Here’s a quick and dirty review of Valve’s “Orange Box”, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (along with the original Half Life 2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve already taken a look at in previous blog entries.)
Half Life 2: Episode Two
Short and sweet, would be my best description of it. I got about five hours of gameplay out of the episode. While it’s far shorter than Episode One was, and certainly a fraction of what Half Life 2 was, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much work Valve had put into the quality of this release.
The expansive new outdoor environments are just stunning to experience. Beautiful, really. The action was pretty intense too, especially the second to last chapter in which you’re faced with using the gravity gun to toss explosives onto Striders and blow them up. The Strider sequence was the most challenging for me, and certainly one of the more intense experiences I’ve had in a game in recent memory.
Overall I’d say this is release offers the highest quality of content we’ve seen out of Valve so far.
[rating:4] Fantastic quality, great action, but I wish they’d given us a little more content to explore. The addition of Xbox Live-style Achievements to Steam should add some replayability to the game.
Team Fortress 2
Let’s face it, if you’re buying Orange Box, it’s probably not for Episode Two. TF2 is, hands down, the most eagerly anticipated FPS release in a long, long time. For this release, Valve took a very different approach to the game’s appearance from it’s predecessor. The game has a humorful, cell-shaded character design that adds a lot of uniqueness and flavor to the game, and really makes the different classes stand out from one another. In terms of gameplay, Valve has wisely stuck with the same fundamental design as the original Team Fortress: nine classes, each with their own weapons and abilities to bring to the table. Some of the abilities have been altered, changed or swapped out for new ones, but playing the classes certainly brings back familiar memories from the original.
I’d say my only complaint with TF2 is the lack of maps. There’s only six as of this writing. While this is sure to change (Valve frequently patches in new content to their games through Steam), it would have been nice to have a bit more content to play with. Once again, Achievements will help tide players over until Valve can get somemore maps into our hands.
[rating:4.5] – There’s nothing not to like here, aside from the lack of maps.
Portal
My personal favorite from this package, Portal’s design and mechanics are simply ingenious. Beginning it’s early life as a senior project from some talented students at Digipen University, Valve picked up the team after seeing the demo and set them to work on porting the concept to the Source engine. What’s particularly cool about this is how Valve has taken a unique and awesome concept and reshaped it to fit into the Half Life universe.
The game focuses around you, a vaguely described human guinea pig for Aperture Science, attempting to make your way through a course of experiments without kicking the bucket. Along the way you gain access to a limited Portal gun, which allows you to open doors in space that link to a redefined and stationary doorway elsewhere in the course. As you continue through the experiment, you’ll get an upgraded Portal gun which allows you to decide where both points of your Portal gateway are. Using these portals, you’ll have to complete puzzles and manipulate space and gravity in order to finish the game and meet your, ahem, research overseer. There’s lots of story subtext to experience along the way if you look for it, and plenty of subtle hints about Aperture’s place in the Half Life universe.
Aperture Science, the company that’s created the portal technology in which you are experimenting with in the game, was a competitor with Black Mesa before the “incident” in the original Half Life game. If you “crack” Aperture’s fictional website, you’ll reveal that the company started out as a shower curtain producer, and only began playing with trans-dimensional space/time portals and artificial intelligence after it’s founder went insane (more on that here.)
What’s perhaps most exciting is the reference to Aperture and the Portal technology having a place in Episode Three, which is revealed during the final scenes of Episode Two. A tanker ship known as the Borealis is rediscovered after it and half of a tray dock vanishes in thin air before the events of Half Life. From the scenes, we determine that the Borealis was a research vessel for Aperture Science, and it’s mysterious vanishing certainly sounds like some sort of Portal-related technology. This combination could be extremely cool, and makes me that much more excited for Episode Three’s finale to the episodic trilogy.
[rating:5] Loaded with achievement potential and unlockable “advanced maps”. You simply have to play this game. Just remember, the cake is a lie!
Tags: half life 2, orange box, portal, valve
.
Good write-up. I think I’d have to agree with you on all points.
Good write-up. I think I’d have to agree with you on all points.
Great review!I loved portal. Both the game play and the humour. It was ingenious and hilarious and absolutely the best game in the package. Didn't like Team Fortress as much though, maybe because I'm not so good at it. Half Life 2 (with episode 1 and 2) were great games too. Not my favorite, but still very good.HL2 Episode 2: 4 out of 5Team Fortress 2: 3,5 out of 5Portal: 5 out of 5