Review – Half Life 2: Episode 2

Like it or not, Valve hasn’t held up their end of the deal with the whole “episodic” thing – they’re so confident and assured of their personal school of game design that incrementing anywhere near a six-month-model wouldn’t provide the results you’re accustomed to in their games. Flawless puzzle design, immaculate pacing and constant play testing as long as the game is in development all play into creating a video game experience as complete and fulfilling as any one of Gordon’s adventures, be it the 12+ hour mammoth that was Half Life 2 or these shorter Episodic blasts. Episode 2 will be on your screen for as little as 4 hours but will be on your mind for months.

How many games have treated you like an idiot lately; thrown you into that same class of players who need some immersion breaking fool to write a specially coded application on his PDA to make sure Master Chief can move the camera up and down. Flashing lights on points of interest or nuisance text boxes telling you how to complete a puzzle you’re already half way through figuring out.
In Episode 2, puzzle solutions are suggested through carefully directed environmental hints. A particularly memorable puzzle, resulting in a handy rocket launcher, has approximately five or six telling hints, implemented purely graphically, that when put together reveal the solution for the puzzle. If you finish it in two minutes or scratch your head for six hours, Alyx isn’t going to pop her head into the room and tell you the solution. You’re a video gamer, you’ve dealt with puzzles before – figure it out.
Games are filled with arbitrary, illogical devices to further gameplay, but Episode 2 has none of it – like Half Life 2, the game still plays with everyday physics and real world examples; as soon as you replace magical-forcefields and ancient sorcery with buoyancy and weight, gamers have a frame of reference and can move on with ease.

And moving on from puzzles is particularly important in the frame of the entire game’s strengths; there is no fatigue nor tediousness involved. If something is boring; Valve rips it out – when you’re trying to make games short rather than long, you’ve instantly turned from bloating the game with artificial content – to streamlining the experience. It’s not easy to be an apologist for a 4 hour long, £40 title, but when the game is budget from the offset you’ll appreciate shorter, better paced content.
Maybe the battles could involve a few more enemies or the dialogue could continue on for a few more minutes, but ‘episodic’ is becoming a brand name known less for short-and-cheap but instead paced-and-streamlined. I’m all for both definitions, however.

Half Life is so expertly directed. You might hear of a game getting some big-shot director in to manage the cut scenes, but in Episode 2, the entire game is crafted and tweaked to make sure that although players have complete control over Gordan, they’ll always be shown the action, story and world in as much detail as possible. When new-comer monster ‘The Hunter’ is added to the fray, you’re not going to get a House of the Dead style “Weak Point – Glowing Spot” page appear on the screen, they are gradually dropped into the world of Half Life with an ‘appropriate’ showing of their brutality.
It’s getting on three years since the release of Half Life 2, but the technology (alongside some considerable upgrades) still makes for amazing humanity in the characters. Episode 2 pushes the story so much further than the first and provides a foreboding look into the next title.

While the graphics have kept up with modern titles, the gameplay hasn’t aged so well. Having melee, grenades and guns as seperate entities in your arsenal is antiquated to say the least; most gamers, used to tapping a button to unleash a close-range smack, will seldom change to crowbar – combat certainly loses its appeal. A rare problem with incrementing games for episodic content.

Half Life is an amazing game and its designed in ways that I wish every game could be; it’s tough to play anything else after Half Life and not be disappointed. Random invisible barriers, illogical mechanics and frustrating story-telling techniques leave salt in the wound that every game isn’t made by Valve. It may be linear, but the way Half Life is designed will ensure the series always go down in history alongside Deus Ex, BioShock and the like. At a Videogame-Genre-Party, Forza Motorsport might ask Half Life who that “Halo” kid or that “Call of Duty” guy is, and Half Life will awkwardly say “I don’t know them”.