I found Half-Life 2 to be a pretty impressive technical achievement for its age, with some really good level design and generally holding up well, but held back by gunplay that lacks the punch of the original Half-Life.

Guess what Half-Life 2: Episode One uses as its main crutch?

I found this game to be pretty unmemorable and not nearly as well designed as its predecessor, but that's not to say it was without merit. The game still employs smaller physics puzzles to make the most of the ever-iconic Source Engine, and introduces the tougher Zombine enemies to give some more spice to the existing headcrab zombie pool, and certain setpieces work well - but without doing much new, it just feels like retreads of what Half-Life 2 already did.

The narrative holding it together couldn't be any more different than Half-Life 2 if it tried. Half-Life 2 presents a twisting, near-seamless narrative that doesn't really make any sense coming off of 1, but whatever, you're in the thick of it now so just roll with the twists and turns as they happen in front of you. The plot of Half-Life 2: Episode One on the other hand, is simple: Get The Fuck Out. Does it fit? Sure! It's just a little polarising in comparison to the game it immediately picks up after.

It feels like I should be doing more here than just comparing Episode One to Half-Life 2, but it really just doesn't have enough going for it. The dialogue is about on par, at least, but the only thing that sets it apart is the fact that Alyx is practically joined to your hip, which makes for some...grating dialogue, given Gordon Freeman's whole silent protagonist schtick does not work in this particular scenario. She's also a nigh-invincible marksman, which surprisingly doesn't take away from the difficulty as much as I expected it to.

All in all, it's fine I guess...but not a game I think is worth revisiting and probably the weakest non-Gearbox HL game that I've played so far. Here's hoping Episode 2 is an improvement!

Half-Life 2, episode 1, was so fun to revisit. It's incredibly manic; there isn't as many varied environments, but I absolutely love the citidel scenes and getting everyone to the train; it felt like a full battle for liberation. It's really fun, and I first played it on the orange box, but it's better on the PC. Gordon and Alyx get to have a more intimate relationship; you're together more, and I really like the character development; she's such a great character. Oh yeah, and dog is still my good time boy.

Ooh-wee-hoo, Half Life 2 is an alright game
Oh-oh, and Episode 1 is bad
Nothing happens and the gunplay is shit
This game ain't my bag

Edit: ok so I actually finished it, adding half a star because the funny linkin park meme, but overall it's extremely weak

This game gave me one of the strangest feelings i never had before - i felt like i was playing the wrong protagonist. It’s obvious who im gonna say that should’ve been the playable character for this ep, she’s practically plastered all over the marketing! I loved Alyx already, but the writing added onto her character so much, i felt like I should’ve been the one pulling Gordon around rather leading Alyx around. (Then again, hindsight is 20/20)

Gameplay is rather disappointing, having it that you dont have the signature crowbar and guns felt restricting, not fun or scary, even in the horror levels. The story was tight as always, and again, Alyx was the highlight of this whole ep.

this is game 17/71 of my backlog.

This is a pretty meh game, if half life were a franchise known for it's difficulty i would have no doubt that this game would be quite frustrating. There is way more than just one section where you walk into a room filled with explosives and can't have enough time to escape before it all goes to shit, the telegraphy of what you need to do (specially in the early parts where we're trying to fix the core) is really bad, but somehow i got it without too much trouble, felt like luck though, but at least the later parts are a bit better at it.

overall, this game is okay, it works, it's also insanely short, i beat it in a little less than 3 hours.

A pretty shit epilogue to Half Life 2.

Take everything wrong with the game (pacing,weak level design,shitty gimmicks) and somehow make them WORSE and you have Episode 1. For being less than 3 hours its genuinely baffling just how fucking dreadful going through it can be. The first two levels (out of FIVE) are just retreads of Half Life 2s finale with little sprinkles of originality (mainly platforming and light puzzles). It doesn't get much better after that, with the only real new mechanics being roller mines (which suck) and Zombine (who are annoying but otherwise fine) alongside unnecessary padding. Having to depend on Alyx so much in the levels really makes things so much worse, which reaches its peak with the absolute dogshit sniper section that forces you to wait for Alyx to take her sweet time to snipe (which could fuck you over since ammo is oddly stingy in the middle of Episode One). I'd like to say that things get better in the final level but NOPE. Exit 17 might just be one of the worst final levels in a shooter, with the crux of it being a pretty low energy escort mission ending in another ass strider encounter which ends on another cliffhanger.

