Title: Half Life 2: Episode One
Publisher: Valve
Developer: Valve corporation (steam)
Genre: FPS
Platform: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Rating: M

Review: Here goes my first review of a video game, Half Life 2: Episode One. I will start by getting what I did not like about it out of the way first, because, for the most part, I have only good things to say. The first thing that I did not like was the whole “lets not give the player a weapon for a really long time” thing. When you first start off you have only the gravity gun and even though it is super powered for a while it wears away too soon and I don’t see what would have been the harm in at least having a pistol or something. For some reason it annoyed me much more than when it happened here, because I mean this time Alex gives you the gravity gun, and what you can’t carry an extra pistol for me? And it makes sense that the dissipate when you use the over powered gravity gun as they did in Half Life 2, but Alex is killing people too, where do their guns go. But this was a minor annoyance and was still pretty enjoyable, it just didn’t make sense to me.

Another thing that I didn’t like was the lighting, because while it was more realistic, sometimes if you walked from a dark place to a white room it would be all shiny and over bright. Let me use pictures to explain.

Eventually it would return to normal but I just found it annoying for some reason. Like there was this time you have to shoot a gunship down, but the sky is so bright you can’t see a thing.

That is pretty much all I can complain about.

As for the good things? It excelled all over the place.

The game play was pretty much the same as it was in Half Life 2, but this time Alex is with you on your journey and makes the trek much more “involved” I guess is the word. Because in Half Life 2 it is always just you and there was sometimes a feeling of its just you, but with Alex there it adds to the feeling that you really are doing this.

It looked as good as ever and there were a nice large range of environments and locations. The reactor room I thought was especially cool. The updated character animation I don’t was huge but I guess the best changes are those which you don’t notice.

There were some cool additions, like the Zombine and the torches, but essentially you are going against the same foes here.

I forgot to mention in things I didn’t like the length of the game, and while it was shorter than I would have liked, I thought that it was long enough to enjoy and it was a devastatingly short game which left me longing and longing for it to be longer.

The story here was great, and I loved the chance to further develop the adventures of Gordon Freeman.

Probably my favorite new thing was the commentary nodes throughout the maps; one can be seen playing in a picture above. I always love watching commentary on movies and the like and the opportunity to do it in a game was very enjoyable.

This was a very fun game and I would really suggest it if you enjoyed Half Life 2.

* * * * * * * * * _ (9 out of 10)

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