Half-Life 2 Critic Reviews

Nothing less than a revolution in the gaming industry that will keep gamers busy for years to come, just as the original did.

A graphics overhaul delivers detailed facial animations and sophisticated physics that leave battle zones strewn with debris after intense shootouts with shuffling corpses, overfed curstaceans and other assorted foes.

Valve have once again managed to transform a genre, and taken pure gaming pleasure to brand new, unthought of heights. The sheer number of moments you'll be astounded by the graphical touches, by the storyline, by the sheer polished nature of the title, and even the incredible level design is quite astounding.

From its opening moments to its spectacular closing sequences, Half-Life 2 assaults you with a variety of gameplay styles and memorable moments, all executed with amazing precision.

The delivered promise of video games to stand alongside cinema and literature as works of art. It accomplishes this through extraordinary graphical and audio prowess, wrapped around a riveting story and conveyed by unsurpassed gameplay...It is, bar none, the finest game I've ever played.

I found the little things most impressive. Telephone lines ripple from the wind kicked up by passing alien gun ships. Even motes of dust meander into view as they casually flit through rays of sunshine.

Valve's inclusion of an interactive physics-based environment and the wonderful gravity gun lends itself to fun gravity puzzles, making use of good old-fashioned common sense and intuition - something I've found to be absent in the average first-person shooter.

We laughed, we gaped, we cried, screamed, and on a few occasions, came dangerously close to wetting ourselves.

There is extensive use of lighting, shadows, and sounds. There is nothing like the howl of an evolved head-crab zombie to completely freeze a player in his tracks. The giant spidery Striders never fail to be both threatening and awe-inspiring.

As excellent as the storyline is, you could completely ignore it and still have an amazing experience.

Half-Life 2 has astonished us from start to finish. Valve has done to the FPS genre what restaurants in Chinatown do to ducks; shredded it, smothered it in a delicious sauce of their own devising, and served it up in a way which you simply couldn't have imagined when looking at them in the pond.

To put it simply, there is never a dull moment in Half-Life 2. In playing the game we could hardly account for a moment when we didn't have some kind of excitement or anxiety. The Source engine is a truly remarkable achievement.

A simple but elegant narrative imbues the experience with considerable inertia. Urgent, funny, frightening and bleak, Half-Life 2 tells its tale of rebellion against a grim European dystopia with ease and vigour.

The way things fly, catch fire, and fall not only carries consequences that add weight to your war of the worlds, but also creates situations that reward guile, guts, and instinct... Everything about Half-Life 2 is remarkable.

Half-Life 2 hits the ground running and never stops, and playing it for long periods of time can actually be exhausting. Just when you think you've seen the coolest thing it has to throw at you, the next sequence tops it.

Every time you feel that you've had your fill of a particular type of gameplay, Half-Life 2 introduces some new wrinkle that reinvigorates the entire experience...It's certainly one of the most masterfully paced . It's the type of game that you can't wait to talk about with other people.

No other game provides such rich atmosphere or better blends exciting action with sublime storytelling. It is much more than a science-fiction shoot-'em up: the adventure has convincing characters with great emotional depth and thrilling cinematic set pieces providing astonishing spectacle.

It's solid and requires, thanks to the variety and great AI of the enemy you meet throughout, more than a modicum of strategic thinking to get through with a good selection of interesting weapons on offer.

Represents the pinnacle of great action shooters because it strictly adheres to the one rule that makes an FPS great, the one rule that so many developers ignore, or break due to ineptitude and then conceal behind a shroud of tacked-on complexity: in a first person shooter, level design is <I>everything.</I>

Where it goes beyond a typical first person shooter is in its story telling. The graphics engine is so realistic that you feel like you are participating in a movie. The character's facial animation is incredible. It's done so well, you can get a sense of how the characters are feeling.