Half-Life 2

The game is extrafcaska [corrected text - ed.]. As long as I write computer game reviews, I have been dreaming about starting and ending these words with these words. For years I waited for a game to appear that would allow me to justify this very flattering profanity [before the amendment - ed. ed.]. Appeared. And it's neither the third part of Doom , nor the second part of The Sims , nor Rome: Total War . It is Half-Life 2 - the most interactive, most penetrating experience that the player can experience after several dozen years of developing electronic entertainment. Half-Life 2 opens the gates of the future of games - worlds living their own lives, which the player enters as if by accident, but it is not by chance that you leave them may not feel like. At least: almost.

Half-Life reality is a world where science gets out of control. A world in which the parallelism of dimensions is violated and they begin to intersect and penetrate each other in a dramatic way. In the second part of the game, the player enters him again in the person of Dr. Gordon Freeman, again he is able to look beyond the barrier of time and place, and in the same way he is forced to put the laboratory apron on the shelf and pick up the weapon. And fight for life with everything that moves or pretends not to move. Absolutely with everything, because the monsters that the authors of Half-Life 2 took from the unknown-which dimensions probably outgrow everything that we could face the past years in various games.

However, we are not face to face with anything terrifying or even bizarre just at the entrance. Half-Life 2, just like its predecessor, slowly, precisely doses the player with adrenaline and delight. Nothing happens here by force and even if the player does not have much freedom in navigating the sad and fascinating world of the future, it seems that the development of the situation really depends on his actions. Here we leave the building on the city square, we can go straight ahead, to the right or to the left. Everywhere a tempting space opens up before us, we see something interesting in every direction, which we would like to take a closer look at. The more that here every detail - regardless of whether it measures a few centimeters or a few kilometers - is refined with admirable reverence. After a more thorough analysis of the environment, it turns out that we can only go right, enter only the only door behind which the further course of action will get us and another plot of the card will be revealed. But we don't feel that we have been forced to do anything by the restrictions of the game! If something or someone forced us to do something, it was either a mean policeman, or an explosion before which logic ordered us to run in the opposite direction, or elsewhere the attractive girl nodded - follow me.

Half-Life's world , how sad or totalitarian it would be, lives as if alone. The streets are patrolled by police, anti-gravity motors of annoying robots are running around. People dressed in identical uniforms try not to gather in larger groups, so as not to fall under power, but here and there a couple talks to each other, exchanges observations. And all this gives the impression of randomness. If the player did not approach these men, would they not talk to each other? Or maybe they would talk about something else? Of course, the player came because something caught his attention. He came up because in the script of the game, in a given location, this particular element was to interest him and thus direct his steps in the page provided for by the script. For this, the authors of Half-Life deserve applause that constantly leading the player by the hand (with the help of decoys that attract his attention), they are able to create the impression of independent decision making.

The above makes the game become an interactive movie in its full sense. A lot is happening around and interesting. The eternal ill of game designers - to leave the player maximum freedom to let him experience the anticipated twists - here he finds relief. You just need to get carried away by the stories and react to events - logically or instinctively - depending on the amount of time we have. When the wall collapses on us, we run away where the bricks do not fly; when it fits out the window, we pull the television out of contact, break the glass with it and jump after it; when the armored car shoots at us from the grenade launcher, we will not hide behind a cardboard box, but behind the nearest wall. Of course, that's what we were supposed to do - it's behind this wall, not behind the box, we meet a man who will push the story further - the roll of tape in the projector will make another turn. But didn't we make each of these decisions alone? Did we not have free will?

Even the most addictive plot, the most precisely built atmosphere would not be able to turn Half-Life 2 into anything better than a good action game if it wasn't for physics. The model of the world that we've been waiting for ... more than a year - since the trailer appeared. AND? And although there is still a lot to be done in the virtual world, it was worth every minute of waiting. It is he who makes the solution to most of the problems we encounter boil down to using objects.

But what use! Do we want to break the window? You're welcome: we take a chair, rotate it so that it fits into the door frame and be happy! Pieces of the window fly to the street, and we can throw the chair behind them. Reinforced glass? Well, that's pain. But what do we have a gun for? One shot is enough for it to break into a mesh, and then it is enough to nudge and sprinkle to the floor. For some only known reason ;-) we want to pick up a box with bottles? Of course, but be careful. One careless move, the box hits the wall, the bottles break against each other, we go to the party with flowers. And what to do so that a board placed on a stone would like to be used as a ramp, after which we can climb? Well, you have to collect the blocks and make them a counterweight to our weight. However, remember that strength equals the product of the weight and length of the arm - physics lessons bow. Physics itself is bowing.

However, there is no rose without thorns. Such a precise physical model makes the game not easy. Here, it is no longer enough to figure out what to use in a given situation. You still have to use it properly, and sometimes not destroy it by inattention. Although most of the items, the use of which will be necessary to move forward, exhibit unnatural indestructibility, it may happen more than once that we break something that could be a great help for us.

