Half-Life 2: A Gimmicky Masterpiece

half-life 2 is a game of gimmicks but that's not necessarily a bad thing all the gimmicks are fun and it doesn't let any single gimmick get old before it happily throws it out to move on to the next one for a power trip game like half-life 2 I think it works perfectly in fact half-life 2 is and always will be one of my favorite games I've even got this poster in my room first off let me clarify the half-life 2 is a power trip where the first game had ugly ethically questionable scientists fighting either to survive or for an unclear cause half-life 2 has attractive or at least enthusiastic rebels fighting against an Orwellian evil whose only reasonable point is that it's either be enslaved or be destroyed although I do think that it's a nice touch that Gordon unintentionally gets many of the rebels killed and directly on top of that the supply crates always give you exactly what you need and the enemies are pretty easy to kill headcrabs only take one hit from your crowbar to kill now combine soldiers move much slower than the hecu soldiers metro cops love hanging out around fuel drums and zombies are easily dispatched with physics objects on top of that nearly everyone you meet in the game either sees you as a god worth dying for or as a gigantic threat with unimaginable power that's all right not every half-life game needs to be survival horror but it's a distinction worth noting so onto the gimmicks when you first start the game the world-building takes the front seat and it's done incredibly but after the story and exposition stuff is dealt with and you have your first weapons the gimmick quickly becomes shooting explosive barrels to kill Metro cops easily this is present in the entire game but it's a major part of the first few combat challenges it's a good way of teaching the player to think with physics as the barrels roll around all over the place but above all else it's fun in the middle of this we have a short section where we have to man a turret and shoot incoming metrocops and city scanners next up we start getting striped from the Metro cops hunter chopper and after we've in and out of the sewers to get past them and eventually to the airboat from here the gimmick is a disempowering chase scene where the choppers dropping bombs on the path ahead and machine gunning us when it's behind after doing that for a while we find an enemy camp we have to take over to reopen a dam that's blocking the path and once at the dam controls we can mount a turret to take out the first hunter chopper it retreats and instantly a new one comes in after us this is the first hint that will become more powerful against the choppers but the empowerment is diminished by the fact that the combine instantly send in another one once you get back in the boat before long we meet up with some rebels who attach one of those turrets to the airboat and we can finally do a boss battle with the hunter chopper to pay off all the disempowerment during the chases and eventually feel like a badass again from here we finally meet up with Alex and Eli at Black Mesa East but since Gordon has a nasty habit of leaving the combine to his friends hideouts and getting Eli and Judith captured we only have time to just barely get acquainted with the gravity gun before we have to go to Raven home there's an achievement for getting through all of Ravenholm using only the gravity gun and it's very doable the destroyed city serves as a great place to get good with the gravity gun as it has tons of physics objects to use and the zombies are slow and don't have any ranged attacks so while the gravity gun is an amazing gimmick for the rest of the game this fittingly is the area where it's most at home the gimmick from here is to use physics to kill things from father grigory's physics based traps to the abundance of saw blades and fuel drums you can easily make it through here without firing a single bullet once we make it through Ravenholm we have a little bit of platforming fun we're failing means falling into a mess of headcrabs and we're back on the surface the game introduces taking out snipers with grenades and we meet up with more rebels as we save them from a combine attack from there the rebels give us the Scout car with an attached pouch a man from half-life 1 and we're told to meet up with Alex on the far end of the coast and Nova Prospekt we realize being held during the coast levels were introduced to the magnetic frame the thumpers devices the pounder to keep the burrowing ant lines away and to the rocket launcher we have a great gimmick where we're in control of a crane like earlier and have to use it to lower our bridge lift up our car and slamming containers into the combine once we're done with the Scout car we can help fight off some rebels in a combine attack which is only reasonable as we led them there they kill the rebels once we leave and take the Scout car probably to study the tau cannon and after that we find lászló the greatest mind of his generation and have to navigate a beach while avoiding stepping on the sand as it causes the ant lines to come up on the other side we have a mini boss fight against the antlion mother and once it's killed the vortigaunt comes out and gets the pheromone gland from the mother's body this allows us to control the ant lions probably my favorite gimmick in the game by baiting turrets away from us using a horde of mindless ant lions we can advance past their defenses and eventually make it into Nova Prospekt over the course of maybe 45 minutes we lead our army of ant lions into the prison and completely seizure this section is seriously so much fun and so satisfying as we watch ant lions rush into every section of the prison through security cameras eventually we get to the main facility of the prison where Eli and Judith are being held and one of the many places for the combine are converting humans and the various slave races we fight with Alex for a bit as she looks for Eli and eventually we split up she guides us through the prison via radio and we faced a series of holdout challenges where we get to use the combine sentries that were causing our airlines so much trouble this game does an excellent job of giving you an annoyance and then letting you conquer and even control it as you progress after a few of these we meet up with Alex again for one last holdout as the combine teleporter warms up when we arrived in Kleiner's lab again we realized the combine have a slow teleporter and we were missing for over a week this is another one of those clever time transitions that Gordon wouldn't have perceived has mentioned in my last essay Gordon gets to do a little fighting with dog through the same areas we walk through in the beginning now ravaged by the rebellion and later gets to command squads of up to four rebels just like the antlion boredom sure does get a lot of them killed but after lots of fighting sniper challenges Strider challenges and even a Mission Impossible style laser room like half-life ones missile storage we get to the Citadel because Gordon has a one-track mind he gets into one of the pods used to transport humans on their way to becoming a slave and gets dropped off in a combine weapon confiscation field all of his weapons are destroyed except for the gravity gun which becomes overcharged along with our HEV suit that's seen us through so much now we can use it to pick up almost any object in the game including combine soldiers themselves sooo chargers now work incredibly fast feeling us and bringing our suit up to 200 percent charge this is the ultimate power trip section and it sure is fun to throw soldiers at one another after getting in the novice slave pod we confront Breen and go on to the final boss fight while I know I haven't been briefed about it I hope I've shown how half-life 2 is a game of gimmicks thanks to the groundbreaking and still amazingly fun source engine and the game's combination of a story about overcoming adversity and gameplay loops about conquering and eventually controlling adversity half-life 2 is a very tight package one of the few games of its scale to consider how gameplay can merge with and reinforce the tone and themes of the game on a larger scale gordon has dropped down by the combine only to eventually master them and on a small scale Gordon is brought down by the hunter chopper the antlions the distance he has to travel the centuries the physics engine and much more only to conquer them and eventually turn that advantage against them as the rebels who put the hunter choppers machine gun on your airboat would say I always like to bring a little iron into a firefight [Music] [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 220,095

Keywords: half life 2 gimmicks valve discussion analysis

Id: pABCaPx7Gwg

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 17 2018