O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
For how influential, important and beloved Half-Life 2 is, I always struggled replaying it. I’d start, go through several opening chapters in a blink of an eye, loving every second of it and then stop somewhere in the middle of Ravenholm or right after. I dunno, the original Half-Life, despite also having weaker segments, always felt more exciting to me overall… Not that I disliked HL2 – I still felt that it was a great game, just, not quite as good as the first one. Which is funny, because at the same time I did love Episode Two a lot and even though it had horrible grindy achievements, first game to add them back in the day, I did all of them.
Except, it’s been around 14 years since I’ve played them last time. And after revisiting the original Half-Life with its expansions and later the fan remake Black Mesa, I was meaning to revisit the sequel as well. What stopped me was the state of the game – HL2 has been somewhat broken for years, having lots of visual issues and some logic bugs too. In 2023 Valve has brought a fantastic update to the original Half-Life, which got me excited about the possibility of getting the same treatment for Half-Life 2. And now that the 20th Anniversary update is out, I’ve decided to finally revisit the game and both Episodes, as they are now part of the same package.
If Half-Life’s impact on the face of FPS as a genre is obvious to see, Half-Life 2 legacy is far more nuanced, I feel. Partially, because the genre as a whole started to gradually move into a more tightly scripted and cinematic direction, with consoles getting big FPS franchises of their own. 2004 was the year of the big FPS battle – Doom 3 vs Half-Life 2, which highly anticipated sequel will be the most technologically advanced and impressive. But even though both of said titans had incredible innovative ideas, the attention has started shifting from PC to consoles while even on PC many “less known” developers were releasing technologically impressive titles. Far Cry was also 2004. Same for The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay – and that incredible looking game was for Xbox.
Nonetheless, Half-Life 2 had a big impact. The physics simulation was so outstanding, it still looks and feels great. The facial animation on characters still makes them far livelier than even some of the modern games with full actor facial capture. The requirement for a Steam account was highly controversial, but incredibly forward thinking in many ways. And the mod scene that would grow out of the new Source engine would rival the one that the original Half-Life had.
And now 20 years later, all of what made Half-Life 2 what it was on launch, has been polished up, prettied up, but otherwise kept as is for the new big update. Now the Half-Life 2 game you buy contains the original, Episode One, Episode Two and Lost Coast in one package, with the latter being provided in the extra menu that also features the Steam Workshop support for a much easier management of mods. An entire era of the franchise preserved in a nice package, that doesn’t do some things a lot of people expected, but does provide some neat little surprises.
So let’s talk about the games themselves.
Going into Half-Life 2 and playing it for the first several hours still feels incredible. The gameplay flows wonderfully, physics are awesome, gunplay is great. There’s atmosphere, variety, great music, excitement and actually not bad storytelling, for how simple it still is. But then, as it usually happens, the game starts to slowly fall apart. The level design becomes less refined. Some sections start feeling far longer than they should be. Then you have to suffer through insufferable few chapters of the uprising where friendly AI partners constantly get in the way and do more harm then help. Until the last few chapters, where the game becomes interesting again. It’s a really uneven experience that, in my opinion, is even more unbalanced than Xen in the original game.
With the new update Half-Life 2 remains, more or less, just as it used to be originally. The main difference is the newly added developers commentary mode. Achievements have been added over a decade ago and remain unchanged. The HEV suit works exactly as it used to, without the changes first introduced in Episode 2. It seems like the HDR rendering (not to be confused with the HDR TV/Monitor standard), was added to the maps, but it’s very subtle, unlike Lost Coast, where it was originally added. Oh and speaking of it – it’s still a really fun, if very short, map that’s fun to play not only as a technological showcase.
Afterwards, Valve have started experimenting with the episodic structure, hoping to produce smaller games faster and cheaper. And the first of those was Episode One, which is reusing a lot of content from the main game, but attempting to focus on things that players loved in HL2. There’s more Alyx, who proved to be very popular, and she’s now a more proper follower. There’s a big optional challenge to complete the whole game using mostly just gravity gun, as players loved that aspect of the game as well. But otherwise, it is a rather forgettable experience on its own. The best moments of this game could’ve worked better if they existed instead of the Uprising levels of Half-Life 2, or were added to Ravenholm. And on top of it, the “don’t call them cutscenes” moments can be very noticeably long.
Episode Two, however, is still quite wonderful. It’s exciting, full of cool ideas and memorable moments. It manages to balance out storytelling and gameplay really well. It looks great, it sounds great, it plays great… Not without flaws, of course. Some of the sections, like the tunnel defense, are a bit too long. But those are quite minor annoyances and the only big “flaw” this game had was the fact that it doubled down the most on the story, only to then keep the players hanging for over a decade. Something that wouldn’t have left fans as frustrated as if Half-Life 2 ending was the last thing people saw of the franchise. Nonetheless, while it would be somewhat silly to just play Episode Two and ignore Half-Life 2 and Episode One, if one had to play just one, I would recommend only this one.
And that’s about it. It’s always difficult to speak on games that are as big as almost everything Valve has developed, especially since in most cases the end recommendation would be “yeah, just go and play it – still worth it”. But that’s just how it is. If you have never played Half-Life 2 and especially Episode Two before – you simply must do that. If you have – well, if it’s been a while, you might as well do it now with this new 20th Anniversary update. It’s great.