Valve figures out how to make Half-Life 2 fun just in time to abandon it completely.
Coming hot off of the heels of Episode One, this time a full year late rather than just nine months, Episode 2 kicks off in much the same way as the last entry. Gordon is buried in rubble, has lost all of his weapons, and needs to wait patiently while Alyx stands around saying proper nouns to him. There's a Portal Storm happening, much like The First Days, she warns. I begin to worry that the writing is starting as it'll mean to go on. My concerns are not at all alleviated by the one of the comic relief duo yelling "be adequate!" to Gordon Freeman as he leaves the area, excusing himself with the line "it sounds like something the Vorts would say". My grip tightens as I prepare for a Vortigaunt to later repeat the line back to me, because Erik Wolpaw heard what a brick joke was once and figured here would be a good place to practice them.
Fortunately, though, none of that comes to pass, and Episode 2 winds up being legitimately good in its second half. Far too much time is spent early on roaming around antilion caves while a Vortigaunt quips at you — there's one moment where he points out a burnt corpse on a chair as a wonderful piece of environmental storytelling in what I hope is a joke scene — and the caves themselves drag. I think I've come to the conclusion that the antlions just aren't an interesting enemy to fight. In practice, they don't end up doing much besides being bigger headcrabs. They leap at you, they swipe at you, the poison ones drop your health to one before the antidote kicks in and starts healing you back up. The only real difference is that they're not allowed to stand next to the thumpers, so you can just park next to one of those whenever it's around and start sniping without any fear of retribution.
Much better than the antlions are the hunters, who pull the double duty of both having an interesting design and being fun to fight. They're initially sold as being these horrible, brutal predators that'll tear anyone apart on sight, but they're not that hard to kill. Still, they can take a lot of bullets, and they're hard to track because they can climb and scuttle just about anywhere. At one point, I was backed into a bathroom that I couldn't get out of because one hunter blocked the exit while the other fired exploding flechettes into the tub next to me. I felt something click. These things would be dangerous if I wasn't wearing power armor. If Gordon was just an average citizen, the hunters would have shredded him. I haven't felt that way about a video game enemy in a long time, where there was such a clear synthesis of the horror stories told about them and the way that they moved and fought in-game. They're a very, very clear standout, and they're probably the most interesting hostile that Valve have ever designed.
Striders are less impressive, but I really liked the final setpiece where they teamed up with the hunters in their assault on White Forest. I’ve seen fans go both ways on this, with some hating the sequence and others loving it, and I definitely fall into the “loving it” camp. The striders are practically immune to everything besides Magnusson devices — you can kill them with rockets, but it takes a lot of rockets — and the hunters are so spongey that it’s hard to destroy them all quickly enough. You have to prioritize killing the hunters above all else, since they shoot the Magnusson devices off of the striders, and there’s not enough time to try racing them to see whether you can get the kill before they swat it off of their strider buddies. It’s a remarkably solved loop. Use explosives to kill the hunters, then use the Magnusson devices to kill the striders. It’s the exact kind of prescriptive gameplay I usually despise in shooters, where there’s really only one correct solution to the problem, but something about it works for me here. It’s a very tense resource drain, so you’re never able to operate at peak efficiency; by the end of it, I was down to two pulse rifle alt-fires and a magazine of pistol ammo to take out two hunters and a strider, and just barely managed to eke out a win. It was directed phenomenally.
Of course, it’s all also the last we’ll ever get of Half-Life 2. I’ll be fifty and people will still hold out hope that Valve is going to come back to finish the story. Historians in the far future will look back at the gilded tomb of Gabe Newell and still be wondering amongst themselves when Episode 3 is dropping. The light of the last stars will dim and the universe will grow cold and empty and in the sweeping black of space some wisps of fragmented consciousness will ask the darkness what the Borealis section would have been like, and the darkness will whisper back that it ‘s gonna be super fucking sick once it’s done. Don’t let Half-Life: Alyx fool you; the franchise is only going to be making lateral and backwards moves from here on out, and that’s if it can get another game at all.
Gordon’s car looks like complete shit and I’d appreciate it if the other characters stopped pretending it was cool to spare his feelings.
Coming hot off of the heels of Episode One, this time a full year late rather than just nine months, Episode 2 kicks off in much the same way as the last entry. Gordon is buried in rubble, has lost all of his weapons, and needs to wait patiently while Alyx stands around saying proper nouns to him. There's a Portal Storm happening, much like The First Days, she warns. I begin to worry that the writing is starting as it'll mean to go on. My concerns are not at all alleviated by the one of the comic relief duo yelling "be adequate!" to Gordon Freeman as he leaves the area, excusing himself with the line "it sounds like something the Vorts would say". My grip tightens as I prepare for a Vortigaunt to later repeat the line back to me, because Erik Wolpaw heard what a brick joke was once and figured here would be a good place to practice them.
