I had never dreamed it might be so glorious. The combine troop walks by. A female voice crackles over a radio with sector-status updates. Birds flap across the sky. If you wait long enough - and of course I didn't - a Scanner hovers over to your viewpoint and photographs you, sending the whole menu screen blinding white for a while. You could knife the atmosphere of a hot day, in a city too oppressed to make a sound.
The first masterstroke is ingenious in its subtlety. You almost immediately discover you can pick up the suitcases, drinks cans, empty takeaway cartons and debris on the station platform, and you will throw them at things. That's not the masterstroke - most of us knew this would be possible. We also knew you start in an oppressed city with some vicious guards. The clever part is that your experimentation in this liberatingly interactive environment looks an awful lot like a character's rebellion against the city's overbearing authority. You're unwittingly role-playing, and it means your first experiences make perfect sense and leave you with the glowing feeling that you're somehow playing a big-budget, gripping and intelligently written sci-fi film.
I, for example, had put these facts together before time, and applied their consequence to a scene a friend described in his review for Edge magazine: a soldier intentionally knocks a drinks can on the floor and tells you to pick it up. It's a revelatory experience in a computer game - you've been shot at a lot, but this guy is intentionally fucking with you. I, however, had a plan. I would throw that can right at him!
Of course I would. Even the control tips knew I would - they come up and advise you of the button to throw an object (not 'drop' one - the bin is right there). And of course you would - even if the residents seem to have have long since lost their rebellious spirit, you're new in town and you'll be God damned if you're picking up litter for a Nazi jerk. So you throw it at his head, he beats your face in with a stun baton, and you are officially welcomed to City 17.
I kept wondering how I was going to get in contact with the resistance and the friendly characters I knew I would meet. Surely not just that "Psst, in here!" moment from the Tenements Bink? I also wondered how I was going to get out of this. The Combine guy was leading me to a torture and interrogation room, and I do not - cannot - ever speak. Maybe my friends would bust down the wall? No. That would be a battering ram where a crowbar will suffice - the answer is subtle yet forceful. The soldier removes his gas mask and grins at me. "Now, how about that beer I owe you?"
That wasn't when it moved from an impressive intro to what could only be an astonishing game in my mind. That came three seconds later, when Barney joked that "I'm way behind on my beating quota." He says it with a grin, and I fall in love with him. And it's not just the astonishing, revolutionary, uncanny facial animation - the voice acting is each one of those adjectives too. There is the tiniest of pauses before that word 'way', as Barney thinks how best to humourously phrase his need to prove himself as an evil oppressor to his superiors. Later, Alyx says to him "Barney, you're not an animal person," and I don't even know whether to put a question mark at the end of that quote, because the line is delivered as neither a question nor a statement, but in that peculiar in-between tone I've only ever heard in real life before: a suggestion that wants confirmation, but doesn't ask for it.
Stop here if you haven't got to Ravenholm.
That's the superficial. That stuff changes the face of the game completely, and that's hugely important, but those scenes are, of course, not that interactive. They interpolate a brilliant film with the game experience, and that enhances said experience beyond measure. But the game experience is extraordinary for a whole load of other reasons, two of which were more important to me than the others.
One is what you might call the combat mechanics - more specifically, how the weapons work and how much damage they do. Half-Life 2 avoids the trap of other sci-fi shooters, in which the initial assault rifles and shotguns give way to 'energy' weapons involving lasers or balls of plasma. When the weapons get more exotic, they're just more exotic ways of hitting people hard with physical objects, and it keeps the fights visceral. Better still, even when you've got the gravity gun the shotgun remains the most effective way to deal with troops - the weapons are an ever-expanding toolset rather than a linear succession that increases in power. And they are glorious tools. My favourites:
- The Crowbar: I never liked the Half-Life crowbar. That clang it made when it hit something unbreakable was deafening and the damage it did when it hit something else was feeble. In one of the many cases in which Valve appear to have listened to my concerns despite my never voicing them and everyone else disagreeing with them, the new crowbar is devastating, and the sound of it hitting stuff is beautifully understated. The true joy of it, and the purpose for which it remains useful to the very end, is batting headcrabs out of the air. They never take more than one hit and go flying in the direction of the blow and tumble across the floor with ragdoll physics, and the satisfaction is on a par with wrapping Roy Orbison in cling film.
