Half-Life 2 - my thoughts

Having just finished Half-Life 2, I thought I would share my thoughts on what has become quite a phenomenon.

For those who have not played the game, please be warned that this piece may contain information that could spoil your enjoyment of the game later. Besides, only by having played the game yourself will you know to what I refer. Though it may seem that I’m being harsh in what I say, I genuinely feel that the game could have been so much more complete if they had handled some things differently.

I find I have contradictory feelings about the game. While it is easily one of the best – if not THE best – first person shooting games, the story was so disappointing.

There are so many cool and exciting things about this game – the vastness of the environments, the variety, the excellent opponents and gameplay, the cool environment manipulation, etc. – it’s a shame that the story was so flimsy and presented in a weak manner. For instance, I thought that the story was just showing signs of picking up when the game suddenly ended. Although I’d clearly reached some kind of climax, it felt more like an “Act 2” climax in many ways.

The biggest problem for me was that my character – Gordon Freeman – was only mixed up in the story by a series of coincidences that must have been signposted for the antagonist to read from the beginning. At no point was the player in control of the development of the story, or even a substantial part of it. The story seemed to be unravelling outside of anything I did and Freeman was simply a passenger.

The two appearances by the G-Man weren’t particularly good, giving the feeling that they were tagged on as an after-thought in order to give the impression there was some form of conspiracy going on. It felt very “gimmicky” to me.

Character development was virtually non-existent, so that you tended not to care about any of the characters in the game, particularly as all they seem to do was boss you around without really explaining what was going on.

You know, I’m still trying to work out what the story was really about.

There were many events dropped into the game that had no resolution and I feel as though they may have been created to justify giving Gordon extra power or equipment and not really part of the story.

One of the most frustrating things for me was the inability to be able to talk to the other characters. They just talked at me and told me everything I needed to know in a very convenient way. In a real sense, there was no true dialogue, just a series of monologues that sometimes came across as a little patronising.

Which brings me onto the character of Gordon Freeman himself. We all know what he looks like. Every character in the game constantly reminds us that we are playing the role of another character by referring to us by name. So why couldn’t they have gone one step further and actually given him a voice and raised the standard of the dialogue into what it should have been – something to match the superb quality of the rest of the gameplay? Instead of making me think that I was in the role, it simply made him look stupid. There were lots of times when I wanted Gordon to say something back to the other characters, or ask them a question, or get them to repeat what they said because I’d been looking around the room and hadn’t been paying attention.

I wanted him to convince me that he was a fully developed character, but he never did, and this contributed to the weakness of the story.

Doom 3, of course, was even worse in this respect. They shifted to a third-person camera and showed the player character a number of times, but still didn’t have him speak. In this case, it would have been far better for him to have remained a faceless, nameless character, which would have meant that the player became the character much more easily.

This sums up the story for me, though I don’t know the artist.