Half-Life 2

Note: This is a review of a replay, but I think this game's very dependent on novelty and often replays worse so take it as you will.

A milestone in game tech, not in art or entertainment. Most of the first act (up to “Black Mesa East”) puts you in same-y sludgy environs with a few mostly-generic weapons in your toolbox. Most of the third act (from “Anticitizen One” on) just kinda blends together into a smudge of urban warfare against bullet sponges (Strider fights being the worst offenders). The middle goes better, thankfully. It's got a good variety of gameplay, from physics-heavy horror to a cliffside road trip that paces out its encounters to the antlion-aided assault on Nova Prospekt; it's the home of a striking melancholy motif, the rusted ship stranded on the shore; and it's full of discrete scenarios and vignettes, which, frankly, are better than the big-picture storytelling.

Speaking of, the story's largely a series of accidents in which you have as little agency as possible. Sure, Half-Life is kicked off by one big accident (the biggest, really) but your actions are a lot more intentional after that. Here? It's just one fuck-up after another.

The environments are great, the music tracks—and silence—are used well, and there's a lotta fun moments. Weak points? The characters are predictable, the “interactive” cutscenes aren't, the vehicles themselves are a bit clunky, the enemies are often unresponsive and choreographed in linear-corridor setpieces (until you ragdoll them), and a lotta the physics “puzzles” are largely just the most basic see-saw stuff imaginable and doesn't impress me years later. However, outside of the very obvious physics tech demos I do think it's kinda misguided to describe the entire game as a “glorified tech demo” the way some people do. This criticism's not quite as meaningless as “this game (dis)respects my time”, but it's still pretty weak. Talk about how a game's shallow or confused or just badly composed or whatever—or in particular, like this game, how it deploys advanced tech in service of immersion but how immersion is rarely an interesting goal.