Gameplay Continued
Back to the game itself and a little further in sees you being hunted down but now armed with your trusty crowbar. Luckily for you, you do have friends, and old faces from Black Mesa make an appearance. Barney, the hapless guard is back, and helps you out on more than a few occasions, as does Alex Vance, daughter of Dr Eli Vance, one of your colleagues from Black Mesa. Eventually you get to meet up with them and learn a little about what has been going on, and maybe even about where you’ve been for all those years. I say eventually, because, in true gaming fashion, things don’t go smoothly and you end up on the run and on your own.
Legging it around City 17 with combine troops on your tail has to be one of the most exhilarating and tense gaming experiences I’ve had so far. Ammo is very limited, health even more so, and forget about armour for your HEV suit. Luckily, your pistol is pretty accurate and there’s a modular damage system in place too. You can bang away all day at a Combine soldier’s leg, but he won’t die. Put two shots cleanly into his head though and he’ll go down quicker than an Eastenders actress in a dark car park.
HL2 is set over 15 chapters, with each chapter made up of several parts, so there’s plenty here to keep you interested. Unlike the original, the majority of HL2 takes place out in the open which gives much more scope for the baddies you’re up against. Valve have certainly gone to town here, with many of our old enemies back for a second look and this time they’ve brought along a new bunch of friends. As you work your way through the 15 chapters, you’ll get mauled by poisonous headcrabs, shot at by city police, surrounded by SWAT style troopers, flailed by flaming zombies and swatted by weird wolf-like zombies. Then there’s the organic alien helicopters, the Combine rocket launching armoured cars, the gunships and flying razor robots… just to mention a few! It’s a sign of good game design that the monsters are gradually fed into the story in a smooth and logical fashion. Instead of just expecting tougher enemies as you progress further, Valve have scripted the game in such a way that it’s perfectly reasonable to see the latest, tougher bad guy when he first pops his head up. If you’re in an abandoned town, riddled with mutated headcrabs, then the next logical step is to meet the zombie thing that they become. Trust me, the first time THAT happens, you’ll be panicking like a swimmer who’s just seen what they thought was a log open its eyes and smile…
Having played Doom 3 all the way through not so long ago, I have to say that HL2 has made me jump far more often. It could well be that, unlike D3, HL2 isn’t nearly as predictable with its fright moments. In D3, you just knew that the tempting ammo pack was a trap that’d shut the doors, kill the lights and unleash the Imps. HL2 doesn’t work like that. The moments that it scares you are the moments when you’re not expecting anything to happen. But HL2 goes further than that as well. There are sections of the game where Valve build the tension, sometimes through creative use of sound, sometimes through use of the environment you’re entering and sometimes it uses both. Anyway, whatever way they do it, though HL2 doesn’t have the shock and gore factor of D3, I certainly found it to be the more intense gameplay experience of the two.
But legging it around isn’t the only to get about in HL2, oh no. As per the standard for FPS games now, HL2 has a few drivable vehicles. Far Cry can easily lay claim to the most drivable vehicles in any FPS, and with that many to go up against, HL2 doesn’t even bother. It’s a good thing too, as a range of vehicles wouldn’t have fitted in with the story of an oppressed society kept in little more than a concentration camp. The airboat is great fun, and when you get it tooled up with a weapon, it’s a wonderful bit of kit. Fittingly, Valve deemed to give it a chapter pretty much all to itself… and it’s one of my favourite parts of the game. The dune buggy is a laugh too, but soon pales in the fun stakes after the airboat. It does have loads of ammo onboard though, which is handy in a frantic fire fight.