to play. Oh, and it comes with a size XL black t-shirt. sweeeet

Doesnt meet with all the hype.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: October 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ive heard so many people say "oh, HL2 is hands down the best game ever." give me a break. I had more fun with other Valve products like Sin Episodes: Emergence.

I guess my biggest gripe was the game itself, instead of the installation problems. I mean, it had awesome graphics, cool weapons, but the important things weren't there. First off, the story was kind of bland. The ending wasn't all that great either. I guess the ending sucked because it was leaving it open for the following 2 episodes of HL2. Anyway, the story wasn't all that in depth. It was alright, but not as great as other games, like Sin, Halo, or Far Cry.

The game play was alright. You spend quite a bit traveling in the stupid airboat and car. Both of which, are a pain in the a$$ to control and you always have several people shooting at you or a gunship on your butt. I spent much of the time on these levels saving and reloading just to progress. I really wished they didn't have these levels. The car wasn't fun at all. It never wanted to go where you were turning the wheels and you always had a dozen antlions chewing your head off or something throwing you off the cliff. If they did without the vehicle levels, it would have been so much better.

A lot of the weapons were good, but there were a couple that were just crap. Mainly, the grenade and the rocketlauncher. Neither one were all that great unless you hit the enemy directly with either one. Got a room full of enemies? dont bother with a grenade. You may get half of them if youre lucky and they manage to congregate on the grenade. Other than that, its just easier to shoot them up with a rifle or something.

Good game i guess, if you like having your a$$ handed to you all the time. After a while it just gets tedious. Shoot, jump, shoot, save, get hurt, shoot, die, reload. Thats how it was for me the whole time i was playing. Either that you had some enemy, that you never seen before, that somehow managed to sneak up behind you and waste you away. I only struggled through this to see what the ending was like, and that was about it. Granted, the graphics were great, the engine was great, but these annoyances can really kill a game. There are several other games out there worth playing more than this one. Sin Episodes, Far Cry, Halo, any of these would be better. Dont get me wrong, i play several games, but this one definitely didn't live up to all the hype i kept hearing. If it wasn't for the graphics and engine, i would have given it only 1 star.

Still the Best PC Game Ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: September 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I just started recently playing HL2 again because I put together a new rig, and I have to tell you it is far from showing its age. What a phenomenal game and engine this is. This game has one of the best storylines and endings ever. The fishbowl game Bioshock has nothing on this.

The graphics are still amazing by today's standard. And when you install the FakeFactory Cinematic Mod v4, the only game that will surpass this visually is Crysis. The facial and mouth animations are still unmatched. The engine could use an update with new and more advanced shadowing, but that's it.

Also, I think steam is great. A couple of my HL2 CDs have become unreadable, but thankfully the cd-key is registered to my account so I am able to download this as many times as I want. Very convenient.

Needs more

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 23, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The game is awesome but the one thing it needs as collector's ed. is some behind the scenes stuff. Other wise it is perfect.

buyer beware

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

All the reviews bitching and moaning about Steam? They're spot-on. Steam simply ruined this game for me. It was HOURS from the time I unwrapped the box to the time when I could actually PLAY it. And the trouble never stopped. For weeks I stubbornly kept playing, in spite of system freezes, interminable delays between maps, and frustration with one of the damn dune buggies, which was terribly difficult to drive because the graphics kept jumping and stuttering (in spite of my pretty decent system, well above minimum requirements). And all this for the single-player game?!?!

I would say that I was playing the game maybe 50% of the time I spent trying to play it. The other 50% was spent waiting for a map to load, waiting for Steam to authenticate me, and rebooting my damn PC every damn time the game brought it to a screeching, frozen halt.

And then one day, I had an epiphany. The game play was pretty good. The puzzles were pretty good. I really liked that gravity gun. But it just wasn't worth the hassle. And it certainly wasn't worth relinquishing control of my system to that invasive Steam app. So I stopped playing. I uninstalled it. And I never looked back. I've not even been tempted this year to reinstall it and see if maybe some of the early bugs have been worked out.

