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The Beginning
Once I met up with Alyx, I started to get a feel for the story. I was supposed to lead an
uprising against some crazy leader who was controlling City 17. At least that's what I thought
when Alyx was leading me to a secret lab that's part of the underground resistance. The action starts
when Barney gives me my old crowbar back...
Mad Action
This is what I've been waiting for, a chance to start shooting stuff! What I immediately noticed
was the jumping. I could sort of bunny hope and the longer I kept jumping, the fast I would go.
I figured this was going to help later on in the game. On a side note, it didn't work in Counter-Strike
Source which is a good thing (flashback to old CS days). As I worked my way through the game, I
noticed something interesting. The aliens that shot electrical charges at you in the original
Half-life are now working for the underground. I also met the ever popular head crabs... they're
apparently working for the other side. Weird, it seems the monsters have split up or something along
those lines. At this point, I've only been running around on solid ground, but I eventually met
up with water. The first time I saw how well the engine rendered water, I was shocked! It looked
disturbingly realistic. I mean, it reflected every object around it with perfect distortion.
Now that's some high quality humor!
Amazing water effects and the boat (click for bigger picture).
The water looked great, but I still had to deal with it. Eventually, I got a chance to use the
hover boat (it was an airboat with a weapon mounted on it). I was supposed to use this boat to
get to Black Mesa East (were the other lab was). They said it was only be a few bends down the
river, but it took like five hours to get there! These five hours weren't easy, I had
to go through numerous ambushes and a quite a few apache-like helicopters. It was all worth it
though; I finally got a chance to play with the gravity gun!
Gravity is Your Friend
Excuse me sir, I appear to have misplaced my saw blade in your torso.
This is probably one of the most interesting weapons I've ever seen. It's called the "Gravity Gun"
and as you may have guessed, it deals with gravity. There are two modes with this gun, you can
pickup objects with secondary fire and primary fire emits a charge that hurls the object.
You can also use primary fire by itself to move heavier objects, like cars. I had a lot of
fun with this thing. Suspiciously, right after I got the gun I went through an infested town...
where the buildings just happen to have saw blades lying around for no reason...
Closing
My single player experience was a positive one. The beginning of the game was slow as with all games,
but once the action started, it didn't stop. Especially later in the game, there were quite a few
situations were I had to defend a certain area from Combine soldiers. The game's AI really shines
here because they actually killed me a few times and it was on easy! Unfortunately, I didn't have
the hardware to take advantage of HL2's sound features which I've heard is amazing. The only thing
that really bothered is the well-documented stuttering problem. I experienced this problem
a lot during game play, especially when big explosions occurred. Hopefully this problem will be fixed
soon because it's very annoying. Besides that, I'll definitely be playing this game again on hard
because I rushed through it the first time.
