Recent reviews by Firestar

Good game, it's emotional. Could have more characters in it is my only negative thing to say about it

STORY

Passable, simple, nothing special. Big bad "multiverse-multidimensional universal empire" (yes, literally, look at the lore) powerful aliens want have dominated Earth and humans are now a slave race. You (and ordinary scientist) and a bunch of ragtag homeless people with home made weapons (the Resistance) work together to stop the Combine (the alien bad guys). Can't really complain about the story characters I guess, they have good voice actors and animations which makes them believable I suppose, although since the main character has no real personality and is a mute there is no real relationship between the player and plot characters which makes it hard to care at all about the plot characters. The game is praised for it's use of interactive "cutscenes" (You're able to look and walk around in them) although these story events/cutscenes is just NPCs slowly walking around, talking to each other, then pressing buttons, so there's no interesting story events/cutscenes that actually make use of this unique form of storytelling mechanic. Overall the story in this game is very bland and boring, mainly because of the lack of interesting events ingame.

The game's protagonist is poorly designed, he has a fixed back story, name and appearance and the storytelling is very linear so there is no player choice, and yet the protagonist has no voice (not even voice sound effects or first person animations) or personality so it's inconsistent and breaks immersion. You don't feel like Gordon Freeman because of first points I made above, and yet he isn't even his own thing either since he has no personality.


GAMEPLAY/COMBAT

The game is primarily an Action FPS so the combat is it's gameplay, and it's terrible. Enemy AI is only two steps from being SOF3 tier. They throw grenades and that's about it, they don't really work as a squad and they constantly stand in the line of fire or slowly strafe to the sides (while still being in the line of fire), they are bullet spongy and feel unresponsive as hell considering when shot they barely twitch and the particle effects for both bullet impacts and gun effects are practically non existent. Enemies go from being very alive to gently slumping over to the ground with no real impact weight to the bullets you fired. Gun sounds and effects are bad/guns feel like pathetic pea shooters and there's only a small variety of guns in this game. The game has probably twice the enemy variety of HALO 1 but all the enemies practically play the same and you won't be forced to change strategy from enemy to enemy so it becomes reptitve very quickly. Physics "puzzles" in this game are a joke, it's the same stuff that toddlers play with in day care centers like putting a brick on a teeter totter to lift something up (you literally do that in one level)

VISUALS

Okay graphics engine wasted on ugly ass bland empty enviroments. There's a big difference between dark and depressing feel to enviroments like the Max Payne games and Deus Ex versus just being depressingly ugly and bland that they remind you of working an 8 hour shift in a small town office on a cloudy day. Textures look grainy and there is no self casting dynamic shadows like other games of the same era such as FEAR and DOOM 3 to help set a moody ambient, so even for its time the graphics engine was nothing special. Oh yeah, and speaking of the ugly enviroments, it makes the levels a boring dull chore to play through because everything looks depressingly boring.

VERDICT

It's not a bad game, but it is highly overrated. Don't believe the hype.