NPCs constantly get under your feet (don’t get me started on Barney). The driving sections are long-winded and marred by poor vehicle handling. Ravenholm is celebrated as the game’s outstanding moment of horror and atmosphere, but it stands out because those things slip away afterwards. Dialogue sections, for example, become tedious on repeat playthroughs, leaving the player with nothing to do but wait for the AI to unlock the next section of the level. But its dazzling visuals, along with the Gravity Gun’s mesmerising ability to pulp enemies with sawblades and broken lavatories, hid all manner of sins. Half-Life 2 was jaw-droppingly beautiful when it first landed. And you’re caught in the middle of it all.
The military is brought in, initially to the relief of the disaster’s victims, until it’s discovered that their job is not to save you but silence you, and they mercilessly pick off any remaining survivors. As your two worlds collide, the fauna and flora of the extra-dimensional Borderworld threatens humanity’s very existence. Extraterrestrial tentacles burst through floors, dragging unlucky scientists to their deaths enslaved Vortigaunts stalk the darkened hallways and your undead former colleagues wander about the facility, parasites gripping their skulls. To this day, the unfolding, escalating horror of the Resonance Cascade is something that few other games have managed to capture. And yet, I prefer Black Mesa to Half-Life 2.īlack Mesa plays out like a classic disaster movie. The graphics were shiny, the guns were new, and the story was thrilling. Jetsam and flotsam bobbed up and down in canals, explosive barrels peppered enemies with shrapnel, and Combine soldiers tumbled realistically down stairwells and over railings. The adventure was not just complemented by visual splendour but also some groundbreaking simulated physics. We trekked across Antlion-infested highways, battled Hunter Choppers on the narrow walkways of a rickety bridge, and toppled a tyrannical government with the aid of a giant canine robot. Half-Life 2 was a revolution in gaming, transporting players to a world that barely seemed possible. After struggling to download patches for the game through some weird program called Steam (it’ll never catch on), the community would finally see what Valve had been working on for the past five years.
Half-Life 2 had finally lurched from the depths of development hell, overcoming source code leaks and a series of costly delays. Nvidia’s 6800 GPU was the new kid on the block, mechanical drives wept at Doom 3’s crushing 2.2GB storage requirements, and the Pentium 4 was still the go-to CPU.
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