Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is a lot of fun, if you liked Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. If you didn’t like those or weren’t looking for more of them, almost exactly, you won’t much like Episode 2. To be fair, if you weren’t looking for more of HL2, you’re probably broken and wouldn’t be buying this in the first place.
EP2 starts you have just like every other Half-Life game, be it an expansion or not, with no weapons. It’s become almost a standard in FPS games these days to start you off with no weapons and slowly build up your inventory until you are your own armory. EP2 keeps up that tradition…along with almost every other tradition now common to Half-Life 2. That’s really what EP2 is, everything you’ve already done, repackaged into another adventure. Players get odd messages from G-Man, drive over long stretches of road interspersed with road blocks they need to solve to continue, find all kinds of zombies, and have Alyx tagging along.
Of course, I say that’s fucking great. It’s more of Episode 1, the distilled version of the original game. Now before I get all “this is great because it’s exactly the same” up in here, it’s not really the same. The annoying scientist from the first one is back (I still don’t know why anyone puts up with him), Dog is even cooler, there are now underground caves, you get a completely different car decked out with new gadgets (which is still hard to drive) and get to meet a few new bad guys. It’s pretty sweet.
The graphics are more of the same, generally, though some underground caves stand out. And while I say more of the same, they still look pretty good even by today’s standards. Nothing fell short, and in many parts of the wilderness areas I was pretty enamored of how good it looked.
The sound and AI are at the same stellar level they were in the previous games. I still love stopping and chatting with the soldiers and listening to them debate silly things. I still can’t get enough of the noise Striders make when they destroy buildings.
The attention to detail is still pretty high, though a few the situations you get into felt more contrived than previous games. Instead of having to fix this bridge to get through here, you’re now ambushed and have to beat the troops, destroy a power generator and then fix the bridge (purely hypothetical situation). Being ambushed in the middle of nowhere feels less like something that could have happened, and more like something staged. Maybe that’s just me, but I got that feeling a lot from Episode 2. It’s similar to how Shigeru Miyamoto develops the mechanics of a Mario game, then develops the game to fit around that. Not a horrible thing, but it results in less of fluid feeling than the game could have.
Despite the nitpicks, I loved it. Some of the areas felt staged and some there wasn’t a lot different between this game and the previous games, but it sure was a blast to play. Except the driving. To quote a friend, it still feels like you’re a midget with blinders on while in a car. However, at no point did I play just to finish the game, I played because I wanted to solve the challenges presented to me. I played because wanted to see what happened in the story. And of course, I played because G-man told me to.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2 gets 4 out of 5 canes because it’s more of the same and if you didn’t like the others or weren’t left wanting with Episode 1, you probably won’t like this one. The tunnel sections were a bit weak, but the rest of the game more than made up for it.
