Half-Life 2 Eyes-On Impressions

We check out the latest on Valve's magnum opus as the Source-powered PC title of justice beckons.

You'd could be forgiven for momentarily forgetting about Half-Life 2. After all, there's been little to see since last year's amazing video reel, which had everyone completley fixated on this one game - since then, the game has slipped from its rather optimistic release date of September last year, and is now sceduled for released "before the snow falls". However, Valve was back in action at E3 last month with a whole new bag of goodies to show off.

The demo starts with a sequence that's basically one big nod to the first Half-Life, you're on a train and you're being taken to City 17, the central location of the game. This kind of thing is what put the original Half-Life streets ahead other first person. Valve has created a real world with real people; we see Gordon interacting with the people in the train station - who this time around have eerily realistic facial expressions and lip-sink. Small hovering camera robots roam the station taking photographs of arriving passangers, combine soldiers usher you through chain-link fenses. I found the use of sound in this scene particually impressive, the ambient sound effects seem to add a lot to the imerssion in these environments.

Even after another year in the very unforgivingly fast-paced world of PC technology, the Source engine still looks amazing. Personally I feel a little relieved that I'm now confident my PC setup will run Half-Life 2 easily. I think before I go hailing Source as the holy grail of first-person shooter engines, a little credit should go to the guys at Valve for not going overboard with the shader effects - Half-Life 2's worlds are very clean, with the Source engine's many effects used at high discretion with not a single lense flare in sight.

The pièce de resistance of Half-Life 2 is of course the physics engine, which has been organicly implemented into the game mechanics. You can pick up grenades thrown at you by enemy soliders, and throw them right back. The E3 demo also showed off a massive crane which you can actually use to pick up crates and drop them on people. In Half-Life 2 you can kill people with almost anything.

The music is again fantastically composed by the same composer who did the first Half-Life's soundtrack, the sound effects are as well very crisp and destinctive, I could already recognise most of Half-Life 2's weaponary from a firing line. Voice acting seems to be well done and in the bucket loads, and much to my personal delight sound effects from the first game are in huge abundance. It's still very unrealised how much nostalgia a few old bleeps can add to a game.

Once the Half-Life 2 demonstration came to an end the show was far from over, we were shown a brief demo of Counter-Strike running on Source (see our separate video below) which will be released along side Half-Life 2. It looked nothing short of amazing, with a complete graphical overhaul and of course lots of barrels to throw around. Bullets sprayed the water around during a heavy gunfight between the two teams, and a grenade sent barrels flying and a very high-poly hand defused a very high-poly bomb. They have my money already.

We didn't have to play the game to know that it's going to accomplish what every PC first person shooter in the last five years has failed to do - it's going to live up to the first Half-Life and even surpass it.

If you're not excited about this game you should be - upgrade your video cards now. And if you haven't watched the massive video below, we suggest you do so now. Stay tuned for more on Half-Life, including details of the Xbox xonversion, which is currently fully up and running.

Andy Robinson
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games