I finished the latest episode of Halflife 2 this weekend. Overall I’d give it a B. It’s got the same solid Halflife 2 production values and the engine still looks great, and there’s one significant gameplay element added, a gravity gun launched sticky bomb that has to be set off with a pistol to deal with a certain situation. Honestly though beyond that HalfLife 2 is beginning to feel a bit stale. The story is still engaging, and ends in such a way that leaves me wanting to know/play more, but for the most part this pak feels like a rehash, with the same sort of situations we’ve seen in Halflife 2 before, differentiated by being set in new level geometry or featuring a different character or a new weapon. Also I’m starting to get aggravated with a couple of longstanding Source engine bugs - the sound stuttering bug (I mean come ON now - 3 retail releases, a number of incremental updates, and STILL this is not resolved? It causes me at least one death a night in multiplayer) especially being the one that bothers me, but also you have always sort of ’stuck’ to things in Halflife 2. Backing away from something ferocious can often lead to an untimely death when you get stuck on the corner of something - a door frame, a desk, a crate - and instead of sort of sliding around it like you do in many other games, you just stick. They’ve solved this in other Source engine games (Team Fortress 2 for example) so I’m not clear on why they haven’t in their main product.
Anyway to sum up - Orange box is worth the purchase just to get Team Fortress 2, which I am playing obsessively, but I don’t know this time around if I would have found Episode 2 on its own a good deal, even at ~$20 like the last episode was. I’d prefer Valve get back into a more normal development pattern and release a new, significantly upgraded game with 20 or more hours of content every 2-3 years, rather than this ‘we’ll release a 4-6 hour long episode every 6 months…wait, no, we meant um, 18 months?’ that they’ve been doing for 3 years or more now.
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