Half-Life 2: Episode 2

Episode 2 is the fourth game after the events of the original Half Life and it finishes a major chunk of the saga of Gordon Freeman. For all you newbies, Freeman is the scientist who had to drop his lab-coat for an HEV suit to rid the earth of an alien invasion after an anomalous materials experiment went horribly wrong.
The story, which has continued very well after the events of Episode One, develops a bit faster than the stories in earlier versions of the game. It starts after the fall of the Citadel in City 17, and now it is up to Gordon and Alyx to get a data packet to the White Forest resistance base.
AI has been worked on immensely and is much smarter in helping you play. Alyx never came in our way when fighting zombies. We can no longer expect to get free kills throughout the game with our sidekicks doing all the fighting and us just hanging around in the background. In Episode 2, your sidekicks want you to lead and will make sure you do that. Even the AI of the enemy has changed quite a bit, with some amendments including zombies who run around with just their upper halves when sliced by a saw blade or by the Combine’s automatic guns, later in the game. We also noticed that in the initial levels of the game the FAST zombies were s bit slower and were instantly killed with one shotgun shell. The poison headcrabs are smart and hide as soon as they are spotted, proving to be a challenge to hit. They suddenly charge with their poison fangs! We found that the headcrabs and antlions are also affected by fluids and now die after being dropped into water or hazardous waste.

Hunters are as big and dangerous as they were known to be, and can do major damage. They don’t show up in combat for the major part of the game. But when they finally do, they need to be dealt with extreme prejudice. In one of the last levels, they even team up with the striders and run around trying to escort them to the White Forest base. The only strategy I could think of here was running my cage car over the Hunters. But this is not as easy as it seems because Hunters are really agile synths from the combine army and can easily dodge a car. I would like to mention that the cage car in the game has been changed quite a bit. It doesn’t have a turret now like in the previous installments and is much easier and faster to drive. The absence of the turret does not make the player weaker in any way as Alyx is always at hand to dispose any enemies that need to be attended to.
The strider-Buster as it was known before the release of the game is actually called a ‘Magnusson Device’, and is probably the most fragile super weapon ever thought of. It is named after Dr. Magnusson, the head of projects at the White Forest base-an egomaniacal scientist who pushes everyone around and proves to be a major headache. The Magnusson Device is supposed to be thrown at the underbelly of the strider with the gravity gun and then has to be shot at to blow up any strider with one hit of any firearm. While this may sound easy, I can tell you that when I get to use this device, there are hunters all around each strider and they can shoot down the device thus disabling them. Additionally, the device is so fragile that it almost blew up[ in my face the first few times I tried it.
Of the big treats in the game, you finally get to come face-to-face with an Advisor and look him in the eye. You get to see a snapshot of the Aperture Science ship Borealis that players of the Portal might find interesting.
The voice acting is superb and the sound effects have also been improved. The guns sound convincing, with the delicately controlled environmental reverberation that is typical of the Half Life series. On the graphics front, there is motion blur, anisotropic filtering up to 16x, selectable reflection levels, heavily improved dynamic shadows and lighting, and very well produced HDR and bloom effects. Other graphic enhancements include impressive foliage and particle systems, especially in the scene where you encounter the Advisor. The physics system has becom ever complex and adds a new dimension to the puzzles.
The usual gameplay problems associated with Half Life are still present. We found various points in the game in which a player can get stuck for no reason, and all movement gets restricted. The only way to get out of these situations is to jump in different directions until you are freed. Also the long load times between cave sequences can be annoying.
Steam still proves to be a huge problem and was quite disappointing to use. I found that it is better to install the entire Orange Box pack as there are a number of files that are shared from the earlier parts of the game. When I installed just Episode Two, Steam had to download around 2 GB of content, but when I installed everything on the disk we had to do just a small update that ran the game within five minutes. Still, a broadband connection is a must to handle the kind of network stress that steam places on the system.
So was it worth the wait? We got Half Life 2, Episode One, Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 for Rs. 999. Oh yes, it was worth the entire wait and a lot of days of Supreme gaming entertainment.