50 Years of Video Games: Half-Life (PC)

Valve may be the biggest name in PC gaming thanks to the Steam storefront and launcher making purchasing and playing computer games easy and affordable, and with many of their own incredible video game franchises both pushing the gaming medium forward while still providing lasting gameplay appeal, they certainly earned their way to the top of the pack. Every major company must start somewhere though, and when Mike Harrington and Gabe Newell left Microsoft to form their own game company, it would not have been too surprising if they began with moderate successes and worked their way up to more famous hits. However, Valve’s first game, Half-Life, was released in 1998 and not only sold incredibly well but did so on the back of new innovative ideas that became commonplace in video games released afterwards. Helping to create a computer gaming empire and certainly a landmark title even if many players only ever experienced the games it influenced instead of the title itself, Half-Life’s legacy makes it actual substance seem a little humble in retrospect.

When play begins in this first-person shooter you inhabit the role of Gordon Freeman, an ever silent physicist who works in the Black Mesa Research Facility. A long tram ride takes you on a tour through the building showing it during normal operations, the mundanity of his position nailed in by the intercom’s many announcements during the puttering ride until you finally step off and head towards a testing chamber. The experiment of the day unfortunately leads to an event referred to as a Resonance Cascade, a portal to another dimension opening within the facility and unleashing hordes of hostile and sometimes intelligent alien creatures into our world. While Gordon begins as a simple scientist, his need to escape the facility under attack leads to him picking up weapons and firearms to fight the dangers from another world to escape the bloody fates he frequently witnesses other employees suffer along the way, a task complicated when the military eventually shows up and tries to suppress the incident by making sure no one involved survives, alien or human.

One of the major innovations found in the way this story is told and one of the driving forces behind the development team’s design ethos is a constant fluid progression through the game world uninterrupted by any event that would rob you of control of Gordon Freeman. You are in full control of him from the moment you step on that tram at the start to the final story beat, and while the game will contain you at parts or perhaps restrict your motions to only looking about or walking around, you aren’t just a completely passive observer. There are many points you can run right past a character trying to speak or tell you something if you wish, and while a lack of subtitles and this feature’s nature does mean it is possible to miss a few details, the game’s few major developments are often made hard to miss or easy to infer. To add to this level of real-time control, Half-Life also contains the then unique idea of having certain important events triggered by the player’s positioning rather than specific actions or cutscenes. A wall may burst open to admit otherworldly creatures when you’re close enough, and by linking such things to your placement rather than any sort of timer or sequence of events the game can try to ensure you have a good chance of seeing specific scenes unfold.

Much of the plot is just a general set of increased complications to Gordon’s goal of escape and few characters of story importance exist beyond him, but despite taking place primarily within the Black Mesa Research Facility the game does manage to produce environments with different feels to them. Research labs with strange experimental tech to interact with, exterior locations that connect different areas of the sprawling facility, deep underground railways, and huge energy reactors all occupy a fair bit of exploration time, although some like the railway where you need to babysit and open the path for a cart you ride on do overstay their welcome a bit. For the most part you are given areas that do manage to feel distinct without conceptually breaking away from the fact this all should be part of a realistic research facility, this not only providing different areas for firefights that can feel surprisingly diverse thanks to room layouts often changing potential areas of safety and advantage but also giving you plenty of platforming and navigation puzzles to engage with.

The platforming isn’t exactly solid though. Half-Life does make clever use of the environment in that you are never artificially limited by it, meaning you can clamber around on fallen pieces of debris or industrial equipment to reach new areas and pick-ups or bypass dangers either in intended or unintended ways, but that freedom of movement does have a downside. Half-Life has very little protection against getting accidentally stuck while doing what sometimes seems like harmless exploration, and one thing you should learn fairly early on is to make good use of the game’s option to save anywhere. Saves will plop you back exactly where you were and the game does try to give you a few autosaves between action segments, it’s still wise to keep multiple saves and perhaps even set a quick save hotkey to overcome not only potentially getting lodged in level geometry for being too curious but also the moments where a failed jump can lead to an instant death. A few touchy moments ask you to leap over pits about as long as your jump can go and the end of the game particularly leans on a lot of level navigation with fatal failure hanging overhead for screwing up, but once you understand the danger you can accommodate it fairly well usually. The odd choice to have crouch jumping be so prevalent does reduce some navigation fluidity admittedly, the maneuver making sense when you’re trying to jump into a pipe or vent but it can also be used to inexplicably jump up onto an object that your standing jump wouldn’t let you reach for no justifiable reason. Usually such jumps are low pressure at least so you can pull off a crouch jump without worry, but it is odd it crops up in the situations it does.

