Half-Life Review

 

This shot features ray-tracing, as is the rage.

Half-Life is easily one of the most influential games of all time. Its iconic opening, in which theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman rides a train alone to work, only to later accidentally trigger a resonance cascade, ushering in an extra-dimensional alien invasion, has been copied a million times. I'm currently playing through Atomic Heart, and it opens similarly, with your character getting to explore the world briefly before everything goes to hell. Half-Life was also one of the first games to heavily feature scripted sequences that enhanced its atmosphere and made the player feel as though they were really experiencing an escape from a government research facility. Scientists fall down elevator shafts, get gunned down by military grunts, and get torn apart by zombies. The soldier AI is still impressive sometimes over twenty years later, with the grunts throwing grenades, taking cover, and popping out to shoot at poor Freemen. The level design was also revolutionary, featuring huge caverns full of nuclear waste, hidden laboratories with secret weapons, and desert canyons overrun with tanks and helicopters. There is a real feeling of progression while playing Half-Life, of climbing out of the crumbling research facility and emerging into the hot Arizona sun. It is, in many respects, a modern game built with late nineties tech.

However, there are some warts. Half-Life was built using a heavily modified Quake engine, and the fast movement from that game is featured here. Gordon feels like he's sprinting with roller skates, and while that's fine for Half-Life's combat, it's not great for its frequent jumping puzzles. And there's quite a bit of platforming, more than I remembered. The closing Xen section gets lambasted for over-relying on platforming, but Xen is very short, and the troubles start much earlier. Gordon has air control and momentum, and you'll slide off ledges very frequently. Also, some of the level design is labyrinthine, and had I not played this game to death over the years, I probably would've been lost, especially in the later part of the game. 

Yet of all the classic shooters, from Dark Forces to Quake 2, I think Half-Life has aged the best, with its modern design elements and excellent atmosphere. You're always doing something new in Half-Life, from riding on a rail cart through flooded tunnels to burning a giant tentacle monster to death in a missile silo. A lot of people will recommend Black Mesa, a fan-created mod that brings Half-Life into Half-Life 2's Source engine, with many sections redesigned. And while Black Mesa is excellent, I'd still recommend the original game. Black Mesa somehow made Xen worse, making it a six hour experience full of wandering level design, instead of the brief otherworldly detour it is in Half-Life. Modder Sultim-t has just released a ray-tracing mod that replaces all of Half-Life's lighting with path-traced rays, and it's really fun to experience this game with cutting-edge lighting. I've put a few screenshots below, along with a video showcasing this mod, and I recommend it if you have a ray-tracing capable GPU.