My HL2 Ep. 1 Review, Spoiler Free
Sorry for not getting to this last night, but I didn't finish until 1 a.m. this morning.
So, how does Ep. 1 stack up against its predecessor? Not all that well, even with accounting for their different scope, but it doesn't fair that badly either. Episode One's biggest failing may come from it following too closely in the feature-film footprints of earlier installments.
With Episode One, Valve has taken the ambitious step of diverging from the feature film road that has ruled computer games for years, turning instead up the path of serial television. It's a bold move and one that I applaud, but something that they seem to have forgotten is that television moves at a slower pace than the action-packed blockbusters that define the FPS genre, which the Half-Life franchise has indelibly stamped.
What made Half-Life so fantastic was not the gameplay, though that was excellent, but the writing. Prior to HL, first person shooters were cast in the mold that Id made, no story to get in the way of the action. Half-Life, on the other hand, gave us a named character, young theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, brilliant but something of a screwup at his top-secret research position. Gordon appears to cause a titanic disaster, and later becomes the target of rampaging aliens and ruthless government special forces, and is revealed in the end to have been a pawn the entire time. The tale is a tragedy, and one that still inspires a risk averse industry.
Half-Life 2 carried the storytelling forward. It too is flush with heart-pumping action, but deepens the tragedies of Black Mesa to encircle the globe. An organized alien force has taken over, corralled the few humans left into dystopian cities surrounded by lethal wastes, and the player begins wondering if he is somehow responsible for it all. In perhaps the best art direction in any game to date, the very faces of the wretched residents of City 17 speak of their despair, like that witnessed by my wife on her trip to the Soviet Union years ago.
And so in Episode One we expect more, not less, storytelling, since the action in television pales next to that in movies, perhaps because movies demand grand proportions; great drama and romance and action to fill that big screen. But in Episode One, we get too much action, and near the end it starts to feel a little pointless. In fact, after the third (or maybe fourth?) time that Alyx volunteers you for another hazardous mission, the addition of yet another action sequence gets almost comic. I found myself saying aloud, “You want me to what? Maybe you want to wear this hazard suit while I take the first train out of here?”
Don't get the impression that there's no advancement of the story, but it's little more than enough to move the plot, with some teases of interesting developments to come. So, if Marc Laidlaw is listening, there's so much more to this setting and these characters that you haven't revealed and we want to know, so please give us more. You no longer have the excuse of bare bones exposition due to format restrictions. You're not writing a feature anymore. Give us details about how the world got this way. Show us more of Eli and Barney and Judith. And don't be afraid to make it hurt, to deepen the tragedy further. It's a bleak world and it can get bleaker. Maybe Gordon made things at Black Mesa worse than they could have been. Maybe Alyx will get interested in another man.
Just give us more story, and remember that while this might have been released in the Summer, it's not a Summer blockbuster.
So, how does Ep. 1 stack up against its predecessor? Not all that well, even with accounting for their different scope, but it doesn't fair that badly either. Episode One's biggest failing may come from it following too closely in the feature-film footprints of earlier installments.
With Episode One, Valve has taken the ambitious step of diverging from the feature film road that has ruled computer games for years, turning instead up the path of serial television. It's a bold move and one that I applaud, but something that they seem to have forgotten is that television moves at a slower pace than the action-packed blockbusters that define the FPS genre, which the Half-Life franchise has indelibly stamped.
What made Half-Life so fantastic was not the gameplay, though that was excellent, but the writing. Prior to HL, first person shooters were cast in the mold that Id made, no story to get in the way of the action. Half-Life, on the other hand, gave us a named character, young theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, brilliant but something of a screwup at his top-secret research position. Gordon appears to cause a titanic disaster, and later becomes the target of rampaging aliens and ruthless government special forces, and is revealed in the end to have been a pawn the entire time. The tale is a tragedy, and one that still inspires a risk averse industry.
Half-Life 2 carried the storytelling forward. It too is flush with heart-pumping action, but deepens the tragedies of Black Mesa to encircle the globe. An organized alien force has taken over, corralled the few humans left into dystopian cities surrounded by lethal wastes, and the player begins wondering if he is somehow responsible for it all. In perhaps the best art direction in any game to date, the very faces of the wretched residents of City 17 speak of their despair, like that witnessed by my wife on her trip to the Soviet Union years ago.
And so in Episode One we expect more, not less, storytelling, since the action in television pales next to that in movies, perhaps because movies demand grand proportions; great drama and romance and action to fill that big screen. But in Episode One, we get too much action, and near the end it starts to feel a little pointless. In fact, after the third (or maybe fourth?) time that Alyx volunteers you for another hazardous mission, the addition of yet another action sequence gets almost comic. I found myself saying aloud, “You want me to what? Maybe you want to wear this hazard suit while I take the first train out of here?”
Don't get the impression that there's no advancement of the story, but it's little more than enough to move the plot, with some teases of interesting developments to come. So, if Marc Laidlaw is listening, there's so much more to this setting and these characters that you haven't revealed and we want to know, so please give us more. You no longer have the excuse of bare bones exposition due to format restrictions. You're not writing a feature anymore. Give us details about how the world got this way. Show us more of Eli and Barney and Judith. And don't be afraid to make it hurt, to deepen the tragedy further. It's a bleak world and it can get bleaker. Maybe Gordon made things at Black Mesa worse than they could have been. Maybe Alyx will get interested in another man.
Just give us more story, and remember that while this might have been released in the Summer, it's not a Summer blockbuster.
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 9:25 PM
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