The name Valve is synonymous with high quality but infrequent game releases that often redefine the genre they belong to; not to mention the company responsible for creating Steam, the PC gaming marketplace that has become the de-facto platform for all things PC. They are a juggernaut of the gaming industry, on the same level as the likes of EA and Activision in spite of their quiet and secretive nature. But the company had to start somewhere, and that somewhere was with 1998’s Half-Life. Published by Sierra Interactive, Half-Life was, as I mentioned earlier, a monumental game changer for the first-person shooter genre, showcasing some of the most advanced technology in a PC game at the time, and even presenting an intriguing story (something that at the time was little more than a novelty for action titles), with writing that was way ahead of the curve.
Having recently purchased a Steam Deck I just couldn’t stop myself from revisiting the classic series, and despite Half-Life being a game I revisit frequently, it was very much an eye-opening experience for me.
When Dr. Gordon Freeman arrives to work at the Black Mesa Research Facility late one morning, he could never have predicted what the day would have in store. Following a Resonance Cascade at the facility, a portal to an alien world is opened and the facility is flooded with hostile creatures.
With the army drafted in to clear up the mess, Gordon must fight his way through the facility and escape with his life.
Having recently purchased a Steam Deck I just couldn’t stop myself from revisiting the classic series, and despite Half-Life being a game I revisit frequently, it was very much an eye-opening experience for me.
When Dr. Gordon Freeman arrives to work at the Black Mesa Research Facility late one morning, he could never have predicted what the day would have in store. Following a Resonance Cascade at the facility, a portal to an alien world is opened and the facility is flooded with hostile creatures.
With the army drafted in to clear up the mess, Gordon must fight his way through the facility and escape with his life.
Reviewing Half-Life isn’t a particularly easy task. This is a game that received critical acclaim upon its release and has been the subject of near constant re-evaluation ever since. There’s not a single thing I could say that is new or different from what you’ll have heard before. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t throw my hat into the ring.
Part of what makes Half-Life such an enduring classic is that even twenty-five years later it remains the gold standard for shooters, and surprisingly few modern titles manage to match this level of ingenuity or quality let alone surpass it. It’s a game that has few challengers, and one of them is its own sequel!
But do we have a habit of looking back on Half-Life with rose tinted glasses? With my most recent playthrough now under wraps I have to say that could well be a possibility.
I have played Half-Life probably around seven or eight times, and I’m going to clarify now right now that I’ve never actually managed to defeat the final boss. However, I’ve managed to reach it almost every single time. To the veteran players that may sound like a familiar story, but to newcomers you may wonder why. That I’ll get to in time, but first I want to clarify that for this playthrough I managed to get a little over halfway through the penultimate mission, Interloper, before throwing in the towel because of a lack of ammo, health, and patience.
As I previously mentioned I also played the game on Valve’s handheld gaming console, the Steam Deck. As of writing, it’s not a game that’s been updated to be fully compatible with the device, so I did encounter a handful of technical issues, and the controls were also a bit finicky but these won’t be considered in my review because I know these aren’t present when playing on a PC.
Part of what makes Half-Life such an enduring classic is that even twenty-five years later it remains the gold standard for shooters, and surprisingly few modern titles manage to match this level of ingenuity or quality let alone surpass it. It’s a game that has few challengers, and one of them is its own sequel!
But do we have a habit of looking back on Half-Life with rose tinted glasses? With my most recent playthrough now under wraps I have to say that could well be a possibility.
I have played Half-Life probably around seven or eight times, and I’m going to clarify now right now that I’ve never actually managed to defeat the final boss. However, I’ve managed to reach it almost every single time. To the veteran players that may sound like a familiar story, but to newcomers you may wonder why. That I’ll get to in time, but first I want to clarify that for this playthrough I managed to get a little over halfway through the penultimate mission, Interloper, before throwing in the towel because of a lack of ammo, health, and patience.
As I previously mentioned I also played the game on Valve’s handheld gaming console, the Steam Deck. As of writing, it’s not a game that’s been updated to be fully compatible with the device, so I did encounter a handful of technical issues, and the controls were also a bit finicky but these won’t be considered in my review because I know these aren’t present when playing on a PC.
