We’ve been here before – for the last 17 years, ever since Half-Life: Episode Two concluded, rumors, speculation, and hope for Half-Life 3 have swirled like the dark energy vortex about the Citadel. Recently, we’ve seen a few teases, a few hints, that suggest something, maybe, might be on the way. Even if it doesn’t arrive imminently, I’m still confident Valve will make Half-Life 3, or at least another Half-Life game, eventually. With that in mind, it feels like time to replay and re-appreciate the original and the first sequel. We’ve looked at the data – a lot of people who have the Half-Life series in their Steam libraries haven’t ever actually booted the games up. But if you got Half-Life, HL2, the Episodes, or any of the expansions in a bundle and you’ve left them alone, now is the time to take them down from the shelf. There are still, all these years later, some of the most influential FPS games of all time.
Let’s start with the numbers. Based on SteamIDFinder’s data, of all the copies of Half-Life 2 downloaded to people’s Steam accounts, a gigantic 285,097 remain completely unused. The original FPS game, the Episodes, and the expansions Opposing Force and Blue Shift also make our list of the best Steam games that their owners have never played. It’s tough, right? The backlog, the release schedule, the ever-growing pile of shame – between work, life, and everything else, finding time to play games, no matter how good everyone tells you they are, is a constant challenge. But if you’ve got Half-Life and you’ve never tried it, I strongly urge you to do so, and here’s why.
With the first game, from 1998, it’s about the aesthetic. The sounds, the textures, the animations. Today we have supremely detailed graphics that, although technically impressive, mean a lot of games look the same – the drive in triple-A towards visual ‘perfection’ has lead to an homogenization of appearances and design, a culture of uniform ‘beauty’ that threatens to strip videogames of something that makes them unique. Half-Life looks like a videogame.
It has an art style, a tone, and myriad visual esotericisms that would be impossible to replicate in any other form. It’s also, to this day, funny, frightening, and fast. I challenge anyone to play Opposing Force and not smirk at the opening sections with the drill instructor, or play the base game’s ‘Office Complex’ level and not marvel at how Valve stitches together action, horror, puzzles, and a simple, compelling narrative.
The same is true of Half-Life 2. The developers at Valve are experts at what I might call the ‘subtle set piece.’ Half-Life 2 doesn’t use cutscenes (at least in the traditional sense) or discovered files or pages of written lore – with a few well-written, well-placed lines of dialogue, or a simple kind of establishing shot, where players are allowed to see a level almost in its entirety before exploring it proper, Valve contexualizes and credifies all of the action that’s about to follow.
When Alyx Vance, characterized thus far as someone who’s experienced and unafraid of anything, whispers in a low voice ‘that’s the tunnel to Ravenholm. We don’t go there any more,’ you know, instantly, there’s something awful waiting for you at the other end of that passage. When you crest the hill and stand in front of the collapsing suspension bridge in the ‘Highway 17’ chapter, you know you’re going to have to fight, struggle, and defy death to get across. What other games achieve in cutscenes and mission briefings, Half-Life 2 does in a single, silent image.
There are innumerable other reasons to play the Half-Life series, a lot of which have been documented and discussed over the last two decades. It might seem like a trad thing to say – “you should play Half-Life” – but if you want to laugh, scream, and experience some of the greatest setups and extended action sequences in all FPS games, without feeling that you’re being patronized or having your hand held, pluck Half-Life out of your Steam library as soon as you can. It’s an excellent mix of tight direction and choreography, and player agency and exploration.
As for Half-Life 3, the leaked Project White Sands seems to hint at the shooter sequel, as well as files recently discovered in updates for Dota 2 and Deadlock. And even if Valve isn’t making it, a fan-built version of Half-Life 3, based on official, abandoned documentation, has just come back from the dead.