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The AI - both enemy and buddy - left many players feeling rather unsatisfied. Looking back, it's clear that it wasn't just the ending that could have been better. And just when you're about to reflect on one of the best games ever made, a bafflingly unbalanced and undercooked conclusion leaves you with a gigantic anticlimax to mull over. From there you're running on pure adrenaline, chopping Headcrab Zombies in half with circular saw blades, lobbing explosive barrels with the gravity gun, duking it out with giant Antlions, dodging matter-distorting blasts from 50 foot-tall Striders and sticking it to the Combine masses. Only when you reach Ravenholm does the game start to realise its epic potential. The gloriously atmospheric opening City 17 section passes in mere minutes, giving way to the over-long Route Kanal and Water Hazard chapters that mark an early low-point in the proceedings. Inevitably, despite being among the three most entertaining games of last year, it wasn't perfect.

Combine harvester Smiling because they're safe and sound while you do all the SHOOTING.

Despite some of its flaws, Half-Life 2 remains a thrilling sci-fi road trip that provides a tantalising glimpse of the possibilities of gaming. This constant evolution was consistently underpinned by Valve's masterfully understated storytelling techniques, wry, self-referential humour, warm characterisation and some of the most epic scenarios gamers have ever been pitted against. For the most part it did just that - constantly surprising the gamer and reinventing itself with a seamless adventure that is as memorable an FPS as there has ever been. Eventually it has to have substance behind the glitz and justify the hype. The wonderful Source engine not only looked truly next-generation (fully 12 months ahead of time) with hugely impressive character models and wonderfully immersive environments, but its innovative use of physics allowed Valve to give us new toys to play with and come up with new gameplay possibilities into the bargain.īut technology can only dazzle a gamer for so long. Half-Life 2's initial arrival almost exactly a year ago on PC certainly didn't reinvent the wheel as many expected and demanded, but it grabbed hold of the stagnant genre with a gravity gun and purposefully thrust it into a compelling new direction. It's not so much a case of having the T-shirt, as having a bin bag full of XL ones.

One of the central problems of the first person shooter is we've pretty much been there, done that so many times, we're a little travel-weary.