Fortunately, though, none of that comes to pass, and Episode 2 winds up being legitimately good in its second half. Far too much time is spent early on roaming around antilion caves while a Vortigaunt quips at you — there's one moment where he points out a burnt corpse on a chair as a wonderful piece of environmental storytelling in what I hope is a joke scene — and the caves themselves drag. I think I've come to the conclusion that the antlions just aren't an interesting enemy to fight. In practice, they don't end up doing much besides being bigger headcrabs. They leap at you, they swipe at you, the poison ones drop your health to one before the antidote kicks in and starts healing you back up. The only real difference is that they're not allowed to stand next to the thumpers, so you can just park next to one of those whenever it's around and start sniping without any fear of retribution.
Much better than the antlions are the hunters, who pull the double duty of both having an interesting design and being fun to fight. They're initially sold as being these horrible, brutal predators that'll tear anyone apart on sight, but they're not that hard to kill. Still, they can take a lot of bullets, and they're hard to track because they can climb and scuttle just about anywhere. At one point, I was backed into a bathroom that I couldn't get out of because one hunter blocked the exit while the other fired exploding flechettes into the tub next to me. I felt something click. These things would be dangerous if I wasn't wearing power armor. If Gordon was just an average citizen, the hunters would have shredded him. I haven't felt that way about a video game enemy in a long time, where there was such a clear synthesis of the horror stories told about them and the way that they moved and fought in-game. They're a very, very clear standout, and they're probably the most interesting hostile that Valve have ever designed.
Striders are less impressive, but I really liked the final setpiece where they teamed up with the hunters in their assault on White Forest. I’ve seen fans go both ways on this, with some hating the sequence and others loving it, and I definitely fall into the “loving it” camp. The striders are practically immune to everything besides Magnusson devices — you can kill them with rockets, but it takes a lot of rockets — and the hunters are so spongey that it’s hard to destroy them all quickly enough. You have to prioritize killing the hunters above all else, since they shoot the Magnusson devices off of the striders, and there’s not enough time to try racing them to see whether you can get the kill before they swat it off of their strider buddies. It’s a remarkably solved loop. Use explosives to kill the hunters, then use the Magnusson devices to kill the striders. It’s the exact kind of prescriptive gameplay I usually despise in shooters, where there’s really only one correct solution to the problem, but something about it works for me here. It’s a very tense resource drain, so you’re never able to operate at peak efficiency; by the end of it, I was down to two pulse rifle alt-fires and a magazine of pistol ammo to take out two hunters and a strider, and just barely managed to eke out a win. It was directed phenomenally.
Of course, it’s all also the last we’ll ever get of Half-Life 2. I’ll be fifty and people will still hold out hope that Valve is going to come back to finish the story. Historians in the far future will look back at the gilded tomb of Gabe Newell and still be wondering amongst themselves when Episode 3 is dropping. The light of the last stars will dim and the universe will grow cold and empty and in the sweeping black of space some wisps of fragmented consciousness will ask the darkness what the Borealis section would have been like, and the darkness will whisper back that it ‘s gonna be super fucking sick once it’s done. Don’t let Half-Life: Alyx fool you; the franchise is only going to be making lateral and backwards moves from here on out, and that’s if it can get another game at all.
Gordon’s car looks like complete shit and I’d appreciate it if the other characters stopped pretending it was cool to spare his feelings.
5 Comments
The second-to-last paragraph is so amusingly evocative that it makes me wonder if you've ever considered writing a book lol. Great essay. I refuse to buy Half Life 2 even though it goes on sale for pennies because I ain't playing an unfinished game.
Thinking about that one Isaac Asimov story the last question, where a supercomputer amalgamation of the consciousnesses of trilllions of humans finally figures out how to reverse entropy at the heat death of the universe "First, let there be light!". I can now add my own personal epilogue where the first primordial human in the garden of eden asks this computer and surrogate god "so when's Alyx coming out?". Good write up
Fuck, I meant to say 3. Would be nice to be able to edit comments
@PasokonDeacon rolling my muscle car into the shop and telling the mechanic to expose the engine and bore rust holes straight through the body in the hopes that it makes me look like a war boy
@Spinnerweb thanks! i spent about half a decade out of high school writing fiction but i've largely since moved on to taking historical accounts and writing loquacious video game reviews
@LordDarias asimov had no idea when he was writing his story that the titular last question would be first asked by a valve employee rather than drunken scientists, and that the question itself would be when valve would stop making hats and go back to games
@Spinnerweb thanks! i spent about half a decade out of high school writing fiction but i've largely since moved on to taking historical accounts and writing loquacious video game reviews
@LordDarias asimov had no idea when he was writing his story that the titular last question would be first asked by a valve employee rather than drunken scientists, and that the question itself would be when valve would stop making hats and go back to games
PasokonDeacon
3 months ago