Behind the Gun: Half-Life 2

I’ve had it in my head for a while now to write a series of “reviews” of first-person shooters.  I somehow doubt I’ll be doing so exclusively for the next little while, but we’ll see.  In any event, here is the first.

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I have a fascination with these bleak, dystopian settings, these harsh wastelands barren of hope and promising decay, and death for the unwary.  I think I’ve felt this way ever since I was a child, reading through the mini-comics that came with the Starriors figures I got for Christmas for a couple consecutive years.  The idea that the Earth might be damaged to such an extent as to be inhospitable to human life—that it might conceivably be destroyed, even—is so repellent to instinct that it becomes in some way perversely compelling.

Half-Life 2 pretty much opens up with that kind of scenario and gets progressively more grim from there.  I think it’s safe to say I was going to be a fan right out of the gate.

You start off on a train, a nod to the tram car where your player character, Gordon Freeman, ended the original Half-Life after doing the smart thing and accepting the G-man’s offer of “employment”.  He took you into some kind of stasis, and now here you are, some twenty-odd years later (give or take).  You haven’t aged a day, but things sure have become different while you were gone.

“Wake up and… smell the ashes,” the G-man tells you, in his oddly haunting and strangely emphasized tones.  Who he is—what he is, precisely—remains unknown.  What we know for sure is that he is some sort of interdimensional bureaucrat who has retained you for your unique skills.  Your first glimpses of this future world are not uplifting.  Wake up and smell the ashes, indeed.

You have only the vaguest notion of where you are and what you’re supposed to be doing. The question of “where” is easier.  You are in City 17, located somewhere in eastern Europe, which serves as a sort of capital for the much-diminished human civilization.  The Earth has been overrun twice over.  First it was the creatures that slipped into this dimension due largely to the events of the original Half-Life.  Then came the Combine, a collective of alien races bent on utter domination.  Between creatures making the countryside and wilderness highly unsafe, and the Combine’s efforts to corral and control humanity, the numbered Cities seem to hold the majority of humankind.  A suppression field prevents reproduction.  Volunteers are modified to become troops for the Combine; troublemakers are also modified, but in a much different, less pleasant fashion (not that the volunteers’ modifications look to be all fun and games, mind you).  The message is clear: those who can be used, will be used.  Those who cannot will be driven to extinction.  The bottom line is that humankind as we understand it will be destroyed, and the Earth will be gutted for its resources.  Half-Life 2 shows us subtle signs of this gutting already happening.  Docks and boathouses on dry land, well away from the shore, give a good indicator of how much water has been drained from the oceans already. 

None of this is shoved in your face.  The Seven-Hour War, in which humanity rose up against the Combine and was decisively trounced—which served, really, as little more than a prologue for the complete surrender and “treaty” brokered by one Dr. Wallace Breen—is hardly mentioned.  It’s in a few newspaper clippings you’ll find here and there, pinned up by the sorts of characters who would want a reminder of all that has been lost, perhaps to goad them ever onward toward some action.  Maybe some conversations mention it.  It’s difficult to recall, exactly.

One of the many strengths of Half-Life 2 is in its narrative subtlety.  There are very few scenes where characters exposit at you for long stretches.  People talk about background events and history in much the same way you or I might talk about history.  They talk about the Seven-Hour War like we, today, might talk about 9/11.  We don’t expound on the tragedy.  We mention it; we share a grim, knowing glance; and everybody understands the full meaning of what’s been said.  In much the same way, characters in Half-Life 2 don’t feel the need to speak in brief history lessons specifically for your benefit.  They talk how people talk.  You want to be in the know, great; go figure it out on your own. 

So there’s Half-Life 2’s setting in a nutshell, if we want to be flip: part War of the Worlds, part 1984, part Children of Men.

That answers the question of “where” nicely enough.  What about that question of “what”?

What, indeed?

The G-Man himself provides a subtle answer to this in his brief opening monologue.  “The right man, in the wrong place, can make all the dif-ference in the world,” he tells you with his off-kilter enunciation.

The original Half-Life saw you pretty much being exactly that.  Surviving a catastrophic accident that opened a portal to another dimension was practically a fluke.  The game from that point forward amounted to little more than the player character’s attempts to escape from Black Mesa (the research facility where the disaster occurs) for much of its length.  That there are alien creatures running around, and later, U.S. military personnel whose job was to shush the whole affair up, is practically incidental.  Freeman just happened to be fit enough and determined enough to beat the odds and escape.

The right man in the wrong place.

So, rather than give you any real direction (or even a stated goal), the G-Man just drops you into a train car bound for City 17, apparently having faith that you’ll do exactly what he (or his employers) want, just by doing what comes naturally.

You’re quickly pulled aside at the train station’s processing center, presumably for understandably lacking important documentation.  Thankfully, the guard who pulls you aside is Barney Calhoun, one of the heretofore nameless security guards from Black Mesa.  He discreetly sends you on your way to Dr. Isaac Kleiner, one of your colleagues from the back-story of Half-Life who is, despite his apparent nervous disposition, part of the resistance in City 17.  Lacking a map or even basic directions, however, you are quickly cornered by the City Overwatch.  You’re saved in the nick of time, however, by Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance, another scientist from Black Mesa.  Alyx guides you to Dr. Kleiner’s lab, where you’re given your familiar Hazardous Environment (HEV) Suit.  Also, your old crowbar.