Half-Life’s story was like nothing else that had some before back in 1998, and even today the way in which it manages to tell its story is remarkably intricate without ever becoming obtrusive.
Because you never leave Gordon’s perspective, and he’s a silent protagonist, the story is delivered almost entirely in visuals. There are a handful of Black Mesa scientists and security guards dotted along the way to deliver key plot developments, but dialogue is kept brief. It’s up to you as to how much you engage with Half-Life’s story, and even now I find NPC’s that I haven’t spoken to before that tell me something interesting, or I see something new delivered through visual storytelling. Some runs I’ll only ever take in the mandatory stuff, such as the game’s opening, and others I’ll find myself exploring a bit more and coming across new things.
It's not a particularly rich story. You won’t get any character development, or any characters at all for that matter. It really is just a story about one man trying to escape a disaster, but the world building along the way, and the way the story is told, is what makes this special when compared to its contemporaries.
From a gameplay perspective, Half-Life was one of the pioneers of the genre in its shift to full 3D. It acts as a bridge from the old style of shooter (which gave you an extensive arsenal of weapons to fight an assorted array of enemy types, each with their own weakness and strategy), to the more modern style of shooter that placed more focus on environmental awareness, utilising cover, and spacing out firefights by using environmental puzzles to block your path.
Black Mesa is a maze of a facility, and the way it’s in a constant state of destruction means that level design is far from straightforward, though at least in the levels set within the Black Mesa facility and the surrounding areas it makes logical sense. You’re always on your toes because you never know what’s around the corner, and whilst you have a variety of weapons to dispatch your foes, you’ll need to think on your feet to take them down as you are significantly weaker than they are.
This is one major issue I have with Half-Life which I really noticed this time around. The whole thing really is designed around trial and error, and more than once I managed to get myself into a total failure state due to some dodgy checkpointing, or simply lacking the necessary resources to succeed. One such case was that I needed to drop down from a high ledge, and therefore would incur fall damage, however the previous firefight had left me with so little health that I simply could not survive the fall, and there were no health kits in the area. It meant I had to restart the level, and whilst in the 90’s this might have been something that was easily excusable, playing this in 2023 it just comes across as bad level design. If I must take damage from the fall, then why is there not a health kit just before the fall to ensure I am able to survive it in the first place? Or better yet, make the fall shorter so it doesn’t damage me.
There’s also a section where you need to cross a minefield, and whilst it’s only a very small minefield, you have no way of seeing where the mines are. You can shoot at the ground and hope you hit them (you’ll know because it’ll blow up), but it took multiple attempts for me to get past it because even by doing that I’d miss the mine, think I’d cleared the path, and then end up walking on it and dying.
Are these dealbreakers? Absolutely not, but it does make the game extremely difficult to revisit because of these seemingly archaic design principles designed around restarting missions if you’ve not played it well enough, or just repeating the same section over and over again until you’ve managed to work out where the invisible insta-kill zones are.
Because you never leave Gordon’s perspective, and he’s a silent protagonist, the story is delivered almost entirely in visuals. There are a handful of Black Mesa scientists and security guards dotted along the way to deliver key plot developments, but dialogue is kept brief. It’s up to you as to how much you engage with Half-Life’s story, and even now I find NPC’s that I haven’t spoken to before that tell me something interesting, or I see something new delivered through visual storytelling. Some runs I’ll only ever take in the mandatory stuff, such as the game’s opening, and others I’ll find myself exploring a bit more and coming across new things.
It's not a particularly rich story. You won’t get any character development, or any characters at all for that matter. It really is just a story about one man trying to escape a disaster, but the world building along the way, and the way the story is told, is what makes this special when compared to its contemporaries.
From a gameplay perspective, Half-Life was one of the pioneers of the genre in its shift to full 3D. It acts as a bridge from the old style of shooter (which gave you an extensive arsenal of weapons to fight an assorted array of enemy types, each with their own weakness and strategy), to the more modern style of shooter that placed more focus on environmental awareness, utilising cover, and spacing out firefights by using environmental puzzles to block your path.
