February '20 Play Log

Here you reprise your roll as Gordon Freeman, the Wordless Wonder. This game has a much better plot than the second, and lacks the platforming elements in all but a few places. Overall a much better game and still worth playing today. Aged very well.

Pros:

• You can ride a boat
• You can ride a buggy
• Good story for the most part
• You meet some really great characters
• Well voice acted
• Levels are varied and don’t feel repetative
• The gravity gun is a lot of fun

Cons:

• There’s no explanation for what happened (either to you or the world) between the first and second games. Some of it you can infer, but there are still gaps.
• Some hit box issues, where you throw a grenade just past a wall but it bounces off anyway. To be expected with old games though.

Verdict: 9/10

Experienced on Oculus Rift

This is a rather unique game. Well, it’s not a game really, or a movie. It’s a murder mystery, but where you can explore the whole area and watch any of the characters. You are just a casual observer, but you get to see everything that’s going on as well as find clues and information about the characters. The story is quite good as well, including a number of surprises.

Pros:

• Excellent voice acting
• You can jump to any part of any chapter, and even see what characters you’ve seen in a chapter and what parts of their time in a chapter you’ve missed
• The clues, newspapers, diaries, etc, you can collect give you more information about what’s going on. I highly advise searching for them all.
• You can fast forward and rewind, which is excellent for skipping through the few boring parts where the character you’re following isn’t doing anything and rewinding to follow other characters
• The story features some surprises and twists that kept me guessing what was going on until the end
• Despite being fairly large, the house very well done. There aren’t large empty spaces that serve no purpose or duplicated rooms just to fill space.
• What music there is is well done, adding to the atmosphere when something interesting happens
• The characters well fairly well fleshed out, feeling like real people whose motivations you can understand once you figure out their backstory.

Cons:

• There were some parts where the sound stopped working, requiring me to restart the game. This may have had something to do with me alt+tabbing out of it to look at something else.
• Despite completing the game and and finding everything, there are still one or two minor questions I have that weren’t answered.
• It felt like the main part of the story just sort of ended, without a satisfactory conclusion.

Verdict: 9/10

I really struggled with whether or not to recommend this game. Given that I got close to abandoning it near the end, and was very ready for it to be over, I can’t recommend it. Yes, it’s old, but that’s not where my complaints come from. In fact, despite usually not being able to tolerate older, dated games, this one didn’t bother me in the slightest. The problem was it’s secondary genre: despite not being tagged as such, this game has lots of elements of a platformer. I enjoy a good FPS, but I am really bad at platformers, and do not enjoy them. If you do enjoy platformers, chances are you’ll love this game. For everyone else, there are better games out there.

Pros:

• The terrible old school voice acting is awesome. Complete with nasally scientists and over the top g-men.
• Good weapon variety with some interesting ones along with the generic.
• Ammo is plentiful - you’ll never be wondering if you should use your favourite or save it just in case
• The ammo isn’t ridiculous either though. If you use one weapon exclusively you’ll run out of ammo eventually and be forced to try something else. You can’t rely exclusively on the obscenely powerful ones you get later in the game either.
• Levels felt unique and varied

Cons:

• Mixed genres can be interesting, but whoever thought mixing an FPS with a platformer was a good idea should be banned from making games ever again. It almost single-handedly ruined what could otherwise have been an enjoyable game.
• The story could have used more emphasis. There was potential but it’s largely absent. You’re a scientist in a sketchy facility. Aliens invade. You run around trying to save the day, finding out just how sketch it really is. You beat the final boss. The end. Being old isn’t an excuse for this - if you want an example, check out Perfect Dark (IMO still the best FPS ever made).
• Some sections (especially the platfomer-heavy ones at the end of the game) felt like they existed solely to pad out the game time and/or make things more difficult without a good reason

Verdict: 5/10