Half-Life 2

THE GOOD:
- Unbelievable visuals.
- Awesome level design.
- Excellent sense of realism, urgency and tension.
- Gripping music adds to the experience.
- Adaptive graphics engine that allows less powerful PC owners to play.

THE BAD:
- Lacking story that could have been explained a lot better.
- Mediocre performance of Steam on launch day that should have been foreseen and prepared for.

SUMMARY:
If there's one thing you should never do when producing a form of entertainment, should it be a movie or a game – never set the standards so high for yourself that you can't easily outdo it when you come to making a sequel. If there's one game developer that broke that rule, it was Valve. They gave us Half Life oh so many moons ago, a game of its time that set new standards in the genre of first person shooter, creating endless possibilities and opening the door to adventurous level design and exploration. Gone were the linear outcomes of...

Valves does it again! Half-Life 2 has a huge potential to become #1 game of the year. Although it has competition against Halo 2, PC Fans and XBox fans are going to have a long battle till the final judgement day comes.

Graphics: 10/10

Literally beautiful. If you wanted to walking into a sci-fi world, this is exactly where to want to look. The water is what everyone is talking about. It really does look amazing. You can literally drop a watermelon into water and see it dive inside and float it's way back up. The game it self is visually satisfying. You find yourself once looking into HL2 and being mesmerized by the incredible detail. With this new engine, you can literally see the wrinkle on a character's face when they are angry. It is ridiculous to the amount of detail put into their facial reactions.

Sound: 9/10

If you have a surround sound speaker system. You will definitely experience something out of the ordinary. Although the music isn't...

THE GOOD:
- Graphics
- Physics
- Amazing and varied gameplay
- Gravity gun (wooot!!!)
- Intelligent gameplay (not just run-and-gun)
- Great AI
- Has a realistic feel to it
I can go on for ages...

THE BAD:
Some complain about glitches, I never encountered them myself though.

SUMMARY:
The long awaited sequel to Half-Life, the game that revolutionized the FPS-genre, has fially been released.
We've waited years for this game... but is it worth it?

YES IT IS!
But lets start out with the story:
You're Gordon Freeman, a scientist who survived the Black-Mesa incident (HL1). Now you're back to rescue City17 from the grip of the combines, half-alien half human creatures.
While doing so, you'll encounter 10 foot 3 legged spiderlike robots with a plasmagun, you'll race across a beach full of nasty antlions. You'll get stuck in a city filled with zombies and even chop 'em in half using the gravgun. This game has it...

THE GOOD:
Wicked Graphics
Great Sound
Great Vehicles
Wicked Guns
Super Story
Easy Handling
Thrilling, sometimes scary
Huge Levels
Short Loading Time
Great Engine, even for older Graphicboards like mine (NVIDIA GeForce4 MMX (PCI)/64MB
Difficulty not to high but gaining constantly.

THE BAD:
The fact that you have to have an internet connection to play and get the game to run.
Have to go online before playing each time unless the game is unlocked and fully registered by the guys from STEAM, which took about 1 day in my case.
Nothing about the game itself.

SUMMARY:
When I heard the game would be released November 16, I flew into the next store in consideration to buy the game. First I was sceptic if my PC would be fast enough for Half Life 2 to run propperly, so I decided to get me a new graphic card aswell. Luckily the board I wanted was not available and so I went home installed and played with my old NVIDIA...

THE GOOD:
Crazy graphics
sweet guns
wonderful AI
Great environments
In debth story that keeps you playing.
MORE!

THE BAD:
Nothing anymore it seams, to play you will need a fast internet connection to download all the updates through steam, but when thats done your never gonna wanna put this game down.

SUMMARY:
First thing, this game looks amazing even on low. The amount of detail that went into everything in this game is unbelievable. (just take a look at the source code.....)I dont want to get into the story to much besides that fact that its very entertaining and like the first half-life, its lets you draw your own conclusions about diffrent aspects of itself. The weapon variety is almost the same as the first game with a few added things. The most noticable addition to your armory is the gravity gun. This weapon allows you to pick up all sorts of things scattered around the game world and toss it at enemies or build...

THE GOOD:
-Graphics
-Story
-Combat
-Characters
-Replay Value
-Multiplayer

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...

THE GOOD:
*Graphics (above all else - just look at the faces!)
*Enemy A.I. (grenades in hiding spots and flanking tactics will keep you on edge)
*sound fx (the strider cannon noise is massive)
*physics (rag dolls and objects with real gravity?!?!?)
*Gravity Gun!!!(Can you not have fun by cutting zombies to bits with sawblades and shooting paint cans in their faces?)
*Massive worlds (even Metroid Prime is speechless)
*controls (even a newbie can pick-up on them)

THE BAD:
*Ummm... unless you have a super-powerful CPU, the framerate will not forgive you

SUMMARY:
Okay, I was never a PC gamer up until I played this game, and had no experience with using a keyboard and mouse to fire a gun...
So I was a little unsettled to get into Half-Life 2, which ended up...

THE GOOD:
good physics. good graphics. manipulator and bugbait are fun to use. hl2 deathmatch should be very fun

THE BAD:
storyline is crap. ai is pretty dumb. cs:s comes with it (i hoped cs would die with hl1)

SUMMARY:
this game didn't live up to my expectations. i was expecting more interaction with npcs and a better storyline. was expecting ai to be really good (since it's supposed to be "ground breaking"). some of the levels got really repetive and boring. the last few levels were really fun though. the ending was ridiculously stupid in my opinion but mods for this game look promising as does hl2 deathmatch (which was just announced wheeee) ....

THE GOOD:
This game does have one of the best beginnings of any game i've played. It really takes you by suprise. Good graffics. Good weapons.

THE BAD:
Very over priced. Takes to long to install. Steam is a huge pain in the ass. Disappointing ending.

SUMMARY:
This game is very overated. Don't get me wrong its a fun game, but with the massive hype I expected much more. Head crabs and zombies. Same ol shit. At least the Antlions are new. Dumb ending. I will never buy a Sierra game again if they use Steam. What a pain in the ass. If the price goes down aroumd $39, buy it.
Here in northern California its going for about $56.
It does have some very fun play, but again the massive advertising campain and hype made me expect more. But it also worked on me, I dropped $56 bones for it.

THE GOOD:
-The graphics are Awsome
-The story is good
-Lots of weapons
-Good amount of enemies
-Lots of things to do, people to meet, places to go

THE BAD:
-I would have like to fly something and driven more vehicles with more than one person on it.
-I also didn't like how the sentury guns fell down do easily, like when you tap it, it gets hard to pick up sometimes and you have to do it quickly.
other than thoses thats about it and its not alot

SUMMARY:
I like the whole story and how it all fits together until the ending which kept me in suspense of "whats going to happen next?" There were a lot of places to go to with numerous things to do and enemies to kill. There are only two vehicles you could drive, the car and the boat, those were good but it was too bad you couldn't fly something you had to shoot out of the sky. I thin it would be just a little better with more vehicle. But still I will give Half-Life 2 a five out...