Half-Life 2: Episode One Game Review (Avg Ratio: 89.2%)
One thing you can say about the team at Valve Software: they don’t like to rush. After taking six years to craft the sequel to Half-Life, it’s taken another eighteen months for the first mini-expansion, Half-Life 2: Episode One, to arrive. As the initial installment of a trilogy to be offered in episodic format, the good news is that Episode One is a welcome return to the world of Half-Life 2, with the same great graphics and gameplay that helped that game win numerous awards in late 2004 (including GameSpy’s PC Game of the Year).
Episode One starts off exactly where Half-Life 2 ended: with you (as scientist/killing machine Gordon Freeman) atop an exploding Citadel, with your sidekick, the spunky Alyx Vance, about to be toast. Without spoiling things, let’s just say that Alyx is kept out of harm’s way, and the two of you are quickly reunited outside at the base of a smoking Citadel. After establishing an uplink with old friends Dr. Kleiner and Alyx’s father Eli (once again voiced by Robert Guillaume), you discover the Citadel is about to go kerplooey, and in order to give yourself, Alyx and countless other citizens more time to escape City 17, you’ll have to go back in to try and delay the meltdown.
There’s a good deal of exposition at the start of Episode One, as characters are quickly reintroduced and tasks are laid out before you. The intro includes a reappearance by Dog (Alyx’s pet robot), who makes your re-entry into the Citadel a memorable one. Once inside, you and Alyx spend a lot of time exploring the deteriorating monolith, giving you a chance to get reacquainted with the gravity gun. Before long, you’ll be flinging around Combine soldiers just like the good ol’ days. As you work your way to the Citadel’s central reactor core, you’re confronted with a healthy dose of puzzles, which start out simple enough but require more imagination to solve as you proceed.
Once you’ve delayed the Citadel meltdown (and picked up some extra intel on what the Combine is up to in the process), the second half of Episode One focuses on Gordon and Alyx’s efforts to haul ass out of City 17. Of course, the escape is anything but simple, as you’re first forced underground where you have to deal with headcrabs, zombies, and ant lions, and then you make your way onto the streets where you get knee-deep in combat with Combine soldiers, who are none too happy with the information you pilfered from the Citadel.
The gameplay in Episode One never strays too far from the familiar Half-Life formula: levels are kept pretty linear as you’re steered from one challenge to the next, with lots of scripted events to move the plot along. The opening levels in the Citadel feel the most unique, due to the heavy emphasis on storytelling, the gravity gun, and all the puzzles involved with stabilizing the reactor. Things slow down a bit once you go underground and start fighting zombies, although there are a few interesting scenes where you have to shine your flashlight on enemies so Alyx can see and shoot them in the dark. Once you get outside with a full complement of weapons, things move along much faster, although it can sometimes feel a little too familiar, as if you’re replaying the later sections of Half-Life 2 instead of new content.
Probably the biggest change introduced in Episode One is how Alyx fights at Gordon’s side for the majority of the game. Plenty of shooters have tried this and failed, with NPCs who get lost or get in the way or are just plain annoying. Valve strikes just the right notes with Alyx; she doesn’t nag Gordon, she can competently follow you around, and even provides useful support a lot of the time. There’s a fun sequence in the later chapters where you’re free to run ahead and fight alone, but it’s far more fun to draw enemies into Alyx’s line of sight so she can snipe them from afar. Aside from her use in combat, Alyx is also effectively used to put a human face on things and keep the story moving along, and Episode One is a better game for it.
As was the case in Half-Life 2, the graphics in Episode One are drop-dead gorgeous; there may not be another graphics engine today capable of consistently producing such attractive scenes in so many different settings. From the dramatic sights outside the crumbling Citadel to the shimmering reactor core to the dramatic lighting effects when fighting zombies in the dark, it’s almost impossible to take a bad screenshot in Episode One. The NPCs are once again rendered with amazing detail and animations, and Valve has included the advanced HDR lighting effects that it showcased last year in the Lost Coast tech demo. Best of all, Episode One appears to be every bit as hardware-friendly as Half-Life 2, and ran without a hitch at 1920×1200 on our test machine (a 3.4Ghz CPU with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 7800 GTX video card).
One of the most unique features in Episode One is the addition of developer commentary, which, once enabled, can be accessed via chat bubbles sprinkled throughout the game. There’s a healthy amount of commentary, with Valve developers mainly offering insights about design decisions that influenced sections of the game. The commentary offers a fascinating look at why parts of the game turned out the way they did, and while Episode One isn’t the first game to try this (the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick had a commentary feature as well), it’s a feature well worth checking out once you’ve finished the game, and something we’d like to see more of.
The biggest question you’ll probably have about Episode One is whether it’s worth the $19.99 price tag. With about four to five hours of new gameplay, it goes by really fast, which is all the more disappointing when you consider we’ve waited so long for new Half-Life 2 content. (Episode Two is currently scheduled for the end of 2006.) There’s also the Steam factor: so far, Valve’s download service appears to be holding up okay, but the game is also in stores now for the same price for those of you (like me) who like having a box and a disc. (For the record, Episode One is a standalone title that doesn’t require Half-Life 2 to play, and includes access to the previously released Half-Life 2 deathmatch.)
Half-Life 2: Episode One delivers exactly what you’d expect from a Half-Life expansion: it returns to the intriguing setting of City 17, delivers lots of tight action sequences and well-crafted puzzles, and is arguably the best-looking shooter out today. At $20, it goes by pretty quick, but the developer commentary adds some replay value, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone who enjoyed Half-Life 2 passing it up. It’s exciting to see developers finally embrace the idea of episodic content; the big question now is whether Valve can keep up with the demand.
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