- The Pistol: Similarly, the pistol has gone from over-loud and under-powered to a subtle artform of a weapon. Its report is inoffensive yet forceful, and it's semi-automatic in the best sense of the phrase - rapid click causes a machine-gun like fire rate devastating at close range, while more thoughtful clicking is accurate at long range. Headshots are largely deadly.
- The Magnum: Other people like this rather more than I, but I see their point - it's not just the power of the thing, it's the size, noise, accuracy and maverick reloading barrel-spin. If you could fan it as its alt-fire, I'd be as passionate as they are and they would probably die.
- The Shotgun: is the best shotgun ever. That was hotly contested for a while there, but now this is here and the results are in. It's even better than it looked in the crane Bink. The noise is a masterstroke - a blending of Hitman's crack and a regular boom, and the spread is tight for the primary fire but wide for the devastating secondary. Coupled with round-at-a-time interruptable loading, perfect damage (specifically a lot, but not enough that the primary fire guarantees you a kill at mid-range, or if you miss a bit or aim at the legs), and considerable knockback on kills, it's a testament to Valve's apparently unique ability to actually learn from other games and perfect what they discover by combining it with their own premise, then test the living hell out of it until it's still gratifying after thirty hours' use. You'd call it an art, if it wasn't so obviously a science.
- The Gravity Gun: a concept that never made a lot of sense until you watch the Ravenholm Bink and see him cut a zombie in freaking half with a circular goddamn saw blade. Then you're like, "Oh, right. Yeah, that works." When you do it yourself, when you realise you can just pick it up and do it again afterwards, line zombies up five at a time, stove their headcrabs in with a breezeblock or smash them into the opposite wall with a radiator torn from this one... then you get it. And that feeling of disbelieving elation your first perfect Gravity Gun kill elicts - that doesn't go away. You'll find yourself thinking about it at work.
- The Crossbow: Whoa, what the hell? What did they do to this? It used to be just a crossbow - powerful, sure, but something Slazenger might make. Now it, what, fires red hot screws through people's heads? Jesus, Valve! I have no idea what they were thinking, but I mean that in the way that I have no idea what Einstein was thinking. It takes a mind very different to ours to come up with something like this, and God bless such minds. Seriously, though, you can nail people to walls. If you want more than that, find a stick big and sharp enough to penetrate and subsequently hold the moon.
Probably the high point of the combat was the optional house stop-offs along Highway 17. Either you broke in and shotgunned the contained Combines, or you crept in and were suddenly raided by Combines pouring in through the doors. You had to shotgun them was the trick. The ability to hole yourself up with furniture barricades, shoot people through windows and camp in corners gave rise to fights that reminded me - and this is the nicest thing I could ever say about a game's combat - of the Victory Motel shoot-out in LA Confidential. Spectacularly violent, shatteringly visceral, unbearably tense.
The other is the settings. I've talked about City 17, with its eerie daytime quiet explained by the omnipresent gas-masked guards, guarding the few doors that aren't locked to you. When you emerge blinkingly into the dazzling plaza of the menu screen, you try to follow some other civilians and are immediately blocked by security checks. You have no ID. You spend your time in City 17 off the beaten path - littered alleyways, empty warehouses, trembling train tracks, brackish waterways and dusty tunnels. I've never lain in a gutter in Stavropol, but it's probably a little like this.
You skim murky rivers and lakes in an airboat at sunset. You shotgun zombies in a graveyard at midnight. You drive what feels like the entire coastline of a small country, stopping off at dilapidated houses whose residents have been slaughtered by the soldiers who now camp there. Partially because of the vast expanses of undulating coastal hills that surround them, and partially because of poignant touches like a tyre swing hanging from a dead tree, or two unmarked graves on a clifftop, these are the loneliest scenes in gaming. Far Cry made me want to sip cocktails and dangle my feet in the swash. Highway 17 makes me want to sit on one of its clifftops staring out to sea and swigging cheap whiskey from a brown paper bag. Then shoot myself.
Stop here if you haven't completed it.
