Half Life 2: Episode 2

Check our full length Half Life 2: Episode 2 review here.

Portal

In a typically Valve-sque fashion you gain consciousness in the middle of a room, with no idea of what is going on. Being surrounded by 4 walls made of glass your first thought is that you are a lab rat of sorts. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that a lab rat is exactly what you are. Just as you start panicking a portal opens next to you. Taking a glimpse at what hides on the other side you notice a female in a jumpsuit looking through a portal directly in front of her. Sure enough you are staring at yourself, but this is just the start of what Portal will throw at you.

Portal might look like a regular first person shooter at first glance, but play it for more than a couple of minutes and you’ll realize it is all but a FPS. A FPP (First Person Puzzler) maybe, but definitely not a shooter. Oh, there is shooting to be found alright, but you’ll be on the receiving end each end every single time. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

Every time the word puzzle is mentioned to a gamer he will probably immediately think of boxes and buttons. It is kind of sad really, but pushing blocks around and pressing buttons is pretty much the only thing most games offer in terms of puzzles. In comes Portal – your tasks will still be fairly simple, such as putting a box onto a platform to open a door or to divert an energy ball into a receiver to trigger a lift. The tricky part is that most of the time the thing you are supposed to move around won’t be easy to reach. It goes without saying that the platform you are supposed to drop it off at will be even trickier to get to, often being several meters higher than you are, or on the other end of a 30ft wide chasm.

So how is one supposed to go about solving these seemingly impossible puzzles? With portals of course! In the first few test chambers (out of 18) the game will open portals for you, but you’ll soon gain the ability to place one portal, while the other end remains stationary. There are some nice tricks here, but the game truly shines only after you gain the ability to deploy both ends of the portals, giving you total freedom in how you approach the puzzles. Want to jump over the chasm in front of you? Just place (by firing the portal gun) one portal next to you and the other at the other end and you’re all set. Unfortunately things usually aren’t this simple. As you progress more and more walls simply deflect your portal beams, forcing you to adapt new strategies to solve the room puzzles. I won’t spoil any specific test chambers, but you’ll often have to use physics to your advantage, such as using momentum gained from falling to jump over chasms or worse.

I’ve mentioned shooting earlier – towards the second half of the game you’ll come across stationary turrets that are similar to the ones found in Half Life 2. Being unarmed you can’t fight them, so your only chance of survival is to get behind them and tip them over. This sounds easy in theory, but as with everything else in this game things aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem at first.

Oddly enough the well thought out puzzles aren’t the game’s best feature. The crown goes without a doubt to the story and humor. I’ll avoid talking about the first simply because you’ll enjoy the game a lot more if you approach it without any previous knowledge. What about the humor you ask? I tend not to laugh at jokes games often throw at players, but during my Portal playthrough I often found myself laughing out loud. The perfect blend of black humor and computer jokes will hit home with most gamers, which can only be said for old LucasArts classics and a few other games. It gets better as you progress as well, partially because you get used to it and partially because of the story progression. As a result the ending is an instant classic, with one of the best credits sequences ever conceived.

Portal is not perfect however. The biggest issue is its length (or lack thereof). It took me only 2 hours to beat the game, with another 2 hours to get through the extra content such as harder test chambers. But seeing how Portal isn’t really a stand-alone title, this can easily be forgiven.

Team Fortress 2

Unlike Portal which is a purely single-player game, TF2 aims to please multiplayer addicts. If you have been playing computer games long enough you no doubt have fond memories of the original Team Fortress. This team based shooter was one of the first to offer different player classes and offer more than just regular CTF. The sequel, Team Fortress 2, was in development nearly 10 years, so hopefully Valve managed to find the perfect balance between the classes, to create the perfect maps and to refine the already great gameplay of the original.

The first thing you’ll notice about TF2 is the cartoony art style Valve decided to use. The over the top muscular defenders, the sleek spies and wrench wielding engineers all look like they popped out of a 50s comic book. And it is not just the characters either. The weapons, maps and objects found around them all look like they belong in a strip. Beneath this very childish exterior lies a different beast however.

With 9 different classes selectable at the start of the match you can imagine the huge amount of different game styles available. To make your choice easier each of the 9 classes belongs to one of the three groups – offense, defense and support. The first two need no explaining really, but just in case you are not familiar with the concept of CTF and control points let me clarify. The three offensive classes are all geared for entering enemy territory and causing mayhem. Regardless of whether this is accomplished by blowing the enemy’s brains out (Soldier and Pyro) or by capturing control points faster and running like a cheetah (Scout), the offensive classes are at their best when fighting behind enemy lines. Defensive classes on the other hand don’t have the necessary skills/weapons to be of much use on the front. Engineers with their sentry guns make for perfect defenders, as do the demomen with their sticky bombs. The heavy class while in theory good at attacking as well works best when standing still, dealing out huge amounts of damage with the minigun. The last and potentially most interesting class group is support. The medic probably doesn’t need much explaining and neither does the sniper class. The final choice is the spy, which is the perfect class for people who like to sneak behind enemy lines and help their allies by hampering the defensive capabilities of the foes.

Each of the classes has a very specific and usually sought after role in the game, so you’ll see plenty of action regardless of your choice. In CTF (Capture the Flag) the choice of class isn’t as important as in control point games, but even here an engineer won’t achieve much trying to capture the flag (or briefcase in this game). It is in control point that having all classes represented becomes important. It takes only seconds for a point to be taken over, so having a sturdy defense with sentry guns, heavies with miniguns and demomen is essential. Likewise a team on the offense needs a pyro for close quarters combat, a soldier for encounters out in the open and a scout for control point capturing. All of the support classes are needed as well, from the mandatory medic keeping his team alive to spies who disable enemy sentry guns.

So what about the maps? They are all different enough to provide entirely unique gameplay scenarios, but there are unfortunately only 6 of them. This makes you wonder what Valve were doing for 10 years, but considering how every single map offers an almost perfect experience we can’t be too hard on them. Care was not taken only when creating maps and balancing classes however. Just looking at the interface or using features such as the action stopping after you die so you can take a screenshot of your killer are enough to make it abundantly clear that every line of code found in the final product was scrutinized beyond measure.

Technology

As mentioned in our HL2: Episode 2 review the newest version of the Source engine brings plenty to the table. As if the dynamic shadows, motion blur and some amazing shader effects weren’t enough all three new games manage to run at a steady 70+fps on most hardware. The very different artistic approaches in all three games also highlight the flexibility of the engine. The sterile environments of Portal look nothing like the lush countryside of Episode 2, and both look completely different than the cartoony Team Fortress 2.

All three games also share some issues however. The most noticeable would have to be the annoying sound skipping bug which has plagued Source engine based games since the very start. Other minor annoyances include long load times (at least for the first time when everything has to be loaded into memory) and minor display bugs (which are probably due to driver issues). Overall however all three games just reek of technical polish, so you’ll be hard pressed to find games with more care put into every facet of the final package.

Conclusion

On its own most of the new Orange Box games suffer from a distinct flaw – lack of content. Being only 6 or so hours long puts a big dent on the overall quality of Episode 2, and with 2 (4 with extra material) hours of playtime Portal is nothing more than an afternoon adventure. Team Fortress 2, while potentially longer has only 6 maps, so for now the amount of diversity you get from it is limited. Looking at the three games together reveals a different picture entirely. Suddenly length isn’t a problem anymore, as you get well over 15 hours of combined playtime with all the commentaries and extra features. And somehow each of the 3 games comes with more polish than even huge stand-alone projects usually do. To top it off, the Orange Box comes with HL2 and Episode 1 in the box, all for less than what you usually pay for a single game.