Half-Life: Source

System: PC
Release Date: 2005
Published By: Valve
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

Half-Life: Source, for those who don't know, is an update of the original Half-Life running in the Source engine (as seen in Half-Life 2). It's a good-looking, entertaining game with some major drawbacks. If you've played the original Half-Life, you won't find anything terribly new here; it really is exactly the same game at heart. But if you've never played Half-Life, Valve will sell you the extra-pretty Source version for ten bucks.

Fundamentally, Half-Life: Source is a hybrid shooter/platformer. As a shooter, it is absolutely top-notch, but it runs into trouble when the platforming gets thick. Platforming is extremely difficult to make entertaining in first-person, and a mouse-and-keyboard setup is quite poorly suited to controlling it. For the most part, the platforming in Half-Life: Source is fairly simple and sparing, and the collision detection is extremely forgiving (a hallmark of tolerable first-person platformers), but on the rare occasions when the game does become jumping-intensive it also becomes frustration. Compounding this problem is the game's annoyingly difficult ladder mechanic; there are a lot of ladders in the game, and they can be quite an endeavour to get on to or off of.

Weapon selection is an important factor in any FPS, and Half-Life: Source does not disappoint. There are fourteen weapons, and the range includes ordinary weapons (such as pistols and a crowbar), "future-tech" weapons (like the Ghostbuster-esque Gluon Gun), and alien weapons (mostly oriented around bugs). The best part about the weapons is that they are all useful; the game does not fall into the trap of making even the standard pistol or the lowly crowbar a simple "fallback" weapon that will only be used if nothing else is available. Ammunition is somewhat scarce in most areas, but not so rare that you'll (often) be counting each bullet you fire. If you charge into every room and just spray it with lead until nothing's moving anymore, you'll run out quickly, but, hey; near as I can tell, FPS school lesson number one is "don't do that." So don't blame me; blame yourself or God.

Technically, the game looks good and runs well, but is somewhat buggy. On three occasions my first playthrough, the game bugged in such a fashion that progress became impossible: a crate I was attempting to jump on somehow flipped up onto its edge and would not be cajoled into sitting down again, a scientist absolutely refused to open a door, and an elevator failed to spawn. The AI is mostly good with one particular outstanding flaw: if a mob has never had line-of-sight to Freeman (or a grenade) and has not been alerted by another mob who does, it is completely inactive and will not react to any stimulus, including being shot. So if you can creep around a corner and spot an enemy's foot, you can stand there and shoot him in the foot until he dies and he won't move or attack or sound the alarm. Mobs can hear Freeman if he's being especially noisy, but seem oddly unresponsive to the sound of gunfire and people nearby falling over with darts in their feet.

Stephen, in his review of the original Half-Life, was uncomfortable rating it down as far as he did based solely on the awfulness of the last four levels. Perhaps I'm just desensitised to critical harshness, but I have no such reservations: levels fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, and especially level seventeen are very bad, and this is a significant enough flaw to warrant rating an otherwise excellent game down a bit. The first fourteen levels of Half-Life are about Gordon Freeman crawling and fighting his way through a ruined industrial complex filled with evil monsters and commandoes, but the last four are about jumping on little bitty platforms inside a big hazy purple-and-green cloud and then blowing up a giant space baby and a fucking spider. Is there some sort of law that says that every FPS has to have a spider boss?

The game owes a lot to the games that came before it, especially Doom, and the influence is never more apparent than in the final battle, which reminded me an awful lot of the final battle in Doom 2. For example, neither of them was any fun at all. And as I watched my weapons progress from pistol to shotgun to machine gun, I confess being a bit nostalgic.

Overall, Half-Life: Source is an excellent game, and well worth the ten dollars Valve wants for it. If you never played the original Half-Life, I recommend it very highly. If you've never been a fan of FPS, this may be the one that changes your mind. And, I mean, it's ten dollars. I can nearly guarantee you'll get ten dollars worth of fun out of it.

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