Half-Life

M A A S S I S H E A V Y

this is peak

Half Life has and will always be one of the best first person shooter games I've played. I mainly like the difficulty because even on easy it's still a challenge. If anyone is looking for a good first person shooter game, go with Half Life.

terrible experience on linux, constant audio issues on both native and windows builds. Legacy version just crashes

Still holds up GOATED game

goat

Honestly, it's a 5/10 at best for me. I've heard how revolutionary this game was and read the very high reviews from the various game review journals, and even the high praise from my friends. I don't see it. It's not a bad game, but it isn't the masterpiece people make it out to be. Graphics: Great for the time and don't even look that bad 28 years later. Some of the textures betray the scripted events because they're suddenly so much brighter than the surrounding area, or a gap will be visible. Sound effects: Another good thing about this game. Great atmosphere stems from both graphics and sound design and they nail it here. Gunplay: Bad. Like worse than anything else I've played. It took on average 15 shots from the smg to take down a single human enemy and that was with careful aiming. Gameplay: Mixed bag for me. the movement feels like you are constantly slipping on ice and walking solves it but there's no way to properly cancel speed after a jump leading to a lot of deaths. It is supposed to be an FPS, but it has a ton of platforming segments that didn't really work for me. I've played platformers and first person parkour games and it shows how bad the additions these "puzzles" made were. Without the platformer segments and weird movement physics the game would probably rate higher. AI: Human AI is incredibly basic and not the ground-breaking, second coming of Jesus level that I'd heard about. I guess they're supposed to show fear, take cover, and use "pack tactics", but they just kinda run around and then suddenly stop to shoot you. I was kinda expecting something more like what GSC had in the original A-life system where the enemies will sneak up on you, force you behind cover to flank, but what I got was generic CoD AI when it isn't in cover. They also tend to lose track of you if they get too far away and you can still hit them. If I'm being honest I feel like Medal of Honor [1999] was a bit better with its AI despite being developed concurrently to Half Life. Story: Another kinda disappointing aspect of the game. The story is barely there even with all the supposed atmospheric story stuff. Mostly it's told by dead bodies and some hints in the level design. The atmospheric storytelling falls flat when it feels like a segmented mission area with all the loading the game does. And not to mention the NPCs tend to be dialog and mission givers similar to other games from the era and even today. I get it, hardware limitations and all that stuff, but the first few times it really felt like the game froze for a bit before I realized it was loading. Portal was leaps better at this and it shows how much the writing team improved between this game and Portal. Overall a mixed experience. It's an okay game and I fail to see the legacy it left in the FPS genre. Innovative? Not really, especially when we check in with our console counterparts.