Half-Life 2

THE BAD:
-Monster Variety

SUMMARY:
First off let's get the bad out of the way. The games only real lacking quality is that it has plenty of monsters to fight against you just fight against the same ones too often. Without giving away too many spoilers the very fast zombies of Ravenholm are rarely used and are truly a fright to fight against. If they were used more often the game could have been much more tense. You fight against too many Combine soldiers. Simply, you do fight against many different kinds of enemies just not very often. Only till closer to the end do you really start fighting against mixed groups of combine soldiers and huge lumbering striders all while holding off the dropships hovering overhead.

Which brings me to the good, the combat is really intense in this game. Especially in the later chapters, things really become intense when there is so much going on on-screen and you're fighting alongside other humans against enemies of all sizes. It really has an epic feel.

The story is excellent, as you come to expect from the Half-Life series. The characters really help flesh out the story because they first of all look so real and second of all portray such a realistic array of emotions. It's quite amazing to watch how realistically the citizens of City-17 go about their daily lives.

There's tons of replay value in the way of mods that have yet to be released but if Half-Life 1 was any indication expect some amazing mods to be released in the coming years.

The Multiplayer is extremely fun, or has the potential to be fun. Half-Life 2 Deathmatch isn't liked by most but I personally feel it's because of the lack of maps. In the future Valve will be releasing more maps for HL2DM and the fun gameplay is definitely there to be had there's just not enough variety CURRENTLY.

Coutner-Strike Source is an amazing multiplayer addition. It's so much fun and has a much more chaotic feel than CS 1.6 or any other version before this. It simply looks amazing as well. The majority of the time people don't like CS is because they're not good at it, and that's understandable because CS can be a very difficult game to be good at, especially when playing against more seasoned CS players.

In the end, Half-Life 2 is an epic game that will go down in history just like the original. No ones going to forget this gem anytime soon.