If I had anything actually nice to say about Episode 1 it'd be just how nice it looks. Source really has held up after 20+ years of being an engine and the improvements look nice. Will also say some of the tracks go pretty damn hard, with the Hospital music being a great battle piece and the best section of the expansion. Otherwise this shit sucks and might just be the worst thing Valve has put out (that I've played).

3/10

Wow, look! Nothing!

I’ve never really liked Half-Life 2 — maybe I’ll get into that in a later post — so I didn’t expect much from the episodes. They’ve always remained as the bailey to the motte for a lot of fans, I’ve noticed, who I’ve told I didn’t like Half-Life 2. The episodes are where Half-Life 2 really gets good, they’ve told me. Of course, I’ve been told in equal measure that the episodes are where Half-Life 2 gets bad, and that’s the exact kind of fandom splitter that makes my ears perk up. Not liking something and then hearing that the sequel to it is both loved and reviled by the original fans may as well be the recipe to getting me to immediately buy a game. Besides, they’re only a dollar each, and they come with Deathmatch. They come with Lost Coast, too, but, you know, they come with Deathmatch.

And Episode One is kind of boring.

So little actually happens! Episode One, broadly speaking, is a rehash of the citadel section of Half-Life 2, a singular “wait for the elevator” section, and then about two city blocks of walking in a straight line before you do an escort mission. Valve was seriously crunching to get this out in time, and they still ended up missing their projected release date by nearly a full year. I have no idea how or why they thought they were going to be able to publish a new episode every three months. Even with all of the reused assets and an existing storyline to continue off of, expecting your developers and designers to be able to drop two hours of a playable game every ninety days is ridiculous. With such an inherently silly backing concept, it's a bit of a miracle that the two episodes ended up releasing at all.

Actually playing it is a bit of a hassle. I really didn't care for the constant "stop what you're doing to stand around while characters talk at you" interruptions in Half-Life 2, because you could usually at least skip traditional cutscenes. Episode One spends a lot of time in its earliest stages asking you to patiently wait while characters have revelations next to you. Stand around while Alex figures out how to get you across a gap, stand around while Alex hacks a door and admires the scenery, hang around while Alex downloads some data off of the Combine mainframe. The actual combat offers some clever setpieces, at least — letting you go wild with the empowered gravity gun again, some incredibly dark areas littered with zombies, Combine fights on long, open streets where you get supported by rebels on the rooftops — but it takes a long time before those get going, and each of those has an equal and opposite "finagle cars on top of antlion hills" section.

Episode One is written kind of annoyingly. A friend of mine blames Erik Wolpaw for this, and I suppose that makes sense; I think the strongest facet of Half-Life 2 is unarguably its aesthetic, followed closely behind by its writing. I’ve never loved how reliant on lore and supplementary materials Half-Life 2 is for getting any context into any of what’s going on, but I respect it. I think it’s a pretty interesting and bold idea to throw just about everything from the beloved original out in favor of starting from a blank slate with the sequel. Episode One, by contrast, starts about two seconds after the ending of Half-Life 2, and largely plays everything straight from there. In itself, I can't find a problem with the overarching plot. I don’t, however, care for the characters.

There’s something very infantilizing about the way characters talk to Gordon in this, especially Alyx. I don’t know if she thinks Gordon hit his head or something, but the talks to him the way that she talks to Dog. You open a grate cover or do a puzzle about as complicated as fitting wood blocks into shaped holes and she drops everything to cheer you on. “You’re so smart, Gordon. You’re such a smart guy. I love smart guys. Smart guys are the best. You’re such a smart, smart boy.” Enough! I know we’re writing with the intent to appeal to people who unironically called the last game “the thinking man’s FPS”, but this is too much. The whole “zombine” bit is also so obviously written with the intent to become a meme, which is a trend that continues well into Episode Two. Given what Wolpaw has written since, I think blaming him may actually be a fair assessment.

Exit 17 is an incredibly underwhelming end to an already unimpressive episode. It's not hard to imagine the dev team huddled around a table late into the night, desperately trying to figure out how to end the game, and then someone yells "fuck it, make them do the same escort quest five times". Five times. With some minor changes to the route, mind, but five times all the same. A door gets blown open, an exit gets blocked, mines get dropped. I can appreciate them attempting to use every part of the animal, so to speak, but there really just isn't enough to go around. The entire level is one small parking lot and a warehouse roughly the same size as the parking lot. The Combine barely even make an effort to stop you. They put two guys in through the top window and assume that they won't both get immediately gibbed by Gordon Freeman. The whole section is like trying to feed a family of five with a single potato. Sure, you can divide it five ways, but all that's gonna accomplish is keeping everyone hungry. Either you need to get more potatoes, or you need to limit the number of people you're feeding. You can't have it both ways. If your only goal is to make the game last longer, you may as well just put the player in front of a locked door that won't open until fifteen real-world minutes have passed.

