At the end of our Doom 3 review, I stated that this year saw the birth of the Far Cry generation, with CryTek’s title managing to raise the bar regarding FPS standards. Of course, this statement was made without taking into account Half-Life 2 (HL2), which was unreleased at that time, and STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, which had its release date pushed back to 2005. Although Far Cry’s release went largely unnoticed, being CryTek’s first game, the same cannot be said about Doom 3 (D3) and Half-Life 2. id Software practically invented the first person genre with Wolfenstein 3D, the concept of multiplayer with Doom and 3D graphics with Quake 1. And until November 16th, Valve shared the same podium stand with Blizzard, as the company that never disappointed its fans. The funny thing was that Valve only had one game released, Half-Life, which took the world by storm in 1998 and unilaterally won the title of “Game of the Year”. The enthusiasm and hype surrounding the launch of Half-Life 2 were also caused by the biggest leak in the history of gaming, an event which is far too notorious for me to get into details. The fact is that the majority of the those who saw the release of Half-Life 2 as the second coming of the All Mighty was comprised of Valve fans, as well as optimists and nostalgics, who were hoping that Half-Life 2 would put an end to the “commercial” games, made only to increase the revenues of the publishers, games which had nice graphics and poor gameplay.

     Like any other gamer that had already seen all the HL2 trailers released by Valve, the start of the game didn’t take me by surprise: I knew how the train station would look like and I knew how the G-Man would sound like. Despite this, I spent quite some time in the station, admiring the high-resolution textures placed on the walls, the pixelshaders on the floors and the facial expressions of the NPC’s. So far, no game has come even close to portraying such a vast array of emotions and feelings (no, I haven’t forgotten Grim Fandango) like HL2 has. The first “jaw dropping” moment however wasn’t the meeting with Barney (I didn’t even remember how the character looked like in Half-Life), but the first glimpse of City 17, whose walls and flats suddenly reminded me that I was living in Romania.
     The attention to detail is simply staggering and I’m not referring just to City 17. The sky is beautiful, regardless of the time of day, a lot of the surfaces are bump-mapped and I often found myself using the zoom to see just how good the objects looked in the distance. Also, the shadows, the Combine force fields, the particles effects and the weapons are very well done. But the first truly impressive elements of HL2’s graphics are the liquid textures, whether it’s the Combine barricades or the cylinders in Dr. Kleiner’s laboratory. Another surprise is the magnifying glass which is found in the same laboratory, around which I spent some 5 minutes, looking at it from all possible angles. Another aspect in which HL2 truly shines is the reflections and refractions caused by the interaction of the water with the environment. For instance, when you will look in the water at the reflection of a pillar, you will see an irregular shape, according to the movement of the waves. The same goes for a corpse in the water, or a submerged car, with the refractions being the same as in real life.
     Nevertheless, from a visual standpoint, HL2 isn’t perfect. Some textures are low resolution, particularly those situated in dark areas, on some occasions, all the NPC’s will have the same face, and the fires just don’t look right. Also, do not be fooled by the lighting, especially when looking at floors or textures with pixelshaders on them: the light sources are not dynamic. The light bulbs can’t be destroyed, regardless of the weapons you use, and, although you can interact with the other objects in the room, a neon will remain still no matter what you do. This one of the technical compromises Valve made so that HL 2 could run on more average rigs.