Black Mesa is a maze of a facility, and the way it’s in a constant state of destruction means that level design is far from straightforward, though at least in the levels set within the Black Mesa facility and the surrounding areas it makes logical sense. You’re always on your toes because you never know what’s around the corner, and whilst you have a variety of weapons to dispatch your foes, you’ll need to think on your feet to take them down as you are significantly weaker than they are.
This is one major issue I have with Half-Life which I really noticed this time around. The whole thing really is designed around trial and error, and more than once I managed to get myself into a total failure state due to some dodgy checkpointing, or simply lacking the necessary resources to succeed. One such case was that I needed to drop down from a high ledge, and therefore would incur fall damage, however the previous firefight had left me with so little health that I simply could not survive the fall, and there were no health kits in the area. It meant I had to restart the level, and whilst in the 90’s this might have been something that was easily excusable, playing this in 2023 it just comes across as bad level design. If I must take damage from the fall, then why is there not a health kit just before the fall to ensure I am able to survive it in the first place? Or better yet, make the fall shorter so it doesn’t damage me.
There’s also a section where you need to cross a minefield, and whilst it’s only a very small minefield, you have no way of seeing where the mines are. You can shoot at the ground and hope you hit them (you’ll know because it’ll blow up), but it took multiple attempts for me to get past it because even by doing that I’d miss the mine, think I’d cleared the path, and then end up walking on it and dying.
Are these dealbreakers? Absolutely not, but it does make the game extremely difficult to revisit because of these seemingly archaic design principles designed around restarting missions if you’ve not played it well enough, or just repeating the same section over and over again until you’ve managed to work out where the invisible insta-kill zones are.
The puzzles are (mostly) brilliant though, and most work really well within the context of a science facility. Every single one is designed around particular areas of the facility, the kind of equipment you would find there, and the solutions are always reasonably simple but do require some level of thought. It makes Black Mesa feel more realistic, and as though this is a real place of work that has gone awry.
Although there are the jumping puzzles, and these are enough to ruin your day. The game’s floaty controls and the first-person perspective make navigating some of these sections a total nightmare, and the less said about them the better really.
Black Mesa also looks the part. The aesthetic of the facility keeps things very clean, but visually appealing. The early missions will see you go through more communal areas and offices, before moving into the more specialised labs and some outdoor areas later in the game. You do get this visual response that you’re progressing by each area looking distinct from each other, whilst also keeping this uniformity you’d expect in a facility like Black Mesa.
Graphically the game isn’t the best-looking game of 1998, but it does present some of the most fully realised 3D environments in a shooter of that time. The levels are large, and don’t just work with horizontal space but also incorporates a lot of height and verticality into the design of areas. No two places feel distinctly the same, and that makes progressing through the game more fun, because you’re always presented with new scenarios.
The Achilles heel of all of this is the final quarter of the game, the Xen levels. These four levels are infamous, enough to strike fear into any player, and rightly so. If you ask a Half-Life fan about the game, I’m sure they’ll conveniently just not mention anything to do with these last four levels. Xen, Gonarch’s Lair, Interloper, and Nihilanth.
For the best part of eight hours you’ve been running around Black Mesa solving puzzles, shooting aliens, and engaging in firefights with the army. It’s all fairly routine stuff. Then you step into a teleporter and bam! You’re in another dimension, and quite literally up shit creek without a paddle.
The level design here is, quite aptly, alien. Honestly there’s nothing else quite like it, because it defies all sense of logic and reason. Navigating these levels is just one extremely difficult task, the next is surviving them as you’re under a near constant bombardment from alien foes. Plus, you need to learn a whole new set of gameplay mechanics such as water that heals you, and working with low gravity, and a living environment that can evolve by interacting with particular areas of it. Not to mention the fact that you need to face off against two boss battles (Gonarch & Nihilanth), and these levels provide frighteningly few resources such as ammo and health kits. It’s a feat that most find difficult to overcome, and many, me included, have never actually succeeded in completing.