Half-Life does a good job in distributing the firearms you’ll use to fight against the extradimensional menace and military troops. When you begin you do feel underequipped for the mayhem and having to make a crowbar work as a weapon against the Headcrabs that like to latch onto people and zombify them is sufficient although deliberately requiring you to get in close to this threat that later becomes much simpler to handle. A pistol comes in and gives you the ability to handle foes at range, but the strength of the opposition increases and the bullet amount needed to take them down with such a simple firearm increases. Once you get your hands on an automatic rifle and a shotgun though you start to settle into a more reliable level of strength, but the game does try to keep ammo distribution spaced out to necessitate conserving ammo and varying your weapon of choice. From this standard set though we move into the realm of more specialized and unique weapon types. A revolver has incredible stopping power but refills for it are hard to find, the crossbow has long range killing potential but is incredibly slow to reload, and the rocket launcher and explosive options come with the typical expected risks of high damage output but potential for self damage on top of needing time to either activate or reload. Once you start finding more of the unusual technology in the research facility though you start getting science fiction tools and alien weaponry, things like ricocheting laser beams and a weapon that just makes a foe disappear if you hold your weapon’s beam on them long enough particularly strong and satisfying to use. The extradimensional weapons aren’t quite as thrilling, the Snarks you can toss to harass enemies too often turning against you instead and the Hivehand’s living ammunition homing in on foes and functionally infinite but slow and somewhat weak.

On the whole the weapon set and ammo distribution is a good fit for the flow of the action and you will find yourself going through a fair bit of your weapon options both to conserve ammo against specific foes or because you’ve been drained of the bullets needed for a reliable standby. In the multiplayer deathmatch mode though things can feel hectic to the point that many of the upsides and drawbacks of the arsenal feel completely different or practically non-existant. Player movement in the story gives you a fairly good jump and walking speed but preserving that in multiplayer leads to players moving around at a frenzied pace that not only complicates aiming but invalidates a fair bit of the tactical options since foes rarely stay still. Going for something strong that barely needs to make contact seems the better option and running around the map in search of something like the RPG becomes better than trying to make an assault rifle land enough hits for a kill. Something like the laser trip mines that seem rare to have a moment in single player feel like they should have found footing in competition between players, but the chaotic energy of multiplayer means such options are easy to avoid and not worth the trouble. There could be some room for mindless fun or smaller scale skirmishes, but it certainly shouldn’t be what you come to Half-Life for.

Between moments of level navigation with little puzzles tied to figuring out how to safely navigate an area, bursts of action caused by conflicts with Half-Life’s enemy set give this game much of its appeal. The variation between the creatures from another dimension not only make you approach conflict differently based on what’s present, but the right scenario can inject some energy even into a weaker foe. The Headcrabs eventually become smaller nuisances when you’re equipped well, but having a bunch of them rain down on you while taking an elevator still poses a major danger. Little multi-eyed creatures called Houndeyes that can emit shockwaves are easy to pick off, but they come in packs and so you can easily miss the one attacking and take the hit for it. Living mouths called Barnacles hang long lines from above that will snatch you up if you run into them, often more a matter of weighing up how much ammo you want to spend to clear up an area for safe movement, and walking tentacle faced monsters called Bullsquids launch acidic blasts from far away to try and catch you off guard while you deal with other foes.