I'd give the game away or sell it, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone with whom I'm on speaking terms -- or even an unwitting stranger. And I will NEVER, EVER buy another game that uses Steam or its ilk. I was shocked when I installed the game to see what kind of control I had to hand over to Steam in order to run the single-player game. I crossed my fingers, ignored my instincts, and let it run anyway. Dumb, dumb, dumb. What a terrible precedent to set in the PC software world. I won't succumb again.

REGISTRATION NIGHTMARE

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I spent hours,...hours trying to acivate this game, shutting of software, virus control, firewalls deleting programs, all to no avail. could not activate the game. What a drag, I keep reading that the game is great, but this corporate, headless, inconsiderate, inhuman, non responsive entity wont let me play the game. so the game is probably good if you could activate, but good luck if you buy a used game. Beware if you buy a used game .The first owners have probably pirated the game and you are going to be stuck with a inoperable piece of software. Good luck!

Bug ridden engine, uncreative level design

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: June 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It's been a few years since I played this "masterpiece" but I remember it well.

Half Life 2 is a sci-fi/first person shooter that follows the adventures of Gordon Freeman. And by adventures I mean, shooting stuff and being denied information about what's going on by everyone. Of course you can infer a vague aliens took over the planet plot in the first 2 minutes, and the inference is about all you'll ever know. Cliche ridden sci-fi ambience aside, the real problem with Half Life 2 isn't the monsters in game but the monsters in the programming.

You see, when it came out there was a bug that seemed to randomly hit people. The bug caused stuttering with sound and hitches in gameplay, even on high end machines. The bug STILL exists and shows up in Source licensed games. I can only be confounded at how a development studio which as much money as they have can't make a stable game. id can do it. Crytek can do it and beat the pants off everyone else's technology. What's up with Valve? Aside from the infamous stutter bug, there are the load times that don't make any sense. Load times that are as if you're defragging your entire HD each time, it takes so long. How do you play a game under such maddening intermissions taking you out of the action? This is a problem that also has NOT been fixed despite Valve's ability to update their game. Add in the sloppy jalopy that is Steam, a piece of software you are forced to run to play their games, and I am utterly fed up with Valve's software practices. They just aren't up to par.

The last point I would like to bring up is the level design of HL2 was a joke. It was linear. As in, well a straight line of gameplay. It's almost shocking, like, am I playing Star Fox? Am I playing a 2D scrolling shooter for the NES? Why on Earth would they take the ability to make open 3D designs, and make every level a linear walk to point A,B,C... ugh, some of the worst shooter levels I've seen, although the office areas of F.E.A.R. trump it I guess. The thing is, Far Cry came out before Half Life 2, and you know what? It was wonderfully open ended. Sure you had to complete the objectives, but you weren't in a little of tube of gameplay with no other choices. Valve seemed to have gone backwards gameplay-wise, like another bigshot that crashed, id with Doom 3, they could not capitalize on the things that make gameplay great and so the game was just a hollow tribute to lots of money spent on art and self worship.

That said, I think Valve is very gradually trying to overcome the criticisms levied at them. It's not happening overnight, but I wonder, maybe we'll see a Half Life 3 that makes everyone happy and not just those who like their games dead simple.

Excellent game with a few flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: June 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The gameplay, graphics ad story are superb. What I found disturbing are the trshy weapons. They all "feel" like toys and shoot that way. Why didn't they take weapons like in CS:S?

Very good Mr. Freeman!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Ever since I first Slumped the Specimine into the the anti-Mass Spetromitor in the first game. I've been addicted to Half-life. and found that leaving me with more questions then answers worked when this game first came out.

I was ungry for more! and more is just what I got... More action, More cool weapons to play with, and yes... More Questions then answers.

But this time around. the characters and allies in the game tore my heart out and tugged on them so hard tat i emotionally connected to teir plights. Then again their rebal AI was pretty bad. I ended up not caring if the NPC folled me or not and if they did, I tended to lead them into a mine field or two before I did anything more important later.

Still the game was fun fast and action packed. I loved swinging the Crowbar once more and a new gagit like the gravity gun was great too.

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