HALF-LIFE 2: BACK TO SOURCE
Slightly stunned by the incredible success of their first title, the still very mythical Half-Life, the developers at Valve have spent the last six years between two waters, masterfully managing the - sometimes unexpected - side of this license (Opposing Force, Counter-Strike ...) but with much less brilliance its other projects, including the ghost Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms or the Steam gas plant. Full of aces but a little frustrated, they finally got back to work on what they do best, the adventures of Gordon, with the slightly crazy goal of laying a suite at the height of one of the best games video of all time. To the impossible, no one is bound, and yet ...Freed - and for good reason - from any scientific obligation, Gordon Freeman takes a train one morning to City 17, a seaside resort with prospectuses full of promise. How many months, how many years have passed since the Black Mesa experience and the events that followed? He himself is quite incapable of responding. One point is clear, however: things have changed since his first meeting with the man in the briefcase and in this new deal, Humanity has not drawn the best cards. She finds herself enslaved, submissive, repressed in many ghettos under the control of the Cartel, an all-powerful but somewhat mysterious entity. Little talkative but willingly violent, his militiamen take care to evacuate with great batons any feeling of rebellion from the skulls of people, whom a few corrupt humans placed at the top of the hierarchy are responsible for stuffing with all the propaganda necessary for a well-ordered servility . Not discouraged, some motivated men, some women volunteers still manage to mobilize, to organize themselves almost, and they are slowly but surely preparing for the revolution that will set them free. They feel it, the appearance in town of the hero of Black Mesa, the legendary Dr Freeman, can allow them to break the yoke of their oppressors ... a role of savior that Gordon, despite his bifocals and his beard passed fashion for well five years, seems forced and forced to accept.
Always locked in a disturbing silence, our hero has indeed not lost this habit of doing what he is told without (asking) questions and will therefore be lugged left and right, over a strangely tenuous intrigue but served by an oh so engaging atmosphere. Rather than multiplying the palaver to present the story and the characters, as is sometimes seen elsewhere, the developers have chosen to immerse the player directly in their universe, even if it is to unseat him during the first minutes of the game to better capture his attention during the following hours. Upon arrival at the station and during his short visit to City 17, he will be rocked by the interminable diatribes of the militia leader, broadcast on a myriad of screens in every corner of the city, or will witness the muscular interrogations practiced in the middle of the street by the militia on the townspeople, without really knowing what is going on around him. The sizzle of electric batons, the monotonous voice of the guards and fear on all faces: everything is done to set up a suffocating atmosphere, halfway between the world of policing in 1984 and that more martial of Equilibrium, which we root out with lots of questions in your head but too little time to ask them. Quickly spotted by the militia,
Freeman must indeed quickly pack his bags and leave the city, to launch himself into a caval whose end he will not see until after a good fifteen hours of well paced action, sometimes interrupted by a few minutes of discussion supposed to justify the shootings to follow. Despite these meager narrative efforts, the development of the script remains fairly basic during most of the adventure; the hero's experience is more that of a fugitive, anxious to save his skin and without any real influence on the course of events, than that of the hero of the resistance that we seek to sell us at the beginning and end of adventure. The final packaging, fairly controlled, certainly puts Freeman and his initial objective in the foreground, but alas a little late and in a slightly artificial way.
Not really an arrow, Gordon
Fortunately, Half-Life 2 has pretty arguments to make us forget its fairly simple storyline, starting of course with the variety of its levels and the pace of its gameplay. Taking up the system inaugurated by its predecessor, the game divides its universe into a multitude of sections separated by loading times (alas long and a little numerous), but constantly linked together by a corridor, a tunnel or other passages of the same genre, so the player never actually loses the hand. He thus takes care not to teleport him at the start of the mission, or to swing a kinematics in the third person in his teeth to bring him to a precise point; the transition between any chase and entering a building is under the control of the player, who must often enter the cellars or locate an exploded window to enter the building, and we remain thus focused on action. It takes very different forms over the course of the adventure, but we quickly find the marks taken in the first episode with a subtle mixture of pleasant but very linear exploration, fine shoot sessions and nags at the same time, little puzzles to solve to progress and also some passages a little platforms, fortunately a little less numerous than before. Surrounded by vile critters at one point, perplexed in front of a puzzle the next moment for a few seconds later kicking their way with crowbar, the player always has something new to do and the level design is therefore very inspired. Useless for example to seek rest in sewers which we have barely discovered the entrance: when the face huggers inherited from the first HL (and their venomous cousins even more stressful, introduced by this new episode) do not come to leap at the figure at the opening of a door, it is the militia agents who stick to it by jumping abseil from the top of a hatch. Sometimes available via the classic wall panels, life and armor are more often recovered directly on the ground, in crates that are smashed on the way, and we very rarely have time to stop to blow.The more so as the title, launched on the hats of wheels as of the escape of City 17, does nothing but increase in power throughout the adventure, multiplying the blows of brilliance when others are satisfied to chain the hallways. Arrived at the swimming and covered with bruises in a rebel outpost, Gordon will be thus also dry put at the handlebars of a hydrofoil and summoned to join the other end of the channel, under the heavy fire of not very pleasant helicopters, before discovering much later the darkness of Ravenholm and its welcoming zombies, the beaches of City 17 and its hungry swarms or even the prisons of the Cartel and its automatic turrets. The bestiary offered, strongly inspired by the first Half-Life, however, offers brilliant novelties including the Striders, species of mechanical spiders several meters high, as well as particularly annoying jumping zombies or flying razor bugs with inertia well done. With the exception of a few lengths, quietly stashed at two-thirds of the adventure, Half-Life 2 has the luxury of putting the player out of breath most of the time and for this reason uses the strings of his predecessor as much than his own recipes.