Even those who can survive these levels, who can defeat the big floating baby (Nihilanth) and find themselves on the tram with the illusive G-Man, even they do not enjoy the Xen levels.
It’s weird to have a game so universally adored like Half-Life but have the entire player base unanimously agree that the final hour or two is genuinely awful.
The development of Half-Life was notoriously troubled, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Xen levels resulted in a last minute change to the games ending and they were hastily cobbled together. But whatever the case, it’s a huge black mark against the game and leaves a sour taste in your mouth if you do ever see those credits roll.
For the most part, Half-Life is a phenomenal game, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential, and why it’s retained the legacy and prestige that it has.
However, that being said, I do feel like the game is often looked at with nostalgia goggles and given far too many concessions for its difficult combat, awkward jumping puzzles, and of course the Xen levels.
Half-Life is a classic, there’s no denying it, and it’s a game every PC gamer should play at least once. But it might not be quite as perfect as many might have you believe.
Although there are the jumping puzzles, and these are enough to ruin your day. The game’s floaty controls and the first-person perspective make navigating some of these sections a total nightmare, and the less said about them the better really.
Black Mesa also looks the part. The aesthetic of the facility keeps things very clean, but visually appealing. The early missions will see you go through more communal areas and offices, before moving into the more specialised labs and some outdoor areas later in the game. You do get this visual response that you’re progressing by each area looking distinct from each other, whilst also keeping this uniformity you’d expect in a facility like Black Mesa.
Graphically the game isn’t the best-looking game of 1998, but it does present some of the most fully realised 3D environments in a shooter of that time. The levels are large, and don’t just work with horizontal space but also incorporates a lot of height and verticality into the design of areas. No two places feel distinctly the same, and that makes progressing through the game more fun, because you’re always presented with new scenarios.
The Achilles heel of all of this is the final quarter of the game, the Xen levels. These four levels are infamous, enough to strike fear into any player, and rightly so. If you ask a Half-Life fan about the game, I’m sure they’ll conveniently just not mention anything to do with these last four levels. Xen, Gonarch’s Lair, Interloper, and Nihilanth.
For the best part of eight hours you’ve been running around Black Mesa solving puzzles, shooting aliens, and engaging in firefights with the army. It’s all fairly routine stuff. Then you step into a teleporter and bam! You’re in another dimension, and quite literally up shit creek without a paddle.
The level design here is, quite aptly, alien. Honestly there’s nothing else quite like it, because it defies all sense of logic and reason. Navigating these levels is just one extremely difficult task, the next is surviving them as you’re under a near constant bombardment from alien foes. Plus, you need to learn a whole new set of gameplay mechanics such as water that heals you, and working with low gravity, and a living environment that can evolve by interacting with particular areas of it. Not to mention the fact that you need to face off against two boss battles (Gonarch & Nihilanth), and these levels provide frighteningly few resources such as ammo and health kits. It’s a feat that most find difficult to overcome, and many, me included, have never actually succeeded in completing.
Even those who can survive these levels, who can defeat the big floating baby (Nihilanth) and find themselves on the tram with the illusive G-Man, even they do not enjoy the Xen levels.
It’s weird to have a game so universally adored like Half-Life but have the entire player base unanimously agree that the final hour or two is genuinely awful.
The development of Half-Life was notoriously troubled, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Xen levels resulted in a last minute change to the games ending and they were hastily cobbled together. But whatever the case, it’s a huge black mark against the game and leaves a sour taste in your mouth if you do ever see those credits roll.
For the most part, Half-Life is a phenomenal game, and it’s easy to see why it was so influential, and why it’s retained the legacy and prestige that it has.
However, that being said, I do feel like the game is often looked at with nostalgia goggles and given far too many concessions for its difficult combat, awkward jumping puzzles, and of course the Xen levels.
Half-Life is a classic, there’s no denying it, and it’s a game every PC gamer should play at least once. But it might not be quite as perfect as many might have you believe.