But even those bleak vistas are dotted with futuristic monoliths that add a sci-fi flavour to the atmosphere. The Thumpers are automated pile-drivers whose huge vibrations keep the sensitive Antlions away. Later, your return to City 17 gets you closer to the looming Citadel, whose dominance of the horizon gets all the more otherworldly as you approach. Inside, the views of its synthetic yet viral assimilation of the rock underground are breathtaking, and you have to stare at them for some time before you can convince yourself they're not pre-rendered concept art. Better still, its stark gunmetal surfaces are arranged in even more interesting enclosures as you ascend it, and soon they permit vast tangles of Redwood-scale cables and tubes. A guided tour and knowing nod to Half-Life's much less bearable one shows off masses of its intestinal twists and the unspeakable entities - both feeble and vast - that stalk its chasms, and at last my jaw actually hung open - an unattractive embodiment of an expression I'd previously assumed was figurative. That last section is sci-fi every bit as compelling as Star Wars, and actually being there is joy beyond words.
A little miscellaneous thing that I can't neglect to mention is THE HORROR. The source of this was also present in Half-Life - the headcrabs jump on people's heads, 'integrate' themselves with your face, 'interface' with your brain and control your every move while you're still conscious and able to feel pain. Later, the tendrils it's invading your body with reach your fingers and turn them into long, spindly red claws. In Half-Life, fine. Rather Alien-esque, but a decent sci-fi baddie because it combines aliens and zombies, our two favourite things to kill.
In Half-Life 2, aaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaah! Oh God! You can hear the human scream and sob with pain as you shoot or burn them, muffled by the hideous alien violating his face. Alien can't hold a candle to this. It's the most horrific thing ever.
Those zombies are slow, though, so they're horrible but not, at a distance, scary. Don't worry! There's a new strain of headcrab, spindly and super-fast. Guess what kind of zombie they make? Yeah, that's right, they rip the skin and fat off their victim's body as if to streamline them. These things are virtually skeletons bound with muscle and sinew, and they wail as they gallop towards you at seventy miles an hour to shred you. At one point, you're on a rooftop waiting for a cable-car to arrive, and you hear a rhythmic clanging noise. If you look around, you'll notice that the drainpipe is jogging from side to side in time with this noise. If you keep looking around, you'll notice the other one is doing it too, and the clanging is getting faster. They're coming, and you want to die just to stop feeling like this.
It gets worse. The absolute extreme of the horror and fear is the abominable, the ineffibly awful, the genuinely nightmarish Black Headcrab Zombie, the best and most appalling monster ever conceived. Black Headcrabs do not administer 10-health scratches when they pounce, they poison you to within an inch of your life. They do not strip the flesh from their victims like the Fast Headcrabs - no, the humanoid beneath this atrocity is swollen, fat with the poison. Nor do they limit themselves to one per host. The wretch is covered with them. The primary, beneath it all, has clawed so deeply into his flesh and gripped so tightly that it's ripped the skin from his back and pulled it up to his shoulders, leaving his spine and the back of his ribs exposed. But you don't see that until the other four horrors have flung themselves at you from his shambling form. And you don't see his awful face, frozen in a bloodied scream, until after you've dealt the enormous damage required to take down the whole horrific cluster and host, heard his last wretched sobs of agony as his torment finally ends, and beaten the last evil thing from his head. What makes the sight of one of these things so unspeakably wrenching, though, is the Black Headcrabs themselves. When you meet just one, you want to give up or just run away - they're too small to hit easily, too fast to reliably dodge, and one horrible bite and you're virtually dead. To see someone who has five of them clinging to him...
This is something Half-Life 2 does a lot - tops whole games in a single chapter. Doom 3's so-called monsters are ridiculous glossy models after this. What's scary about something that isn't human? That's basically just a fierce animal. You wouldn't want to meet one in real life, but you're going to have to do a whole lot better than that now.
It tries virtually everything that's fun in action games, does it better than anyone else, then switches to something new for the next chapter. At the same time it looks better than anything else, it's better-written than anything else, the characters are more emotionally engaging than even those in films because of their extraordinary animation and acting, and the whole thing tells a sci-fi story with more potency, artistry and enigma than any other game plot I could name. This is just the best.
Score: 1