This is pretty much the iconic image of the series in a nutshell: the bearded and bespectacled theoretical physicist-turned-action hero Gordon Freeman, with nothing but his HEV Suit and trusty crate-breaker to fend off hordes of aliens and other assailants.

From here, you’re pretty much on your own.  You’re tasked with finding Black Mesa East, which is the resistance headquarters, and reconnecting with Eli Vance, where Freeman will theoretically do some science for once.  Of course, this is not to be.  Upon being discovered at Black Mesa, Freeman is forced to flee through Ravenholm, which has been infested with headcrabs, which effectively make zombies of their victims, and make Ravenholm one of the more unnerving sections of the game.  From there you go through the mines, and shortly thereafter find yourself tooling along a lonely stretch of sea-cliff highway toward Nova Prospekt, which is a political prison.

Half-Life 2 never seems to wear out its welcome.  The various environments you traverse last just long enough to feel substantial (especially on your first, most clueless playthrough), yet are short enough that you never really get tired of a particular area.  Even in the game’s various areas, there is often diversity in the different sorts of places you’ll go.  The aforementioned highway section is broken up frequently by various obstructions.  You find yourself dealing with the occasional ambush, or removing a barricade, or deal with rolling mines or any of a number of other things.  There is always some variety to keep things interesting and novel.

The game occurs largely in big setpieces.  There’s a rhythm to the game; you’re usually alternating between more navigation-heavy sequences which involve solving puzzles on your way from Point A to Point B, and more combat-oriented sequences where puzzle-solving is nonexistent and you’re gunning down bad guys or blasting a way to freedom.  But even in combat, you have to use your head.  Sure, some minor encounters can be solved by charging in with guns blazing and mowing down every mook that comes into sight.  Most battles don’t work that way, though.  Like most FPS games, Half-Life 2 requires you to manage your resources.  There are only so many health and armor recharging stations and items in the game.  Likewise, there is only so much ammunition.  And while there are also only so many enemies, unlike you, they can shoot and throw grenades forever.  Some of them are immune to most your many weapons.  (Half-Life 2 is somewhat old-school in that Freeman carries an arsenal of nearly a dozen weapons, and ammo for each, on his person throughout much of the game).  Fight smarter, not harder, in other words.

A common complaint with Half-Life 2 is that its enemy AI is lacking.  This complaint is probably lent more weight than it should be on account of how intelligent (relative to the standards of the day) the enemies in the original Half-Life were.  When it comes to Half-Life 2, the complaint is both true and false.  Custom-made levels have shown the enemy AI to be quite intelligent.  However, the way environments are set up, it’s difficult for the enemies to really showcase their abilities.

So all of this provides a halfway-decent description of the game, but why do I like it so much?  If it’s my favorite FPS of all time, surely it does something special, right?  Well, yes and no.  I tend to think of Half-Life 2 as the sort of game where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  The game is getting somewhat long in the tooth by now—it was released in late 2004, after all—but that doesn’t matter much to me.  After all, I’ve played the living hell out of older games.  Quake, for instance.

A lot of it comes down to the atmosphere I mentioned back in the beginning.  And it’s not just that Valve chose a post-apocalyptic atmosphere (or one similar to it) when they made this game.  It does take a little more than that to get my interest.  It’s that they were at some considerable pains to reinforce the sense of despair and slender hope that are manifest every inch of the game’s world.  You periodically run across resistance outposts, all of which have the appearance of having been lightly manned and (in most cases) hastily abandoned.  You’ll walk into a room in some dilapidated shack by the road, or some platform tucked away just out of sight, and there will be a small cache of supplies there, and a mattress and a radio to show that someone, however briefly, occupied that spot.  If you’re observant, there are occasionally clues as to why that person isn’t there any more.  The atmosphere is in the way the people dress, the way they talk, the way they mutter to each other about how terrible things are, or warn you not to drink the water while in the city (there’s something in it that makes you forget, apparently)…  There are probably a hundred things that are beyond description because I’d take them for granted, and only notice them by way of their absence in other games.  “Man, I wish this game did X like Half-Life 2 did,” I’ll think, and then pause.  “Or that it did X at all.”

I tend to come back to atmosphere a lot when I think of what makes a game’s story good.  That’s mostly because I think atmosphere is one of the most important things a game has to get right in order for its story to have the greatest impact.  Atmosphere is in the subtle, delicate details of the game world.  A game may look real and sound real all it wants to, but atmosphere is what makes it feel real, in a compelling way, and that feeling is infinitely more important than any one thing we see or hear.  The environment doesn’t have to be realistic, but atmosphere is what gives a game’s environment a sense of consistency and purpose, which translates into a form of realism.

Of course, the rest of the game is also great.  The graphics, despite showing signs of age, still function perfectly well.  The sound effects and music are done admirably.  But I tend to look at the overall experience, and what stands out to me is the attention to detail everywhere you look, the atmosphere balanced so well that it helps to sell the setting while not being cloyingly thick, the aggressive adherence to realism in the environment's details.

Long story short: go play Half-Life 2.  Then go play the two episodes.  Then go play Black Mesa (the fan remake of the original Half-Life).