Platform: X-Box
Publisher: Valve
Price: $50
Let me start out by saying this: If you can play Half Life 2 on the PC, then just go ahead and do so. There’s no real reason to bother with the Xbox version if your computer is more than capable of playing HL2. However, Half Life 2 is the best single player FPS experience you can have on the Xbox, and is such a goddamn ambitious port of the PC experience that it at least warrants a bit of respect if not an entire play through.
I’ve not played the entire single player campaign of Half Life 2 on the PC, mostly because when the game was released I didn’t possess a computer capable of realistically running the game. I did have plenty of hands-on time with it at a friend’s house, thankfully, and I’ve played the hell out of the original. When I heard about the Xbox version, I seriously wondered how they were going to port it over with stripping out elements of original build.
When they announced that it was going to be a strictly offline experience, no multiplayer, I just shrugged it off, as I’ve played my fair share of online FPS games on the Xbox, and there’s plenty out there to keep me busy. Valve continued to reiterate though, that they were not taking anything away from the main campaign. For those of you that have played the original HL2 build, then you’ve gotta understand how massive some of those levels are, and how unbelieving I was that this would work out well on the Xbox.
How wrong was I? Completely wrong.
That’s not to say there aren’t some technical problems, such as choppy frame-rates and longer loading times. There’s even the occasional blurry object. The game is, honestly, far from perfect. But everything that made Half Life 2 fun on the PC (minus the multiplayer) is definitely present here.
The original Half Life blazed the path for all other FPS games to adopt a more cinematic and immersive way of telling a story. There were some truly stupendous moments to be seen, and Half Life 2 doesn’t deviate much from the original in this respect. You can consider this to be a bad thing, because there’s little in the way of innovation here, but it also manages to finely emulate the experience of the first one in the way only a true sequel can, unlike the slew of FPS titles that have attempted to do so.
You start off back in the role of Gordon Freeman, the physicist commando from the first game. If you remember the end of the first one, the blue suited G-Man offers you a choice, to either come work with him or die. Since dying wouldn’t make for much of a sequel, it’s easy to figure out the path that Gordon chose. So when the game starts (set quite a few years into the future of the original) you find yourself headed towards the dilapidated police state known as City 17. Here you’ll find the remnants of conquered humanity, policed in force by the enemy of the title, The Combine. When the intro ends, the action begins, and doesn’t let up until the finale. Along the way, Gordon will run into a slew of foes and friends, as he works to take down the society that the Combine have been ruling over with an iron fist.
The controls on the Xbox version are a bit looser than the PC, losing some of that accuracy that can only be had from a mouse. To help you out, the targeting possesses a type of “auto aim” that just needs you to be relatively close to an object or enemy to lock on. This does tend to make things a bit easier at times, but you’ll come across quite a few instances where it’d be nearly impossible without it. All in all, the difficulty level isn’t too high; the majority of the enemy AI is a bit disappointing. They’ll do the duck and cover for a while, but eventually they’ll just run at you guns blazing, so if you have the patience you can generally pick them off pretty easily. Some of the large enemies remain a pain the ass to kill though, and as the game progresses you’ll run into more and more of them.
The game looks fantastic on the Xbox, and while it does take a hit from what you can do on the PC, it still manages to look damn close to the original. There are some framerate issues when activity fills up the screen, which will tend to get annoying at times, but this is more of a hardware limitation than a flaw in the game. The music sounds just as good as it does on the PC (maybe even a bit better with a proper home theatre set-up) and the voice over work is top notch. It’d be a bit nicer to associate a voice with Gordon himself though, as it’s a bit odd for him to remain silent when someone is carrying on a conversation with him in the game. I figure this is due to trying to give you the feel of being Gordon, but it really just manages to distract you a bit more (I have the same complaint with Dragon Quest 8’s main hero).
Load times are a bit longer as well, as you move between areas in the expansive levels you’ll find yourself wanting to save more and more to avoid having to retread thru the loading as much as possible. Thankfully, you’re able to devote up to 30 slots to save on, so you’ll have plenty of room to do so.
All in all, the story of Half Life 2 is a blast to play through, and the game really does a good job of creating cinematic moments that you don’t just watch but interact with. It doesn’t provide much in the way of innovation like the original Half Life did, but it manages to be an excellent sequel and the best single player FPS experience you can find on the Xbox. It will provide you with at least 12 hours or so of gameplay, depending on skill level, but doesn’t offer much in replay value. If you’re a huge FPS fan, or you’ve never experienced Half Life before, then you truly owe it to yourself to check it out.
- Dustin Chadwell currently resides in Ohio, USA. He's been playing video games since the Atari 2600, and believes he can whoop anyone's ass in Joust, and Galaga. Probably not Halo 2 though. New technology tends to confuse him.