Review by: Josh Horowitz
Published: December 3, 2004

Half-Life is a true PC classic. I remember first playing it way back in 1998 in my college apartment on my Voodoo-accelerated Pentium 3, plowing through an intense single-player experience filled with soldiers, walking zombies, headcrabs, and a trusty crowbar. After finishing the game, I couldn’t wait for more from the creative and twisted minds at Valve. Recognizing both my desire and those of fans around the world, Valve and other developers released a number of Half-Life add-ons over the years, both commercial (Opposing Force, Blue Shift) and downloadable (Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, They Hunger). Despite the original Half-Life‘s success, however, the One True Sequel seemed to be nowhere in sight. All that changed with an announcement back in 2003 that the five-year-old franchise would finally be getting its modern makeover, taking advantage of the new decade’s advances in graphics, physics, and playability while maintaining the great story elements that made the original so successful.

Of course, Half-Life 2 didn’t appear on store shelves in 2003, a fact that has been part of a controversy that is interesting in itself. For those who didn’t follow the story last year, Valve’s founder Gabe Newell made a bold public statement in March to a hungry gaming public that the long-awaited Half-Life 2 would ship on September 30th of that year. Complicating matters were technology challenges, a lawsuit with Valve’s publisher VU Games, a ballooning budget (up to $40 million), and an embarrassing source-code theft by a German hacker, all of which contributed to pushing the date back over a year.

In Half-Life 2, players once again take the role of the crowbar-wielding MIT-trained scientist Gordon Freeman, who had been left in limbo by his mysterious employer, the G-Man, following the events in Half-Life. Awakened from his “hibernation,” Freeman finds himself in a train station in the Orwellian Police State known as City 17, an Eastern-European-like city filled with dreary human workers and sinister-looking “Civil Protection” guards. It seems that the “Combine,” an advanced alien race with deadly vehicles and weapons at their disposal, now controls Earth. Representing the human race is the former Administrator of the Black Mesa facility, Dr. Wallace Breen, whose message of subservience and appeasement blares over loudspeakers and televisions everywhere.

During the adventure, players as Freeman get a chance to team up with familiar faces from the original title, including the security guard Barney and several scientists from Black Mesa. There are also some new characters, such as Alyx Vance, the attractive daughter of one of Freeman’s scientific colleagues, her giant robotic guardian, DOG, and numerous human resistance fighters. Players will need to work with these characters while learning more about the Combine and its leader in order to take down the establishment, bringing freedom to the people of City 17 and beyond.