It's certainly not bad, and I imagine that it being shorter than Forrest Gump is pulling a lot of weight in making me not dislike it. It's okay. There's ultimately so little here that it's impossible to really love it or hate it, and that might be the strongest condemnation of all.

Thank goodness Valve got all of those vehicle sections out of their system, so I definitely won't have to worry about them in Episode 2!

God, what whiplash. While Half-Life 2 hasn't aged a day, Episode 1 really feels like the wheels came off at Valve during production (which they basically did!). Retreads of the Citadel and City 17 sections of the preceding game immediately feel stale, and throughout the entire run there isn't really an original idea. The best section is the elevator defense, which is entertaining enough (and pretty tense in the darkness!) but really doesn't match up to the high points of Half-Life 2.
Being accompanied by Alyx for the entire game is fun, and I imagine this was quite impressive at the time, but overbearing NPCs are maddeningly common in games nowadays, so it's not exactly impressive now.
I played through the entire game with the gravity gun to get the One Free Bullet achievement, and that injected some fun (and difficulty!) into the game, but Episode 1 has serious Middle Sequel Syndrome. Pretty disappointing, honestly! Hope Episode 2 hasn't aged equally badly.

It's a brief experience that you likely could finish in one sitting. It's also not quite as memorable as the game it's expanding. Yet, it's somehow an even more rewarding experience than Half-Life 2. While the overall story still isn't the draw point of these games, the world and these character have really grown on me. They all have an welcoming energy and the dialog is as sharp as ever. I felt far more excited to be along for the ride in this outing. As things began to come together from the events of Half-Life 2. The gameplay is also more thoroughly thought out and tighter. Fire-fights are more dynamic and skin of your teeth, thanks to a three fold improvement of squad mechanics that add more complexity to the encounters, A.I. that really keeps you on your toes and an environment that feels more designed to highten the experience than show it off. At the end of the day though, this is more Half-Life 2. You'll know if it's for you. It's definitely for me and I had a great time with it.

Incredibly short and okay at best. The story ends at the moment where it seemed to start building up towards something interesting.

While the game is derivative in its design and played it incredibly safe by opting to not introduce anything new in terms of enemies or weapons, the atmosphere in places felt better than the base game. Having more environments where it was darker and you had to have the flashlight always on felt like a nice change, at least in my opinion.

You don't get the crowbar until you're pretty close to the end of the game, and combined with the limited ammo you get in most chapters, it was pretty noticeable the devs wanted you to over rely on the gravity gun.

On this playthrough, I learned to love Episode One a whole lot more than I ever did before. Yes, it's a bit of a narrative lull after the fast-moving ending of Half-Life 2 which brought up so many questions that this has no intention of answering. Yes, it largely stands on the shoulders of the games immediately before and after it. And yes, it's quite short compared to Episode 2.

But in that lull, this is able to take its time and let you hang out with Alyx through a relatively low-stakes escape from City 17, and god do I love her company. She's endlessly charming, hilarious, and facilitates a lot of the small gameplay twists this throws at you. Doing trademark Half-Life micropuzzles is much more satisfying with a companion providing near-constant commentary and helping out. I also love the small moments spent with random resistance members, like when you walk out of the room and hear them questioning resistance leadership and generally talking shit. The role of Gordon and his partners is so overwhelmingly messianic from HL2 onward that it's nice having a bit of a counterbalance.

Episode One really shines after you've played through the main series (at least, before Alyx) and come back because you missed your old friends. And I really did miss them.

Gameplay: Good
Story: Good
Controls: Good
Graphics: Good (for its time)
Length: A bit short

A decent expansion, but rather forgettable.

The idea of getting out of City 17 after the events of Half-Life 2 was cool, but it just wasn't handled really well.

You go from an epic confrontation on top of the Citadel to shooting headcrabs in the dark. I just didn't get the feeling that there was any urgency to get out of the city while playing through this.

It felt as if most of this expansion is just a bunch of cut content stitched together to progress the main plot. This is a shame, since Episode One had potential to be really great.