I was ten years old when I played Half-Life 2 for the first time. I got stuck in Ravenholm and had to get my dad to do the cemetery escape with Grigori. I was terrified of Nova Prospekt's dingy lighting and ruined corridors. I couldn't aim to save my life because I had never played a shooter on PC that wasn't Halo on Easy.
114 hours and seventeen years later, Half-Life 2 is one of my favourite games ever made. It is timeless in how simple it is to pick up and play, how immersive and rich yet charmingly simple its environments are, how brilliant the sound design, music and voice acting are as well. Mods for Half-Life 2 are still being produced 20 years later, like Entropy Zero, which should by rights have been a full priced game in itself considering how fantastic it was.
Half-Life 2's setting is a marked departure from the concrete, steel and desert that characterised Black Mesa. Now in City 17, an anonymous Eastern European hellscape following the end of the world, noted mute and crowbar enthusiast Dr Gordon Freeman must flee a bloodthirsty gestapo, break machinery whenever he touches it, solve simple physics puzzles, visit the cleanest town in Eastern Europe, stage a prison break with giant insects, and spark a full scale uprising before going back to sleep for about thirty minutes.
It has one of the best shotguns in a game, one of the best gimmick weapons ever produced in the form of the Gravity Gun, some incredible setpieces and a replayability that you don't really get with modern FPS games anymore. Wonder if they'll ever make a third one?
Half-Life 2 deserves every praise it gets, and I hope that 2024 sees a 20th anniversary update the way its predecessor got for its 25th.
114 hours and seventeen years later, Half-Life 2 is one of my favourite games ever made. It is timeless in how simple it is to pick up and play, how immersive and rich yet charmingly simple its environments are, how brilliant the sound design, music and voice acting are as well. Mods for Half-Life 2 are still being produced 20 years later, like Entropy Zero, which should by rights have been a full priced game in itself considering how fantastic it was.
Half-Life 2's setting is a marked departure from the concrete, steel and desert that characterised Black Mesa. Now in City 17, an anonymous Eastern European hellscape following the end of the world, noted mute and crowbar enthusiast Dr Gordon Freeman must flee a bloodthirsty gestapo, break machinery whenever he touches it, solve simple physics puzzles, visit the cleanest town in Eastern Europe, stage a prison break with giant insects, and spark a full scale uprising before going back to sleep for about thirty minutes.
It has one of the best shotguns in a game, one of the best gimmick weapons ever produced in the form of the Gravity Gun, some incredible setpieces and a replayability that you don't really get with modern FPS games anymore. Wonder if they'll ever make a third one?
Half-Life 2 deserves every praise it gets, and I hope that 2024 sees a 20th anniversary update the way its predecessor got for its 25th.