I have a terrible confession to make: I have a problem with Half-Life 2. It's the same problem I have with Citizen Kane, or rather it's the same as one of the problems I have with Citizen Kane. You see, back when Orson Welles came to make Kane back in 1941 he was reckoned to be at the very height of his powers: fresh from having terrified the whole of America with his radio-adaptation of War of the Worlds, he'd been offered a 3 picture deal by RKO and, essentially, told he could do pretty much what he wanted. So he did.
They say power tends to corrupt, and that seems to have been equally true for Orson Welles as for his creation, Charles Foster Kane. Supplied with "the biggest train set a boy ever had" to play with, Welles decided to play with every last bit of it: he decided to shoot every scene he possibly could in his newly-discovered "deep-focus" when, in reality, the focus of the human eye flits from object to object; he built sets with ceilings because real rooms have ceilings, but then had to shoot from an unnaturally low angle to show his precious ceilings off. His problem was that having coming up with his new ideas he had to show them off at every possible opportunity. And that's what's happened in Half Life 2, with one crucial difference: at least Welles was wise enough not to let his new tricks mess up his plot(1).
Look at Half-Life 2 and you soon find that sandwiched between the fabulous opening levels and stunningly cinematic (if too brief) end levels are a series of nicely-realised tech demos, placed end-to-end in lieu of plot. Act II of Half-Life 2 is a series of answers to the developer's "wouldn't it be cool if?" questions: wouldn't it be cool if we had a boat?; a car?; a gravity gun?; pheromone-controlled giant bugs?; improved AI for your street-fighting buddies. Each new gimmick (apart from the omnipresent and over-powered gravity gun) appears for one level, only to be completely discarded thereafter - one boat, one car, one looooonnnng bug-assisted level, one eternal series of street-based firefights. Why can't I get the bugs to help me in the city? Why can't I drive a car through the rubble-strewn streets? Because they've been done, the cool idea has been demonstrated, now look at this cool idea instead.
It's this lack of careful plotting (in stark contrast to the original Half Life) that has left me feeling dissatisfied. Valve seem to have confused work on a script with work on dialogue (which is almost universally excellent, a couple of clunky "don't go down that corridor"s aside), with the result that the game qua game lacks any real twists. Here's a ***spoiler***-laden example: the only plot-based (if heavily signalled) "twist" in HL2 is the discovery that a character working for the resistance has actually been working for the sinister Dr Breen. Does this affect you? No. Does it have any impact on the way you play the game? No. Compare this to HL1. Midway through the journey of that first game you find yourself full up on health and armour and in ownership of just about every kind of armament known to man or monster. What is more you have just successfully seen off the scariest bunch of ninjas ever found outside Quentin Tarantino's nightmares. What happens then? You get bopped on the back of the head and thrown into a trash-compactor. Were you expecting it? No. Do you care? Oh yes. Does it affect the way the game plays? Bearing in mind you've got to earn back all those goodies you've just been enjoying toying with, most definitely. Now that's a proper plot twist for a game. And twists like that require thought and care just as much as the physics engines and the voice-casting.
So there you have it. Rant off. HL2 plays well, looks lovely, is well acted and has nice dialogue. Just a pity they forgot the plot.
(1) which was messed-up enough already.
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