Half Life 2

Logan Booker returns to Black Mesa.

So, what can you expect from the sequel to one of the greatest games of all time, a game that revolutionised a genre and made sad pandas of all the games that came before it? An accident in your pants, for one.

Mesa plate
Half-Life 2 takes place almost two decades after the original Half-Life. Set in the city of City 17, a well-to-do concentration camp/last bastion of civilisation, the player is plunged into a twisted reality straight out of a George Orwell novel. Humanity has become a slave to a race off-world oppressors known as the Combine. Their control is total - society is but a shadow of its former self.

Five years of development have not gone to waste. Source, the engine technology created by Valve and the foundation of Half-Life 2, is both capable of exploiting the latest graphics hardware, and scaling performance for mid-range systems. Using a combination of pixel shaders, specular lighting, dynamic lighting and bump-mapping, Half-Life 2 creates a realistic world full of convincing characters and palpable environments - airborne drones provide the Combine with constant surveillance while the 'Civil Protection Force', the city's quasi-police/Gestapo, does less protecting and more antagonising, knocking down doors and terrorising citizens. All the while, biomechanical gun ships and helicopters occupy the skies, the thrumming of their engines magnifying the already claustrophobic nature of the city, and hopelessness of humanity's imprisonment.

Perhaps the most intense water effect in a game ever. To say it's jaw-dropping would be an insult of the highest order.	Scary Ravenholm and its zombie menace.

The magic that brings this experience together, and is by far the game's crowning achievement, is the reworked Havok physics engine. If volumetric shadows made Doom 3, then physics make Half-Life 2. While many of the game's puzzles and scripted sequences rely heavily on its existence, Havok makes certain that its presence is felt in the wacky day-to-day adventures of Gordon Freeman life - be it throwing bottles at fellow humans or driving the heavy electro-magnet of a crane.

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First person shooters with credible back stories are far and few between, and Half-Life 2 not only benefits from having a decent writer penning the tale - in this case Marc Laidlaw - but also enjoys some leeway by being a sequel. Much is already explained and Valve throws you as hard as it can into the deep-end. For newcomers, this may be confusing, as much of Freeman's story rests in the previous game. With little explanation as to how Freeman came to be in City 17, many players unfamiliar with his history may feel as though they've opened a book and started reading from the middle.

Impressively, Half-Life 2 has many identifiable characters, both psychologically and physically. Rather than populate the story with a bunch of random folk a la Half-Life, the player will actually meet NPCs with unique names, faces and mannerisms. City 17 however, for the most part, is filled with nameless mannequins who all share the same two voice actors - one male, one female - and detracts a little from the immersion.