The story told in the game is not the lightest. But it is not her that makes Half-Life 2 not a happy Christmas gift. Without going into the discussion about the dangers of computer games for the first time: killing enemies by hand and observing other dying people is simply a pleasure. This is because, first of all, the bodies of those killed behave naturally beyond admiration, and the multitude of possible ways of parting with virtual life exceeds expectations. In Half-Life, the popular ragdoll is not irritating with artificiality, which (according to the name) makes a person turn into a rag doll at the time of death, whose one hand weighs approximately the same as the rest of the torso with legs. In Half-Life everything has its own weight and endurance. The box behaves differently, the bottle differently, the brick differently; different hand, different head. It's enough to fire a series of shots at the opponent's torso and end it with a headshot to appreciate the difference. The dead man will not fly against the wall in the direction of the shot that killed him, his legs and arms will not clump around his head, as if the joints, bones and muscles have sublime. Quite the opposite - it can happen that he falls convulsively on his knees, as if the damaged brain had actually fastened all his muscles with his last order.

And dying from lead poisoning does not exhaust the range of prepared deaths. You can die from an explosion, you can shatter against a wall (yes, yes, moving on the roof of a speeding train, keep your head low before it falls), you can finally fall victim to one of the monsters from another world ...

Artificial intelligence of opponents who used to behave relatively naturally works well. With a clean line of fire they open fire, not paying much attention to their own safety. If a player hides, they will run so that they can continue to threaten him, but no more than necessary. If the player manages to bite off (read: shoots and hits), they will start to be afraid, hide behind obstacles and look behind them only at the moment of shooting. However, this behavior only applies to people. Brainless monsters are already showing off the stupidity and aggressiveness we expect from them. Uncomplicated robots will try to avoid danger, but until you feel their heating circuits in which the decision to execute the main program (approaching) with necessity (escaping) struggles.

This murderous splendor creeps in to a small noise in the form of relatively limited mobility. Dr. Freeman is unfortunately not as free as we would like. It can climb ladders, jump on low obstacles, it can crawl. He can also move by jeeps and motorbikes. However, he cannot look around the corner, grab the edge of the wall and pull himself up. This means that the fight with opponents is simplified by gradually sliding out from behind the wall until the player is able to shoot at the protruding pixel of the enemy head, while still staying in the margin of being unnoticed. Detriment.

I would like to avoid reviewing this one of the greatest, and maybe the most magnificent computer game, dry arguments about shaders of various types and caliber, about surround, code optimization etc. It's all in the game and it's hot. All this means that sitting in front of the monitor in a dark room, turning on some speakers there plus one, we are sucked into the virtual world, and there we stand and look around with a gaping mouth. We turn around for sounds coming from all sides and made by everything. We hear distant voices of conversations or dripping water. Passing by the table, we accidentally drop a box from it. Jumping from above onto the wooden crate, we will smash it. In fact, thousands of programmers and decades of programming experience are behind all this. It's great and in a few years it will be even better.

However, it is fair to mention that all these fireworks, all the wealth of events taking place on the screen does not fall on its knees in the face of weaker equipment. The game works and looks brilliant on a completely average computer at the moment, which you could get for a decent price two years ago. The minimum game requirements - SUCH game - are almost fun today: 1.2 GHz, 256 MB RAM, graphics card compatible with DirectX 7. Only 4.5 GB demand on the hard drive reminds us that we are not dealing with Pac-Man . Reasonable requirements - 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM, GF 4 Ti - are simply reasonable. What's more, when there is a dumbfounding view ahead of us, a futuristic helicopter flies over our head, and the banks of the nearby river are reflected, and it seems that our computer suffers at least, just press alt-tab to find out in a split second, that all this was an illusion. A piece of good programming work.

Of course he would find. Call it: chronicler's duty. But also in surprise. Because if the wall can be written with bullets or engraved with a crowbar "I love Jolka", the wooden palette can be shattered into boards, and one of them can be raised and thrown into a corner, if the sound filter changes depending on the size and nature of the environment, etc., then why into the water usually does not raise the splash fountain, and the TV thrown out of the window does not implode? Why can't you see the hands of the main character embracing items carried by her? Why can't you climb the grille and grab the next bars to cross over the abyss? Maybe simply because the appetite grows as we eat, and we forget how it once was when the glass resting on the table was not able to neither chip nor knock off the rocket explosion ... Or maybe even in such a refined game still something could be improved? So that we can wait for the next part of this most wonderful of the darkest adventures. And so far: sin, shame and irreparable loss do not play this.

A different issue, not related to the game itself, is the process of its installation and the level of anti-piracy protection used. It is worth mentioning for the sake of "what is being made". The game is intended for single-player play, but it is impossible to start it without an Internet connection. On the day of the premiere, almost an hour and a half passed from the moment the first of five discs was inserted into the CD-ROM to the moment when I saw the start menu! The need to upload 4.5 GB of data to the disk, decode some of them before starting the game, after establishing connection with the company server, and all this with maximum overloaded connections - required a lot of patience. Well, well. It was worth it.

Borys "Shuck" Zajączkowski

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