In the first category, we retain for example some pretty sequences of assault by the militia from a position held by the player, with grenades and all the tremor, or the opening of an improvised passage through debris with the foot doe; a path obviously imagined by the developers but that one has the impression of being the first to discover. In the same vein, Valve wanted to invite some scripts, finely programmed but not intrusive as in a Medal of Honor for example. Impressive delusions of Dog, the pet cut like a bulldozer, with gigantic factory chimneys which crash at the feet of a player too eager to notice them, the title reserves some pearls of scene which certainly would not have made a mark in the first episode.
Tamed insects
This Half-Life paw, quite present in certain parts of the game, is however brought up to date by various welcome innovations, for the series or in the field of FPS in general. Absent from the first episode (with the notable exception of small wagons), vehicles are at the center of many passages in Half-Life 2. There are two controllable by the player (in addition to a brief passage in a crane): l hydrofoil, all terrain but with hazardous handling, and the buggy with the overinflated engine. The apparitions of the two machines share the same structure; in more or less extensive settings, we pilot quietly under enemy fire and sometimes, an obstacle on the way forces us to dismount and clear the road. It can be a puzzle, the story of making a springboard and thus continue our journey, or an abandoned barrack in which we will be delighted to discover life, armor and enemies to smash. It can also be a Cartel outpost to be vigorously cleaned before being able to continue, or simple carcasses of cars that will be passionately kicked off. Despite the strange maneuverability of these racing cars, these sequences - and their various interruptions - offer additional freshness to the journey of friend Gordon, even if we may regret their somewhat excessive length. The other innovation, more radical than that, comes from the physical engine, the Havok, or rather from the use that is made of it in the game. While offering the usual flying beer cans, the eternal rolling cans and eternal falling boxes already staged by other FPS before him, HL 2 allows to integrate the laws of physics in its gameplay, without making the fall of objects an end in itself. After a few hours of play, it is therefore quite natural to explode wooden slats at the bottom of a channel to bring the objects they were holding up to the surface (and thus create a passage); to swing what falls on hand in a receptacle in order to lift the platform which is connected to it; explode the bottom crate to knock over the others. Sometimes, we are even surprised at the fidelity of the model used, when for example a scaffolding falls on our face after the involuntary felling of a pillar.But Valve went a little further with the anti-gravity gun, known for two E3 already and yet still as surprising. Like all weapons in the game, it has two shooting modes. The first allows to push back, the second to attract an object or a metallic beast. We can easily lift a crate, a can, a car carcass obstructing the passage, then send it flying away at a good distance, all with two clicks of the mouse and without really getting tired. With a little training, it is therefore quite possible (and even advisable) to swing all kinds of objects, and more particularly cutting, sharp or blunt utensils to swing in the figure of the closest enemies. Not as unstoppable as it seems and yet devilishly useful, this weapon of a new kind quickly proves to be more effective during exploration (lifting things, turning over the buggy, making a propeller accelerate ...), or in the face of numerous enemies, only as a pure shooting instrument and we will use it above all, in the action phases, to effortlessly eliminate the species of razor bugs, or to swing an explosive barrel in a bench zombies. Again, the anti-gravity gun, while being essential, does not cannibalize the gameplay and integrates well enough, like the physics engine as a whole.
