Product Reviews

If you've never heard of Half-Life you'd be forgiven for thinking it was some boring old science program designed to teach you about nuclear power. Well, you'd be missing out on the greatest PC adventure to date.

The original Half-Life was hailed as one of the greatest PC games of all time. It cleverly blended action, adventure and brain-teasing puzzles into an immersive and addictive whole. What raised this gamehead and shoulders above the competition was that it had a storyline worth following. Rather than clumsily punctuating the action with movie clips or animated introductions, Half-Life did the unthinkable and let the story unfold as you played the game.

Half-Life 2 sees you back in the shoes of Gordon Freeman, the speccy scientist turned hero. You wake from a startling vision of a grim future, the mysterious briefcase-carrying G-Man from the first Half-Life beckoning you towards consciousness. As you awaken, a train carries you into a station.

But from the moment you emerge groggily onto the platform, it's clear something has happened to earth while you've been away. Robotic drones glide through the air, stopping only to blind you with a camera flash, and your few fellow commuters are all dressed in a prison-blue garb.

From the very outset, Half-Life 2 looks and sounds fantastic. Not only are the voices of its characters perfectly lip-synched, but their facial expressions are incredibly detailed too. Move around while talking

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to someone and their eyes follow you - their facial expression describing each individual's state of mind with startling realism. This attention to detail follows through to every aspect of the games design. Drop an empty drinks can and it clatters to the floor and rolls off into a corner.

None of the fancy graphics, physical or aural trickery would be worth anything if the game wasn't fun to play, though. Thankfully, Half-Life 2 is one of the most exhilarating games you are ever likely to play on your PC. The storyline effortlessly pulls you into a grim vision of the future, and manages to change mood and pace with such dexterity that you'll find yourself immersed for hours at a time. And that, ironically enough, is Half Life 2's principal weakness. Such is the compulsion to play, it's all over much too quickly.

The other minor niggle, apart from its longevity, is that Half-Life 2 requires online registration to its Steam system before you are able to play it in the first place. If you have broadband then it won't take very long, but if you're on a 56K modem, be prepared for a wait. It took us over TWO and a half hours to register our copy as over 30MB of data needed to be downloaded. However, once it's registered, you can play Half-Life 2 as much as you want without logging on to the Net. On the upside, if you do have broadband, the Steam system allows you to download other games by its creators via the Internet. With new games to download and the benefits of being kept up to date with all the latest bug-fixing and performance enhancing updates, Steam seems worthwhile.

Half-Life 2 is a glorious experience while it lasts. It makes other games' attempts at storytelling look laughable, and makes even superb games like Far Cry and Doom 3 seem fairly ordinary in comparison. And with the new souped-up version of the popular online shooter, Counter Strike: Source included in the package, those of you with broadband will be over the moon. Which leaves us with one last important question - when's the next Half-Life out then?