Review by: Emil Pagliarulo
Published: December 4, 1998

Gordon Freeman has had one hell of a day. He’s been chastised by his fellow scientists, shot at by the military, terrorized by hideous inter-dimensional monsters, and recruited for a suicide mission to save the planet Earth. Still, the scientist-turned-savior is having the time of his life. Why? Because he’s the lead character in the hottest first-person shooter since Doom, and after this nightmare ends even Lara Croft will be knocking on his door.

If you haven’t heard of Half-Life by now, you’ve either been stuck in a closet or on some alien planet for the past year. But for the sake of this review I’ll assume either is true, and start at the beginning. In Half-Life, you play Gordon Freeman, a lower-echelon scientist working at the sprawling underground desert testing facility known as Black Mesa. As the game begins (okay, slightly after the game begins, but I don’t want to give away Valve’s great nod to DisneyWorld), you realize that all is not quite…”right”…in the anomalous materials testing lab. Some of your colleagues seem overly concerned about certain unforeseen occurrences, and God knows that blown panel, complete with dancing electricity, hasn’t exactly boosted your confidence. But hey, you’re a scientist, and the work must go on. Such was your mindset when you entered the hazardous materials testing chamber to do some work on a new sample. One catastrophic explosion later and you knew you shouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning — especially when strange interdimensional aliens start appearing and you “blink” away to their world for a few seconds. Yessiree Bob, it’s going to be one of those days….

After this interdimensional travesty, you as Gordon are left to figure out what happened, and what you as a lowly research associate can do about it. As you quickly learn, you can do quite a bit, mostly because your fellow scientists have either been killed, are trapped somewhere and in need of rescue, or are just too terrified to do anything but hide. So, like it or not, you’ve been “volunteered” to save your colleagues, the complex, and quite possibly all of humankind from hordes of transgalactic beasties.

As it turns out, though, the aliens become the least of your problems. Not long after the trouble begins, you hear word that the military is coming in to contain the situation and rescue any survivors. Well, they show up all right, but their rescue effort turns out to be a massive mop-up job, aimed not at saving the survivors but exterminating them, to eliminate any witnesses to the catastrophe. This military intervention brings its own set of questions: why is the U.S. government so intent on covering up a supposed “accident”? Is there more to the dimensional rift than the other scientists are letting on? And who is that mysterious guy with the suit and briefcase who always seems one step ahead of you? It doesn’t take a nuclear physicist (wait..you are a nuclear physicist….) to realize there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot, and with Mulder and Scully off the X-Files it’s up to you to figure out who’s behind this whole mess.

Knowing you’ve got to stop whatever’s happening is one thing — actually doing it is a whole different story. You’ve got to remember that you’re miles beneath the New Mexico desert, and in order to even begin to figure out how to proceed you’ll need to make it to the surface and find some help. You’re not a supersoldier, spell-casting elf, studly anime hero, or undead gunslinger; you’re just Gordon Freeman, a regular, albeit incredibly intelligent guy in a protective suit who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now you’ve got to muster all your courage and strength to do the right thing. So, Half-Life is basically about your struggle to discover what’s happened, all the while avoiding hideous monsters, gung-ho green berets, and the random hazards of an underground facility that is falling apart around you. And you thought that dude in Unreal had it rough….