Neither a gadget nor an ultimate instrument, it brings an undeniable touch of subtlety and proves, moreover, all its valor at the end of the game. It is the same with the other damn well found weapon of this Half-Life 2: the pheropod . Sort of hairy gland, torn from a fairly aggressive creature, it allows its owner to take indirect control of a small handful of swarms. These creatures, usually little inclined to sympathize with the human race, all become honey in front of a pheropod and are docile to the point of attacking such and such a target pointed by their new master. The feeling, quite new in an FPS, to command a horde of hungry insects is terribly enjoyable and as for the anti-gravity gun, this original weapon is not enough in itself: you have to constantly support the critters and rather s '' serve as a diversion, by massacring with shotguns the guards thus devolved. In the last levels, we can in the same way count on the support of rebels, ready to follow us (to precede us, in fact) in death. With limited artificial intelligence, they will serve as human shields more than anything else.
A very physical engine
On the technical side, Valve did particularly well - without however succeeding in concreting the achievement as much as we would have hoped. Graphically, it is flawless: less rich in modern and spectacular effects than Far Cry or Doom 3 (metal, in particular, does not have the same pretty cold reflections), Half-Life 2 nevertheless manages to rise to the level of these two main adversaries of 2004, or even to surpass them, thanks to a perfectly mastered graphic style. Full of scale and completely in the "futuristic but not too much" tone of the whole, the decorations notably have a well marked realistic side which will leave more than one jaw on the parquet floor: the only arrival in the city, in leaving the station, will suffice to shock more than one incredulous. The treatment reserved for water is the same tone and its rendering is also of high resistance, with reflections in all directions on the surface and a distortion effect quite successful when you swim under the waves. Overall, we are very far from the vast expanses of a Far Cry, but with a roughly equivalent freedom of action, we do without it. The icing on the cake, the title is paying the luxury of being significantly less greedy than its two competitors and a fairly average machine will manage to turn it without worry. Suffice to say that its test PC and its 3200+ index for 1 GB of RAM and 9800 Pro did not hesitate to put all the options fully in 1024 * 768, and a little FSAA to smooth everything. Unfortunately, this sparkling medal also has a relatively inconvenient side: loading times. Proportional to the power of the beast, of course, they remain too long in all cases and above all far too numerous not to be painful quickly enough. No matter how much you prepare a coffee, lift a few dumbbells or chat with the lady to pass the time, you are quickly frustrated by these repeated interruptions. The other concern, much thinner, concerns the various oversights in terms of interactivity with the sets. By dint of swinging boxes across rooms, lifting boards from a distance or admiring a log floating on the surface of a body of water, we are rather surprised not to be able to turn on switches, turn off a lamp or explode a bulb, even by throwing several tons of metal on it. The lighting effects remain pleasant, but it's still a bit of a blemish.Artificial intelligence is more difficult to define, especially when we played Half-Life first of the name five or six years ago. By dint of nostalgia, many players have fond memories of these too sharp marines, capable of hiding behind a pole and swinging a grenade in the hideout of the player camper. In Half-Life 2, the militiamen readily adopt the same behavior: despite their equipment, rushing into the heap is not one of their priorities, they do not hesitate to hide when they are shot and are not stingy with a grenade or two, to get the player out of his hole or destroy one of the automatic turrets he would have mischievously placed on the way. Alas, if their behavior is often logical and their movements honest, they lack the speed of decision and reflexes to be dangerous in front of the FPS player of the year 2004. With a shotgun, we stuff ourselves without flinching a dozen of militiamen in an open room and this is obviously not very normal, even with a special survival suit on the back. To increase the lifespan (15-20 hours all the same in Normal mode) and take full advantage of its purchase, it will therefore be better to start immediately in Difficult mode: not basically faster to think about it, the enemies are a little more snarling and already represent another challenge. With the possibility of changing the lifespan on the fly during the game, no hesitation to have. Once the game is over, this new part of Gordon Freeman's adventures leaves on a frustrating or intriguing note, depending on the mood, but above all delivers the player to multi mode,
which comes in a very surprising way to Counter-Strike: Source. Identical to the original mod question of game principles and gameplay, this new version benefits from a graphic realization brought up to date, a water rich in many reflections and some pretty additional physical laws, on the fall of corpses in particular. On this point, no surprise but we can regret having only this novelty, which is not really one, to get your teeth into. A deathmatch mode, like that of the first episode, would probably not have been frowned upon by the players ... even if there are ultimately few new weapons to try. From the original, we find indeed in addition to the crowbar the basic pistol, the magnum, the machine gun / grenade launcher, the shotgun, the laser-aimed rocket launcher and the crossbow ... skillfully revamped, of course, and still as punchy, but all the same.
In the register of annoying ancillary things, it is difficult to ignore Steam's control over the sale of the title and its consequences. Whether purchased online or in a box, the game requires activation by Valve software and therefore an internet connection, a step that many players would have done without. Leaving to annoy a little more the buyers of the box, it only contains the DVD and a simple summary sheet of controls, without manual and others. A little cheap packaging for a game at this price.
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