Half Life 2: First Impressions

I'm really grateful to id for releasing Doom3 back in September. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of near pant soiling terror, the shocks when turning on my flashlight in a darkened area to see a zombie poised to rip out my throat, the awesome special effects like the heat haze around the imps' fireballs and the creepy 'System Shock 2'-esque PDA plot device.

An excellent game that I still highly recommend.

But, if Valve had released Half-Life 2 before id had got its magnum opus out of the door, I doubt I would ever have played it. Once again, the bar has been raised when it comes to first player action; in fact, not so much raised as moved wholesale by several miles.

I got home from work last night, started Steam which promptly started to unlock the preloaded copy on my hard drive. Off to the kitchen to make hot steaming cup of caffeine, and when I came back the game was ready to play - no hassles, no dramas. I know some people have had problems, but for me the experience was seamless.

And then on to the game; first things first - the videos that we have all been drooling over for what seems like forever (insert obligatory DNF joke here) do not do the game justice. The game feels smooth, the action is fluid and the facial animation is something else. OK, I don't have the most sluggish rig in the world, but it's certainly not the best (FWIW; Asus P4P800-SE Deluxe; P4 HT 3.0GHz; 1Gb 2700 RAM; MSI FX 5700 Ultra; 160Gb DiamondPlus 9 SATA); by contrast, Doom 3 struggled to get a decent framerate at 1024x768 on this machine whereas Half-Life 2 simply seems to take things in its stride.

So far, I've only played for a couple of hours (I'm still on the wonderfully named 'Route Kanal' level), but already I've come across a couple of wonderful touches; in particular, Barney's jibe that a degree from MIT must have come in really useful for throwing a switch is priceless.

My other favourite touch at the moment has to be feeding exploding barrels to the barnacles, and then exploding them.

I cannot recommend this game highly enough. The temptation to throw a sickie was very strong - but as I work in an IT environment, I suspect I would have been rumbled! Go buy, go play. End of story.