Graphics and Sound
Graphically, HL2 is a bit of a mixed bag. Certainly, there’s plenty of work gone into making the game look fantastic. You’ve got your lens flares, particle effects, real time shadows… misting, fogging, real time water reflections… you name it, Valve have put it in. The water effects are marvellous, if a touch silvery in places. However, the real time reflections look amazing (though you’ll need a meaty PC to see them at a playable framerate.)The textures are superb too. Even close up, things look good, something D3 can’t claim while looking you in the eye. It could just be that HL2 is set in the near future, so the environments are familiar with blocks of flats, boarded u shops, rubbish strewn canals, burnt out cars and urban decay all around… anyone from Luton would be right at home.
An area where the likes of D3 and FC win graphically is in the general smoothness of the models for the environment. HL2 can render vast outdoor scenes at a decent framerate even on my middle of the road machine. It does this at the cost of polygon counts for the scenery. This means you get a very angular countryside. We all know that nature doesn’t like a straight line, but in HL2’s world, they tend to be the norm. This wouldn’t really be a problem but we’ve been spoiled with FC’s lovely rolling hills and D3’s curved architecture. HL2 looks a little, umm.. square. This angular effect that the terrain has is highlighted more by just how good everything else is. Pipework, sewer tunnels, barrels… they’re all nicely rounded, it’s just a shame that the rubble strewn cliff you’ve just walked down has right angles that would put a set square to shame.
On the other hand, the character detail is simply superb. There aren’t any cut scenes to explain the story here, you seamlessly slip into a section where key characters tell you what’s going on. Here the facial animation comes to the fore, with expression and lip synching, along with excellent voice acting, lending the characters a realism un-seen in a game before. We’re talking close to movie quality CGI here, it’s that good.
An excellent example of this can be found early on in the game when you come across a husband consoling his wife. Hit the use button to talk to him, he won’t say anything, but the expression on his face speaks a thousand words. You can argue that the effort spent here might have been better spent on the AI but I’d have to disagree. HL2 is a story driven game, to immerse you in the world and make you want to play it, you have to care about what is going on. Seeing dozens of emotions such as anger, resignation, defeat or joy on characters faces as they talk to you and each other draws you into the story brilliantly and you actually start to care about the other people in the game.
To be honest, there’s nothing graphically in HL2 that you won’t have seen elsewhere. The trick here is that HL2 has brought them all together in one game and done them better than most. D3 just shaves it for overall graphical lushness, and FC does more convincing, better detailed outdoor areas making HL2’s look a tad sparse by comparison. The blocky terrain with dead straight angular edges doesn’t help either, but then there’s plenty else here to enjoy instead.
With the sounds, as I said earlier, Valve have become masters at using them to create tension, build up a moment or slow the pace down. The weapons all sound spot on and we’ve got some great environmental effects thrown in for good measure. Doppler sounds are particularly nice as guided rockets go whizzing by and just by the change in pitch you know they’ve turned and are on the way back.
As I mentioned earlier, the voice acting is very good, with some recognisable voices back from HL to accompany the characters that have come along from the first game. Barney has nice downbeat air to him, Dr Breen sounds as smooth and silky as greased velvet, just like a bad guy should. Once again though, I had a few troubles with the sound, there bin quite a lot of skipping and stutters until I upped the number of channels in hardware, which smoothed things out. Also, just very occasionally, the environmental effects would carry on over into the next section. Standing in the open with everything echoing as much as it did in a cavern is disconcerting, but is normally easily fixed with a quicksave and re-load.