Eventually you will encounter alien types more fitting for firefights like ones who can surprise you by teleporting in and hitting you with a powerful blast, flying ones that often require more precise weapons to reliably hit, and bulky armored aliens who can deal heavy damage quickly if you don’t make use of cover. Sometimes you can get the human military to clear out the aliens before you join the fray while others they’ll be the ones wiped out, and the gunmen tend to bring the same tools as you to the fight and definitely aren’t poor shots. Advancing carefully and picking off targets is smart, especially with automated turrets hidden around corners and even a few actual tanks whipped out to try and stop you. The game does feature very few boss fights though and these aren’t quite as solid as regular skirmishes. In many gunfights or creature encounters there can be a risk of quick death if you’re caught unaware or throw yourself into the fray too much, and being blasted apart by a tank or rocket is a reasonable way to die and they have their own ways of being avoided. Both boss fights tend to drag and can have moments where platforming can kill you or an annoying feature of the fight leads to repetition, so it is fortunate that Half-Life tended to have its gameplay shift between quick combat and more involved exploration rather than leaning on the kind of big dramatic fights it clearly didn’t have a handle on.

THE VERDICT: The revolutionary intersection of character control and storytelling certainly helps emphasize the player’s agency in Half-Life, an idea that extends to area navigation as platforming and puzzles can utilize most of the available environment. That exploration can be strained at times due to limitations or harsh punishments for small mistakes, but allowing liberal use of the save system lessens such issues and the gun play between moments of navigation packs in plenty of enjoyable weapons and varied enemy types. The first-person shooting never stagnates during the story, and while the hectic multiplayer isn’t too appealing, the single player manages to curate plenty of distinct and engaging moments that mostly offset the rougher elements.

And so, I give Half-Life for PC…

A GOOD rating. While its historical successes will always lie in how it showed the world a new way to present stories in modern games, Half-Life’s success as a game mostly arises from the first-person shooting fundamentals and how it chooses to toy with those. Alien creatures that don’t even tap into the same type of weapons as the player introduce unique dangers during a gun fight and concerns beyond just needing to stay out of the line of fire, and with the player able to trigger dynamic set pieces the game is able to introduce sudden danger that foes like the teleporting aliens rely on to add to their threat level. The player’s weapon set builds up to a solid degree of diverse options that often necessitate use by specific limitations on use or ammo availability, the variety of enemies again playing into this as you’ll want to utilize something different for the sleek and speedy special forces soldiers than you would the slow but well armored alien brutes. The game’s incredibly navigable environments play a good part in giving different areas a unique feel when in a fight even if you’re still in the same part of the facility as the last one, and when the game can whip up an interesting platforming or exploration puzzle the freedom to jump on everything really shines. However you do have moments like the rail cart riding portion that last too long and lose some of their freshness, and moments where the platforming is pushed to be more capable than it truly is lead to moments that could have been incredibly aggravating if the game didn’t let you force your way through it with its liberal save system. The actual act of jumping probably is given too much emphasis, especially near the end, and Half-Life shines best when it’s focusing on considering how you navigate an area or working carefully through a firefight. Multiplayer also tosses out those ideas to its detriment, and while an anxious and slow multiplayer could be just as bad, a middle ground where it doesn’t feel like a bunch of hyper children bouncing around blowing each other up would probably make it a more appealing prospect once you’ve played through the well structured story content.

1998 had a lot of games starting to settle comfortably into exploration of a 3D space and Half-Life carried first-person shooters forward by emphasizing that environment. The year in general is packed with groundbreaking games and ones still considered by many to be the best of all time, and more and more the shackles on what could be done in a video game were being removed. Seemingly natural ideas were now easy to include, but by doing so you could be seen as a trailblazer. People had to take those steps though, and Half-Life’s contributions that wowed the gaming press and players at the time are now more likely to pop up in ordinary games without comment. Still, as a springboard to launch Valve to future greatness Half-Life’s importance still resonates. While a modern player without the right context might not be as dazzled by its design, the fundamentals of its action are still sound, the game’s fresh ideas for varying navigation and combat holding up even if its then fresh ideas for gameplay mechanics are now just part of common game design.