Half-Life 2
Released on: PC, Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3, Mac OSX
Played on: Xbox 360
Release date: 2004 (although the Xbox 360 version was 2007)
Occasionally, I find a game where I'm not sure my playthrough rules are fair to the game - and Half-Life 2 is one of them. As I'm sure many of you are aware, this is one of those games that everyone who was a gamer played and loved when it came out.
Except me.
At the time, the only current generation console I had was a Wii, and the idea of my PC playing anything more technically complicated than Doom 2 was just ridiculous. So the Half-Life saga passed me by. Until I discovered Portal.
Portal is a puzzle game by the makers of Half-Life (Valve) and using the same FPS engine. I LOVED Portal (and later on in this playthrough, you will see just how much) and consequentially I was ecstatic when I was given The Orange Box for my birthday last year. The Orange box (for those of you who don't know) was a packaging of Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 for consoles.
Now that I've finished explaining the convoluted history of why I own this game in the first place (which I appreciate was confusing, thank you for sticking with me there), now I'll explain my opening paragraph again. As per the rules I set out for this playthrough, every game gets played for an hour (approx). The problem with this? Half-Life 2 is a very plot-centric game, and for the first half-hour of the game, where you simply walk your character around (in a very linear fashion as all doors are locked to you except the ones you need to go through), occasionally running away from people, and talking to NPCs, it didn't really grab me.... It didn't even really feel like I was playing a game! It certainly didn't feel like fun.
Part of the problem is that I have never played Half-Life (the original) and don't have any clue what the plot of that game was - and Half-Life 2 seems to just drop you straight into the plot, so I did feel a touch confused.
Also (and this is more a criticism of myself than the game), I'm a big fan of humour in game plots - and there's not a lot of that evident in the opening of the game. It's rather serious, and the feel of this blog is likely to reflect that, as I've got nothing in particular to joke about. Therefore I may, at some point during the remainder of this blog, insert a silly word or two in order to make you giggle.
Once I got into the game, after half an hour or so, and I became armed and could start to defend myself, then I did have some fun. It's a good game, and I can see why it gained so much acclaim. But honestly? It still didn't grip me a lot. I found it very hard (and I'm not excluding the idea that maybe I'm just really bad at the game) and while that's not necessarily a bad thing in a game - I do like a challenge - the very fact that I was noticing how hard it was tells me that I wasn't engrossed in the game.
*SILLY WORD KLAXON*
Penis.
*BACK TO BLOG*
And, to be honest, that's that. It doesn't matter that the controls are good, the graphics very serviceable, and the atmosphere genuinely well-crafted. If a game doesn't grip me, I'm not going to keep playing it, and that's what has happened here. Sure, I might give it another go in the near future, and not having to start over from the very beginning again may improve my opinion of it. But for now? It's going back on the shelf.
Also, just to clarify, I'm not visiting Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in this playthrough, as they are extensions of this game, and I found this one confusing enough as I didn't really know what was going on!
Rating: 6/10
Time Played: 1 hour
Would I play it again?: Maybe - but not for a while...
Time to go back to one of my favourite consoles and one of my favourite characters next - Donkey Kong Country on the SNES!
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