Half-Life 2

After having bought (and played) Black Mesa, I thought I might as well get Half-Life 2 (or HλLF-LIFE² as it's stylized) and experience first hand how Gordon Freeman's journey ends. The game's second standalone DLC, Episode Two, which was released in 2007, teases another sequel but Valve has not been willing to create one so far. In 2020, they did release a virtual reality game called Half-Life: Alyx (stylized with an upside down lambda as y which I'm unable to reproduce in text) but its events are concurrent at best (though the game does add to Episode Two's ending a bit).

Wake up and smell the ashes

The mysterious G-Man wakes Gordon up from the stasis he was put into. The theoretical physicist discovers 20 years have passed since the events of the previous game. An extraterrestrial empire called Combine has conquered Earth but there is a resistance which Gordon joins soon enough. Him being a silent protagonist gets rather awkward in this game and I kind of hated how they even acknowledge it by having Alyx point it out.

Like the game it's the sequel to, Half-Life 2 is a straightforward shooter. Some notable gameplay additions are drivable vehicles and a gravity gun, which allows you to grab and throw stuff. The physics of the game are a tad too fiddly to my liking though. For instance, trying to build stairs with boxes to be able to drop a ball into a basket for an achievement is much more difficult than doing the same thing in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Objects get pushed around so easily and Gordon tends to slide off surfaces.

By default Half-Life 2 doesn't have toggleable crouch which I prefer. A simple script fixed that however and I didn't have other technical issues. Loading screens are again "seamless" but at least this time they're always in places you can expect them to be in, like in a road tunnel or a twist in a corridor.

Half-Life 2's graphics are improvement over the first game as to be expected, but coming from the Black Mesa remake they could be even considered a downgrade: nothing in Half-Life 2 looks as fancy as Black Mesa's Xen. This game's art director was Viktor Antonov whom I've seen mentioned before because he was a visual designer on Dishonored. He was also an additional art director on Wolfenstein: The New Order and a consultant on Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, DOOM (2016), and Prey (2017). I don't think he worked on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided though whose Prague I was first reminded of when stepping out into City 17 in this game.

+3 perfect titles

Like in Black Mesa, I spent a lot of time ensuring I was getting all the achievements. Notable ones included: Lambda Locator for finding all 45 caches in the main game, The One Free Bullet for firing only a single bullet in Episode One, Get Some Grub for squishing all 333 antlion grubs in Episode Two, and Little Rocket Man for carrying a garden gnome all the way through the same episode to send him into space.

The last one was clearly the inspiration for the hat and pizza in Black Mesa. Carrying Gnome Chompski is not as bad because the DLC is not overly long. However, it is not painless either. You drive a buggy through most of the DLC and the gnome can't be properly placed anywhere on it. (Why can't Alyx hold the gnome for you?) You can get him into a spot where he stays put fairly well but crashing into something or being shot by a helicopter will send him flying again. In the chase sequence I stopped trying to have the gnome in the car and just got on and off the buggy to launch him forward with the gravity gun. Playing on the easiest difficulty setting makes that possible although even then it was a close call.

Half-Life 2 was a mere curiosity for me beforehand and didn't turn out to be anything more. It was fun enough but I can't appreciate it as anything more than that. Beside acknowledging, it's difficult to truly appreciate innovation retroactively.