Who needs choice, anyway? One of the core values of great games is supposed to be providing the player with a range of tools and options to choose from in accomplishing a goal. And yet Half-Life 2 is quite prescriptive. You are on rails throughout – there is only one way through a level. And there is very overt signposting about what you need to do to overcome the obstacles in the way. Here's an infinite stash of rockets because you're going to be using rockets now. The crates have a bunch of grenades in them? It's grenade time.
The game is so expertly tuned to provide the player precisely what they need at precisely the right time that it always feels quite artificial. Immersion is elusive when the guiding hand of the developer is everpresent. The overarching narrative nods to this, in that Gordon Freedman is a pawn used by the G-Man to intervene in a mysterious inter-dimensional "Great Game", where you're supposed to tip the scales in the struggle between the rapacious alien Combine and the human resistance. Valve's Portal games make the metaphor more explicit – the player is literally in a designed maze where their lack of agency is very evident, and the goal is to realise the disturbing nature of this situation and escape. It's a more satisfying commentary on the constrained freedom games have to provide a player.
All that aside, it's very easy to get swept up in Half-Life 2's narrative. The original Half-Life was set in a claustrophobic underground base where the goal was survival and the lesson was not to trust the authorities to save your ass when disaster strikes. The soldiers aren't there to rescue you, but to kill you. Half-Life 2 transposes that sense of oppression onto an entire city. You are in a police-state ruled by Breen, a human puppet of an alien empire, and you quickly join forces with the clandestine resistance. Breen is a very satisfying villain. His propaganda broadcasts have a dark humour to them, but you discover that he has in part bought into the Combine's project, seduced by their offer of wonderous scientific discoveries. The fact that the resistance are the ones who have cracked the secret of local teleportation and the gravity gun shows up Breen's arrogance and his uselessness. He is a weasel, and an effective goad for the player to carry on fighting.
This is a very fun game. Half-Life 2 is a fairground ride where you do one exciting thing after another. Even if there is only one solution, executing it is still very satisfying. The choices you make are smaller and more immediate – which weapon do you prefer to use, will you run in or crouch around, how much do you want to mess around with the gravity gun and the environment around you. The challenges are well paced, with calmer exploration sections giving you a breather from the fights. The majority of the game is not particularly hard, although I did struggle a bit with the rocket fight against the striders towards the end. The finale is very confident – you breach the citadel and lose all your weapons bar the gravity gun, which becomes a one-click kill machine. The thrills and spills are put behind you as you traverse (and get carted around) an entirely new non-human environment. It's an inversion of Half-Life's difficult Xen section – and a great capstone to a great game.
Devilman: The Classic Collection Vol. 1 by Go Nagai
